From perusing headlines alone, readers may be excused if they think fintechs are pro-artificial intelligence, as a blanket generalization.
But last week, buy now, pay later platform Affirm gave some nuance to what had been a bottom-line-forward discussion.
“It’s unequivocally accretive to the bottom line to use AI the way we are,” Affirm CEO Max Levchin said during the company’s quarterly earnings call May 7.
The way Affirm is using AI, however, appears not to be at the expense of its human workforce.
“We are not planning AI-related layoffs, full stop," Levchin said during the call, adding that the company’s revenue per employee is “hanging out in NVIDIA territory.”
Levchin’s stance runs against trend. Cash App innovator Block announced in February it would cut 4,000 jobs in favor of AI. Crypto.com weeks later laid off 12% of its staff after implementing enterprise-wide AI. Bolt Financial reduced its workforce by 30% last month, citing a pivot to AI.
Levchin said he doesn’t begrudge entrepreneurs “making … what they believe to be the right decisions for their company.”
"Long before AI tools came along, we had tooled ourselves up to be very efficient,” he said. “These tools are giving us rocket boosters, wings, whatever metaphor you want, and we're very happy for it.”
Rather than embracing the adage of “do more with less,” however, Affirm may be simply aiming to do more.
“[AI] is just a thing we're going to keep using to ship more," Levchin said.
Affirm has “no shortage” of products it wants to build, Levchin said.
“Humans that are the creators of ideas, the arbiters of good taste and the ultimate responsibility carriers … are still very necessary, so we don’t anticipate any decimation of the engineering team, but we are very excited to give each one of our engineers, basically, superpowers,” he said.
Other companies in the finance space have found further nuance.
Chime deployed AI copilot Jade in customer service.
“We wanted to know how much and how hard would it be to automate without losing the type of quality that one of our human agents, human team members, is able to deliver,” Chime Chief Operating Officer Janelle Sallenave told Banking Dive’s sister publication, CX Dive, last week at an event. “If we’re going to invite a member or invite a consumer to let us take actions about how to improve their financial cash flow, that’s a pretty big trust fall to take. That’s your money.”
Eventually, Chime convinced consumers to try speaking with Jade and saw them become more comfortable with those interactions and more willing to speak to Jade again when it was able to resolve their issues.
Now, AI and automation handles 70% of all of Chime’s interactions. Resolution rates have increased by more than 40 percentage points, Sallenave said.
“One of our golden rules is we will never introduce friction,” Sallenave said. “If you want to talk to a human, we’ll give it.”
In a similar vein, Affirm’s Levchin last week defended product quality as a North Star of sorts.
“If you’ve ever read the fine print of the likes of ChatGPT or [Google] Gemini, there’s a little thing at the bottom that says AI makes mistakes; basically, you’re on your own. We don’t think we have the luxury of putting that in our code,” Levchin said.
As much as the company uses AI, Levchin said there are several checks and balances unique to the company that ensure that what it ships “is of the same or higher quality than what we did before these tools came around.”
“If we make an underwriting mistake, if our engine somehow treats some consumer unfairly, or if we’re off by a penny here and there … none of that is OK,” Levchin said.
