Stripe Offers Affirm’s Adaptive Checkout to Canadian Users

Payments company Stripe and buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider Affirm have expanded their partnership.

According to a Thursday (April 13) news release, the expansion makes Affirm’s Adaptive Checkout feature available to eligible Canadian Stripe users.

The expansion follows a Stripe/Affirm partnership launched last year to offer Adaptive Checkout to users in the U.S. As PYMNTS wrote at the time, the tool uses Affirm’s “smart decision engine to make a real-time underwriting decision and provide consumers with optimized bi-weekly and monthly installment options side by side.”

In this case, that means offering payment options that range from six weeks to 36 months and start at 0% APR, the release said, without late fees.

Sophie Sakellariadis, Product Lead for Payment Methods at Stripe, said the partnership will help Canadian businesses scale and adapt to consumers’ evolving preferences.

“By adopting Affirm, we’ve seen Stripe users boost their average order value with flexible payment plans,” she said.

The release says businesses on Stripe that adopt Affirm have seen an average 41% higher average order value with Affirm versus existing payment methods.

The expanded partnership is happening at a time when governments around the world are preparing to institute regulations for the BNPL space.

“Much like ridesharing, streaming media subscriptions or short-term property rentals, the BNPL market surged while governments debated how — and if — the market should be regulated,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

But this hands-off approach could soon be at an end, as many governments consider rules that would apply credit laws to the BNPL sector.

In the U.S., this effort is being overseen by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which recently released a study detailing the potential risks of BNPL.

The report spotlights dangers to consumers that include the potential not just for debt accumulation and overextension, but also the risk of having their data harvested by BNPL providers without their knowledge.

“While BNPL regulation is generally absent in the U.S., experts predict that the CFPB will unveil proposed rules sometime in the near future,” PYMNTS wrote.

“The exact regulations are unknown, but they may bring BNPL under the same umbrella as traditional credit companies and will curtail the amount of data that providers may harvest and leverage from their customers.”

The EU’s BNPL regulatory framework is much further along. Like the U.S., the EU plans to bring BNPL under the existing credit umbrella — in this case, the Consumer Credit Directive. The European Commission approved a revision to the directive in 2021 that would extend it to BNPL, including new protections geared toward a mobile-first market.