Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM), the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth, recently announced its ability “to increase its app releases by 300%, thanks to its ongoing work with mobile devops company Bitrise.”
Since 2019, Affirm has been “working with Bitrise to automate its core mobile processes, allowing Affirm to deliver both in-app and in-store payment plans, inform consumers about discounts across merchants, and tighten its integrations with Amazon and Walmart.”
According to a recent report by Experian, 4 in 5 U.S. consumers “use a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) option on everything from clothing to cleaning supplies.”
While the payment option’s rapid growth can initially be attributed to the rise in digital shopping, now BNPL is “on the path to replace traditional payment methods like credit cards both online and in-store.”
As this transition happens, the BNPL space is “becoming increasingly competitive, and providers are racing to be the first to create a cohesive experience in-app that supports both digital and physical purchases.”
For a company like Affirm that supports BNPL for more than 100,000 merchants across a wide array of industries, “being able to consistently—and quickly—provide consumers with new app features and updates that make buying easier across all channels is instrumental to the company’s ability to expand both its consumer and business user bases.”
Affirm tapped Bitrise, a company that works with more than 6,000 companies around the world, “including over 2,000 payments and retail companies, to automate its formerly manual processes.”
Before Bitrise, Affirm was “operating on 12 Mac minis, a structure that was proving to be time-consuming and costly due to the extensive manual engineering required.”
With Bitrise’s cloud-based solution, Affirm was “able to turn its concentration to developing new cross-channel BNPL capabilities and consistently release them to consumers and businesses.”
Over the past four years, Affirm has “worked with Bitrise to increase the amount of updates and features being pushed to the app store from once a month to biweekly.”
And, before events like Black Friday and Amazon Prime day, Affirm “pushes releases every week.”
Due to this consistent cadence of updates, consumers “can now shop and checkout in Affirm’s app, discover available discounts across all partnering merchants, and, for certain retailers, use a BNPL payment option in store such as with Affirm and Walmart’s Point of Sale capability.”
With Bitrise, Affirm has also “tightened its integration with Amazon, pushing extra tests to confirm there are no detrimental bugs that would cause faulty buttons or, worst-case, an app-crash when shoppers flood the app during popular events like Amazon Prime Day.”
Edward Smith, Software Engineer at Affirm, said:
“Buy-now-pay-later is the future of payments across industries. Consumers expect an experience that is accessible both online and in-store and one of the best ways to do that is by having a multi-functional mobile app. We knew that we needed our app to meet the high demands of the modern shopper, and that meant having the time and the ability to invest in user experience. With Bitrise automating our mobile processes, we have been able to expand our iOS app and provide shoppers with a seamless, and affordable, shopping experience on all channels.”
Prior to its work with Bitrise, Affirm “had six developers, dedicating a large amount of time to troubleshooting their CI/CD pipeline.”
Since moving to Bitrise, the company has “expanded its developer team by over 316%, allowing engineers to focus on innovation instead of CI/CD.”
Bitrise allowed the team “to expand quickly without being constrained by development tools.”
Barnabas Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise, remarked:
“Whether a company sells items directly to consumers or, in Affirm’s case, helps consumers afford and get the best deal possible on products, they are going to have to have the ability to provide that service through a mobile app. From an app development perspective, this means continuously introducing new functions and features to keep up with the ever-changing retail landscape. Our work with Affirm allows them to bypass time-consuming manual processes so that they can introduce new innovations and stay one step ahead of competitors.”