Max Levchin’s Affirm becomes Sam’s Club’s exclusive pay-over-time provider

The San Francisco lender, founded and run by Max Levchin, returns to the Walmart family of stores 19 months after losing Walmart’s own business to Klarna.

By Hollis Varga

Max Levchin’s Affirm has won back a piece of the retail empire it lost last year. The San Francisco buy-now-pay-later lender said on Oct. 22 that it had signed an exclusive, multi-year agreement to be the pay-over-time provider for Sam’s Club, the warehouse chain owned by Walmart.

Under the deal, Sam’s Club members will be able to choose Affirm at checkout on SamsClub.com “in the coming weeks,” and the option is to expand to the chain’s warehouse stores in 2027, according to Affirm’s announcement. The trade publication PaymentsJournal reported that the online launch is timed ahead of the holiday shopping season, with the store rollout planned for early 2027.

“Making every dollar count shouldn’t stop at checkout,” Wayne Pommen, Affirm’s chief revenue officer, said in the company’s release. “When people pay over time with Affirm, they know what they’ll owe and choose a plan that fits their lives. That way, every dollar counts after checkout, too.”

What the record shows

The terms Affirm has made public are specific. Financing will be offered on eligible purchases of $500 or more, and a down payment may be required. Shoppers will go through a real-time eligibility check for each purchase, and Affirm says it never charges late fees and that its interest never compounds. In California, the release notes, Affirm’s loans are made or arranged by Affirm Loan Services under a California Financing Law license.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the agreement or its length beyond “multi-year.”

The deal matters to Affirm because of what happened with Sam’s Club’s parent. In a Form 8-K filed March 17, 2025, Affirm disclosed that OnePay, the Walmart-majority-owned financial technology company, had chosen Klarna for its pay-over-time program. Affirm said its integrated Walmart program had accounted for about 5 percent of its gross merchandise volume, and about 2 percent of its adjusted operating income, in the six months ended Dec. 31, 2024. Its shares fell on the day of the disclosure.

Sam’s Club and Walmart are run as separate businesses, and analysts see the choice of Affirm as a reflection of that. “Affirm was a better fit for Sam’s Club based on the more affluent demographic of the Sam’s shopper versus a Walmart customer,” Don Apgar, director of merchant services at Javelin Strategy & Research, told PaymentsJournal. He discounted the idea that Walmart was running a contest between the two lenders: “You might think they are going to run both and which is most effective, but that’s unlikely given that both are multi-year deals.”

The warehouse-club field is now largely spoken for. Costco began offering pay-over-time financing through Affirm in May 2025, and BJ’s Wholesale Club has offered installment payments through Citizens Pay since 2021, PaymentsJournal reported.

A growing book of loans

The agreement arrives as Affirm’s business is expanding quickly. For its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended June 30, the company reported $14.1 billion in gross merchandise volume and $1.17 billion in revenue, both above Wall Street estimates, CNBC reported. Affirm projected revenue of $1.19 billion to $1.22 billion for the quarter that ended in September.

Mr. Levchin framed the demand in terms of household budgets. “In times of inflation, we see more demand because folks are budgeting,” he told CNBC in August. “They’re more thoughtful about how they want to use the money, and we’re there to help.” He also offered a caution: “I do think that sustained pressure on prices isn’t great in the long term, and so can’t ignore that either.”

Affirm is scheduled to report results for that September quarter on Nov. 5, the first numbers that could show early effects of the Sam’s Club launch.

The founder’s stake

Mr. Levchin, who emigrated from Ukraine to Chicago in 1991 and co-founded PayPal before starting Affirm, is worth about $2.1 billion, according to Forbes real-time estimates as of Oct. 28, 2026. Forbes lists his home as San Francisco and attributes most of that fortune to his stake in Affirm, which it puts at more than 8 percent of the company.

That makes the company’s share price, and deals like this one, the main driver of his wealth. It also gives him a platform in California politics. The San Francisco Examiner reported in August that Mr. Levchin had given $1 million to Building a Better California, a committee backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin that is sponsoring Propositions 41 and 42 in opposition to Proposition 40, the proposed tax on billionaires’ wealth on next week’s ballot. State campaign-finance filings compiled by the site PubSys list three contributions from him to the committee between January and early October, totaling about $3 million. The Inquirer has reported on other large donors in that fight, and Mr. Levchin was among those included in The Inquirer’s Oct. 23 survey of the city’s wealthiest families.

How regulators see the product

Buy-now-pay-later lending has drawn regulators’ attention at both the federal and state levels, with different results.

In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an interpretive rule, 89 FR 47068, treating many pay-over-time lenders like credit card issuers for purposes of dispute and refund rights. Under the Trump administration, the bureau said in May 2025 that it would not prioritize enforcement of that rule and would focus its resources on “pressing threats to consumers, particularly servicemen and veterans.” It then withdrew the rule along with many other guidance documents, explaining that agencies should impose binding obligations only through regulations adopted by notice-and-comment rulemaking, and that much of the bureau’s past guidance had imposed compliance burdens outside that process.

California has taken its own approach. The state’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation treats many such plans as loans that require a California Financing Law license, and it urges shoppers to check a provider’s license, fees and repayment terms before they sign up. It warns that easy installment credit can encourage overspending and that protections vary from one provider to the next. The department has reached settlements with several pay-later companies over licensing and fee practices, though not with Affirm, which holds a state license.

Affirm, for its part, presents its model as an answer to those concerns: it says it charges no late fees, does not compound interest and checks eligibility on every purchase. For Sam’s Club members, the state’s advice applies all the same: read the terms before tapping the button.

Comment

Affirm responded to The Inquirer’s request for comment by pointing to its Oct. 22 announcement.