Yeah not much background in this article. Affirm is a "buy now, pay later" service (BNPL). It's basically just personal loans with the addition of a fee charged to merchants (on the premise that providing financing will attract more customers to the merchant). Very similar to the layaway offered by some merchants directly but Affirm offers this as a service.

Affirm is a unicorn and IPO'd in 20221. It has quite a few competitors in the BNPL space like Klarna and Afterpay. So far they all lose a lot of money.