Running Apache Iceberg For Financial Workloads At Affirm

Apache Iceberg unlocks the complex time travel requirements and intensive data validation needs that Affirm has as a financial company. Iceberg’s write-once / read-anywhere paradigm simplifies Affirm’s governance by minimizing existing data sets — ensuring there is only ever one logical copy of a given data set, complete with a validation history, and tag-based time travel watermarks. This presentation recorded at Summit 2025 provides detail on the the way Affirm leverages Snowflake’s Open Catalog to power our Iceberg implementation, solving both operational and analytic challenges in the business.