Affirm

Expanding engagement beyond checkout

Affirm was built around installment loans, so engagement naturally peaked at the moment of purchase. To grow long-term relevance, the team explored extending Affirm into everyday spending through a cash back rewards program.

The early proposal was a standalone cash back platform. I pushed back. The rewards space was already crowded with established players, and building another destination gave users little reason to choose Affirm. Working with product, we landed on a different angle: automatically depositing earnings into Affirm's existing savings account. The savings product was already there. Making it the home for cash back rewards turned something Affirm already had into a differentiator competitors couldn't easily match.

The design challenge was embedding rewards into core financial surfaces — dashboards, balances, and merchant discovery — while introducing promotional states to convert users who hadn't yet opened a savings account. Leveraging Affirm's partnership with Walmart, we piloted the program at meaningful retail scale to test real-world engagement.

Beta results showed strong opt-in and a meaningful lift in repeat transactions among enrolled users. The program didn't progress beyond beta as priorities shifted, but it clarified both the engagement upside and the economic constraints of scaling merchant-funded rewards within Affirm's model.

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