Hi, I'm Dan Permanak and welcome to Axios Recap. Today is Wednesday, January 13th.

Impeachment is being debated in Congress, Airbnb is out of Washington, D.C. during

inauguration week, and we're focused on a firm in the future of FinTech.

Earlier today, a buy-now pay- pay later lender called Affirm made its debut on the NASDAQ.

By the time it began trading, it was worth nearly $30 billion.

Four reasons why it matters.

First, a firm is led by Max Levchen, who is really one of the godfathers of digital payments having co-founded

PayPal. Two, it's basically out to destroy credit cards, or at least to serve as a viable

alternative to them. The company provides loans for purchases from thousands of merchants,

including online ones like Peloton, Warby Parker, and Casper.

Three, the broader fintech market is on fire, just absolute fire right now, despite the country's broader economic problems. Just yesterday, for example, a fintech company

called Plaid canceled its $5.3 billion takeover by Visa. The official reason was an antitrust lawsuit, but sources tell

me the unofficial reason is that Plaid felt the price had gotten very stale and had gotten

sellers' remorse. Four, as we've discussed on this show in other contexts, payments can be

where the rubber really meets the road when it comes to changing behavior. Think of Visa

and MasterCard refusing

to service Pornhub subscriptions or Stripe recently deciding to no longer process payments for

the Trump campaign. So we want to dig deeper into a firm and the role and future of FinTech

with the firm CEO Max Levchen. So Max, Max, let's start with the obvious kind of financial IPO stuff.

You guys raise the range of your IPO.

You price above the raised range, $49 a share.

But just a few minutes before you and I start taping this,

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