Affirm Newbies
The five core values of Affirm
What is:
- People Come First
- No Fine Print
- It's On Us
- Simpler is Better
- Push the Envelope
This is the collective term for the customer, merchant, acquiring bank, and the financial institution that provides the cardholder with their debit card.
What is the 4-Party Model?
This 4-digit number, required for ***-debit transactions, must be kept secret by the cardholder
What is a Personal Identification Number (PIN)?
This is what the mobile apps can create to check out anywhere
What is a virtual card?
This is the team responsible for crafting cohesive experiences across both the app home tab and the logged-in web.
What is the Home & Web Experience Eng Team?
The original date of Affirm's IPO
This bank provides the cardholder with their debit card, verifies their account status and available balance, and ultimately approves or declines a transaction.
What is the Issuer or Issuing Bank?
Unlike a credit card which uses a line of credit, a debit card transaction deducts funds directly from this.
What is the cardholder's bank account?
This is the SDK that merchants use to create direct integrations with us.
What is Affirm.js?
This major FY26 web-focused project is about revitalizing the logged-in web to improve shopping and card experiences.
What is Project Ignite?
The original name of Affirm before the rebrand
What is Expedite?
The two distinct, sequential phases of every card transaction: the real-time request for approval, and the subsequent batch process of moving funds.
What are Authorization and Settlement?
We don't issue loans in these two states
What is West Virginia and Iowa?
This 3rd-party blackbox helps us detect fraud on our apps
What is Iovation's Blackbox SDK?
This initiative aims to guide users to their best next action and alert them to major events.
What is KMD?
The month and year of the highest loan volume to date
What is November 2023?
This algorithm is used to validate credit card numbers
What is Luhn validation?
This is the process of replacing sensitive data, like a Primary Account Number, with a unique, non-sensitive identifier.
What is Tokenization?
This solution uses predictive technology to personalize payment options for customers at checkout, offering terms that are proven to boost conversion and grow sales for merchants.
What is Adaptive Checkout?
In FY26, the Home & Web team explicitly does not own this part of the incentives stack.
What are the backend services (APIs, RPCs, DBs)?
The original labs that Affirm came out of
What is HVF: Hard, Valuable, Fun?
This is the first four characters of Max's user_ari
What is ****?
This is the process of replacing sensitive data, like a Primary Account Number, with a unique, non-sensitive identifier.
What is Masking?
This is the kind of merchant integration Sephora has.
What is an Anywhere/VCN merchant?
This initiative drove over $100mm in annualized incremental GMV for Affirm.
What is the Payment Forward app?