Afterpay shares have hit a five-week low of $106.30 this morning and have declined for four sessions in a row, following similar moves in the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

Stocks are currently down 2.6 per cent at $107.84.

The buy now, pay later company gave a presentation to the Macquarie Australia Conference this morning and confirmed active customers have increased 75 per cent in the past year to 14.6 million with 2 million app downloads in the first three months of this year. North America saw the biggest growth.

Unaudited merchant revenue margins “remained firm and continued in line with what was achieved in first half of 2020-21″, the company revealed.

The presentation also addressed two areas for which Afterpay is often criticised - being used by people with poor credit ratings and high merchant fees.

Afterpay told the conference its customers had less personal debt than non-users, claiming the general population has about $11,900 of personal debt whereas Afterpay users have only $8,100 in personal debt. It also revealed that only 22 per cent of customers pay late fees.

And Afterpay said its late fees were much lower than credit cards.

For example, if all Afterpay sales were made on credit cards, the late fees to consumers would be $159 million, but instead are only $48 million.

And for merchants, which have previously blamed high merchant fees for lower profits, Afterpay says its app delivered a net benefit of $3 billion to Australian retailers in 2020 and took $289 million in merchant fees.

It claims to have delivered $340 million in cost efficiencies, including higher online sales “which are cheaper to service than in-store sales”, referrals from the Afterpay site, fewer returns, less fraud, and co-marketing campaigns.