Dive Brief:

• Buy now, pay later provider Affirm and Fidelity National Information Services, better known as FIS, have partnered to make Affirm’s checkout services available to FIS’s Worldpay clients, according to a joint press release from the companies on Wednesday.
• With new pact, Worldpay merchants can offer select customers buy now, pay later options for bi-weekly and monthly installment payment plans. The service uses an underwriting system to conduct a soft credit check and approve customers for those installment payment options, the press release said.
• The multi-year partnership with Worldpay gives San Francisco-based Affirm access to about one million merchants in Worldpay’s global network, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

Integrating Affirm at checkout will enable Worldpay merchants to “capture new sales opportunities and revenue streams, helping them continue to grow into the future,” Jim Johnson, head of merchant solutions at FIS, said in the release.

For Affirm, the partnership extends the reach of its products, said Becca Stone, vice president of strategic partnerships at the BNPL company. Consumers want more flexible and transparent payment options, and “we look forward to supporting Worldpay’s merchants to drive growth and better serve their customers,” Stone said in the release.

The tie-up comes amid an intensely competitive BNPL environment. Last week, Affirm CEO Max Levchin brushed off the competitive threat posed by tech giant Apple’s installment offering, citing Affirm’s integrations with e-commerce platforms Amazon and Shopify and with large retailers Walmart and Target as an advantage. Affirm lost exclusivity with Amazon earlier this year, although Affirm continues to be a payment option on that e-commerce site.

At the same time, Affirm has scaled back its employee headcount and ended operations in one region. The company cut roughly 500 employees in February after reporting a fiscal second quarter loss of $322.4 million. The following month, it shuttered its operations in Australia, although competitors Sweden-based Klarna and Block-owned Afterpay continue operating there. 

As BNPL has attracted attention from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Affirm has partnered with FICO to create a credit scoring model that will incorporate BNPL transactions and report them to credit bureaus. Levchin told analysts during the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call that more details about the model will be shared when it’s complete.

Meanwhile, Jacksonville, Florida-based FIS is undergoing operational changes. In February, the payment processor announced plans to spin off Worldpay, creating two separate publicly traded companies.