Affirm Increases Mobile Release Speed by 300% as It Expands Its Offering

August 04, 2022 at 09:00 AM EDT

The Buy Now Pay Later Giant Taps Bitrise to Automate Its Mobile Processes, Resulting In More Innovation and Faster Integrations With Retailers such as Amazon and Walmart

Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth, today 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.

“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,” said Edward Smith, Software Engineer at Affirm.“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.

“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,” said Barnabas Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “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.”

About Affirm

Affirm’s mission is to deliver honest financial products that improve lives. By building a new kind of payment network — one based on trust, transparency and putting people first — we empower millions of consumers to spend and save responsibly, and give thousands of businesses the tools to fuel growth. Unlike most credit cards and other pay-over-time options, we show consumers exactly what they will pay up front, never increase that amount, and never charge any late or hidden fees. Follow Affirm on social media: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | TikTok.

About Bitrise

Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps company, whose platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to maximize the business impact of their mobile apps. Working with Bitrise, the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations get their apps to market faster, improve security and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements. Bitrise enables organizations to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise (now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Marks & Spencer, Tag Heuer, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbel and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape. Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco, Boston and Osaka.