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PayPal Inc. co-founder and Affirm’s CEO Max Levchin on center stage during day one of Collision 2019 at Enercare Center in Toronto, Canada.

Vaughn Ridley | Sportsfile | Getty Images

LONDON — Buy now, pay later firm Affirm launched Monday its installment loans in the U.K., in the company’s first expansion overseas.

Founded in 2012, Affirm is an American fintech firm that offers flexible pay-over-time payment options. The company says it underwrites every individual transaction before making a lending decision, and doesn’t charge any late fees.

Affirm, which is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, said its U.K. offering will include interest-free and interest-bearing monthly payment options. Interest on its plans will be fixed and calculated on the original principal amount, meaning it won’t increase or compound.

The company’s expansion to the U.K. marks the first time it is launching in a market outside the U.S. and Canada. Globally, Affirm counts over 50 million users and more than 300,000 active merchants, including Amazon, Shopify and Walmart.

Among the first merchants offering Affirm as a payment method in the U.K. are Alternative Airlines, the flight booking website, and payments processing firm Fexco. Affirm said it expects to onboard more brands over the coming months.

Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, told CNBC that the company had been working on its launch in the U.K. for over a year. The reason Affirm chose Britain as its first overseas expansion target was because it saw a lot of demand from merchants in the country, according to Levchin.

“It is a huge market, it’s English-speaking,” making it a great fit for the business, Levchin said in an interview last week ahead of Affirm’s U.K. launch. Affirm will eventually expand into other markets that aren’t English-speaking but this will take more work, he added.

“There are lots of competitors here who are doing a sensible job serving the market. But when we started doing merchant outreach, just to find out locally, is the market saturated? Does everybody feel well served?” Levchin said. “We got such an enormous amount of market pull. It kind of sealed the deal for us.”

Fierce competition

Competition is fierce in the U.K. financial technology space. In the buy now, pay later segment Affirm focuses on, the company will find no shortage of competition in the form of sizable players like Klarna, Block’s Clearpay, Zilch, and PayPal, which entered the BNPL market in 2020.

Where Affirm differs to some of those players, according to Levchin, is that its range of financing products offer customers the ability to pay purchases off over much lengthier periods. For example, Affirm offers payment programs that last as long as 36 months.

Affirm’s launch in the U.K. comes as the government is consulting on plans to regulate the buy now, pay later industry.

Among the key measures the government is considering, is plans to require BNPL providers to provide clear information to consumers, ensure people aren’t paying more than they can afford, and give customers rights for when issues arise.

“Generally speaking, we welcome regulation that is thoughtful, that pushes the work onto the market to do the right thing, but also knows how not to be too cumbersome on the end-customer,” Levchin said.

“Telling us do lots of work in the background before you lend money is great. We’re very good at automating. We’re very good at writing software. We’ll go do the work,” he added. “Pushing the onus on the consumer is dangerous.”

Affirm secured authorization from the Financial Conduct Authority, the country’s financial services watchdog, after months of discussions with the regulator, Levchin said. He added that the firm’s “pristine reputation” helped.

“We’ve never charged a penny of late fees. We don’t do deferred interest. We don’t do any sort of the anti-consumer stuff people struggle with,” Levchin told CNBC. “So we have this good, untarnished reputation of being just very thoughtfully pro-consumer. And merchants love that.”

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ incident

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay 'kiss cam' incident

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.

Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.

“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.

Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.

Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”

In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

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Musk’s Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

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Musk's Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

Read more CNBC tech news

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says ‘no more blank checks’

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says 'no more blank checks'

The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
  • Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated

Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.

For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.

The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.

In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.

Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.

Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.

Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.

Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.

“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”

Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.

The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.

Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.

Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.

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