Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal has launched a new mobile payments startup today, Affirm. Affirm wants to bring speed and convenience to any mobile checkout experience by significantly reducing the number of steps needed for checkout. For consumers Affirm seeks to bring Two Tap purchase to the sites you shop every day.
Affirm will use Facebook for authentication of consumers, and also use a number of other social and data signals to assess risk. It will then guarantee payment to merchants — who will pay Affirm a fee — after this check.
“We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop,” said Levchin in an interview today. “In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy it now or you lose a customer quickly.”
“You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back,” said Levchin.
“Payments online are still too hard — we started the revolution with PayPal and democratized payments for small businesses, but we stopped short of changing the system,” he said. “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”
Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal believes technology has come a long way since PayPal hence there are much to do.
Via Allthingsd