Klarna and Affirm’s Earnings Show Two Different Roads to BNPL Profit.

Klarna and Affirm, the two largest pure-play buy now, pay later companies trading on US markets, have each reported a profitable quarter this year. Their share prices tell a different story. Klarna’s stock sits near a third of its price at its September 2025 IPO, while Affirm trades well above the level at which it listed on Nasdaq in January 2021.

One year after the Klarna IPO, growth is intact but confidence isn’t

Klarna priced its IPO at $40 a share on 9 September 2025, valuing the Swedish-founded lender at roughly $15.1 billion, and closed its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a market capitalisation of about $17 billion, according to the company’s own pricing announcement. A year on, the stock trades close to $13, down by more than two-thirds from the offer price and near its 52-week low.

The decline sits alongside genuine operating progress. Klarna’s second-quarter 2026 results, published on 18 August 2026, showed the company’s first quarterly net income since listing: $9 million, against a $53 million loss a year earlier. Gross merchandise volume rose 18% year on year to $36.6 billion, and transaction margin dollars, the measure Klarna says it manages the business against, grew 42% to $446 million.

What moved the share price was not the profit. Klarna trimmed its full-year 2026 guidance, lowering expected gross merchandise volume from more than $155 billion to a range of $149 billion to $151 billion, and cut its revenue outlook to $4.08 billion to $4.16 billion. The company attributed the reduction chiefly to softer volumes in Germany, its largest market, and to currency translation. The stock fell sharply in the days that followed, a reaction consistent with a market that had priced in continued acceleration rather than the first sign of deceleration in a core market.

Affirm’s longer public run shows a steadier profit path

Affirm has had five years longer to prove the model. It priced its own IPO at $49 a share in January 2021, opened at $90.90 on its first day on Nasdaq, and has traded as high as $90.44 and as low as $42.10 over the past year. Shares currently change hands around $71, roughly 45% above the IPO price.

For the fiscal year ended 30 June 2026, Affirm reported gross merchandise volume of $50.2 billion, up 37% year on year, and revenue of $4.26 billion, up 32%. The company posted fourth-quarter net income of $1.617 billion, but $1.45 billion of that figure was a one-time income tax benefit from releasing a valuation allowance built up during its earlier loss-making years, an accounting adjustment rather than operating income, a distinction Affirm’s own results disclosure makes clear. Set that item aside and the more telling number is the operating line: Affirm has now posted several consecutive quarters of positive GAAP operating income, the kind of unit-economics that eluded the sector for years.

What the gap tells the wider BNPL sector about profitability

Both companies now report profits under standard accounting rules, a milestone the sector spent years chasing while critics questioned whether pay-later lending could cover its own credit and funding costs at scale. Neither company’s shares reflect a straightforward profitability premium. Affirm’s stock sits closer to its 52-week high, rewarded for a longer run of consistent operating results. Klarna’s sits closer to its 52-week low, despite delivering its own first quarterly profit, because a guidance cut in one large market outweighed the milestone in investors’ eyes.

The distinction matters for how other BNPL and point-of-sale lenders read the market’s mood this year. A first profitable quarter is not being treated as proof of a durable model; a multi-quarter pattern is. That pattern is already emerging in a related corner of consumer credit distribution, where Fintechly has reported that the growth in disbursement cards is real even as issuers betting on the card product itself are making the wrong wager. For companies still privately held and weighing a US listing, the lesson from this earnings season is that a single quarter in the black buys less market confidence than several in a row.

A fuller list of active capital-markets participants in fintech is on Fintechly’s capital sector directory.