...Just wanted to take a moment to introduce you all to Jeff. We brought him on to completely overhaul our origination process and systems. Jeff? Thanks, Mike. Excited to be here. If anyone has any thoughts or input. Sure, go ahead. Just so you know what you're getting into, account openings are down, our conversion rates have never cracked 20%, and we haven't launched a new product in years. Oh, I'm not worried. Not worried, huh? Our infrastructure is duct tape and bubble gum, and good luck with getting a credit card out in under two weeks. We'll be using Composable Origination from Blend, so the solutions you thought were impossible are a reality now. Can we cross-sell after a deposit account is funded? Yep. Can we finally get into home equity? Sure. But it'll take forever, won't it? Nope. Okay, but can we get rid of all the manual tasks we have to do? But still keep our tech stack. Can we personalize the experience for customers? Okay, to answer your questions, yes, yes, and yes. With Composable Origination, we can easily configure components to meet our needs. That's across deposits, home equity, mortgage, and much more. And if we want to build something really unique, we can do that too with Blend Builder, a low-code way to build origination solutions amazingly fast. Wow! I didn't even know that was a thing. Yes, it is now. Any other questions? Do you think you could integrate TikTok? I'm sorry, do you work here? It's Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Ah, well, yeah. Now it's all possible. Wow! Honey, you are the bomb dot com. Don't get... Just, can you cut it? Sorry. Okay, cut it. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that video and were even a little intrigued by what you saw. I'm Cassandra, and I'll be your emcee today. I'm excited to welcome you to our special event. I'm joining you here from our HQ in sunny San Francisco. We'll be sharing some exciting announcements today that we believe are going to be a huge step forward for our industry. To start today's program, our founder and head of Blend, Nima Ghamsari, will kick us off. Then we'll be joined by Lili Sander from our product team, who will walk us through an exciting product demonstration. Finally, we'll be joined by a leader in our industry, Ken Meyer, Chief Information and Experience Officer at Truist, who will engage with us in an insightful and unscripted fireside chat. Lastly, my colleagues and I will be monitoring questions and conversations in the chat throughout today's session, so feel free to reach out to us anytime. We're here for you. And with that, let's get this show started. Thank you, Cassandra. Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking time out of your day to join us. Many of you are joining us as existing longtime Blend partners, and for that, I thank you for the great partnership. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you for many years, so we continue to help meet your business goals. Blend's origins are rooted in the mortgage sector, and we continue to invest in making mortgage lending more efficient and more straightforward for everyone involved. Borrower self-serve tools and mobile tools for your loan officers have enabled your teams to serve your customers where they are and for you to be more efficient. LOs continue to serve as trusted advisors rather than loan manufacturers, and we helped alleviate much of the back-office processing and underwriting pain seen by non-Blend customers. In fact, our customers reported almost 12 hours of time saved per loan as a result of using Blend, helping them to keep turn times down and generate a lot of new business simultaneously. We're just getting started. At the same time, we saw that there's still so much more that we need help with. The current economic environment has shown us that we need to be able to move even faster. Collectively, you're fighting to lower origination costs, create competitive advantages that will help with loan acquisition, deposit growth, and retention. All of this while balancing resource challenges both within your technology and business lines. After more than 10 years of working with you, you've told us over and over again about a constraint that you face, the complexity of your existing technology infrastructure. We know that our customers have a vision for how to better serve their customers, but over and over again, we see their tech is holding them back. Inflexible banking technologies and legacy infrastructure are often riddled with technical debt and disconnected or loosely connected with other systems. That makes maintenance expensive, adaptation difficult, and prevents you from being flexible and from being responsive to the needs of your customers when change is needed. As consumers demand more and more from all their providers, financial institutions must be agile enough to not just react, but to lead the way. That's why, after three years of work, we've evolved Blend to provide the capabilities that our industry absolutely needs and has been asking for, and we call it Composable Origination. I'm delighted to announce that Composable Origination is finally a reality for financial services, and it's available today with the Blend Builder Platform. It's not only a solution to today's challenges, but something we believe will be the way financial services will continue to evolve and serve their customers for decades. What is Composable Origination? Well, it starts with your existing infrastructure. The Builder Platform provides prebuilt integrations with all of the major technology stacks that are in use in our industry. These span core banking systems, loan origination systems, CRMs, identity providers, online banking platforms, and more. Next, it also provides a series of prebuilt modular components called blocks for financial services. These include blocks for decisioning, pricing, income verification, closing, and more. And lastly, we provide an orchestration layer so you can define custom workflows in a low-code, drag-and-drop environment. You can experience Composable Origination in a couple of different ways. You can leverage prebuilt solutions from Blend, covering products like instant home equity, deposit accounts, personal loans, and credit cards. These are ready-to-use, reusable, and purpose-built out-of-the-box solutions to be the best-in-class product workflow templates and integration templates, so that you can get up and running incredibly quickly and get a value as quickly as that. You can also build your own custom products using the Blend Builder platform. This is where the rich integrations, the modular blocks, the easy-to-use orchestration will help you break through the limitations of today's inflexible architecture, and Lili will take a deeper dive into the Blend Builder platform in our upcoming demo. We designed a platform for Composable Origination to address the problems that we knew we had to address for our customers to be successful. You told us, "Help us innovate, differentiate, and save." You told us that you need competitive advantages, that innovation needs to be accelerated, that ease and convenience for your customers wins raving fans. The Blend Builder platform enables you to accelerate innovation, differentiate your products, and reduce your costs. For consumers, this means receiving highly personalized experiences that are simple and delivered proactively. All of this is available today. Our initial focus for Composable Origination has been on the consumer banking use cases, and the early adopter successes are significant. In fact, one of our banking customers out in the Midwest was able to deploy their business deposit services significantly faster than their in-house teams anticipated, while maintaining a focus on delivering a best-in-class, differentiated experience. It also cost them less and enabled them to dedicate more of their bandwidth to other high-value projects and activities. Composable Origination unlocks innovation for them and can do the same for you, and this also extends to our mortgage customers. Our first use case in mortgage on the Builder platform has been to enable Spanish language borrowers to engage with their lender. Blend Builder will also eventually be the basis for our entire mortgage platform. So how does all of this create value for you in practice? For your technical teams, using the Builder platform means deploying in days or weeks rather than months or years. It eliminates constraints presented by legacy technology platforms. With Composable Origination, services, workflows, and product templates can be configured using modular drag-and-drop components that can be used across product lines and channels, ensuring consistent experiences and a single data model. It also reduces cost and complexity, enabling rapid implementation and delivery. For business leaders looking to grow market share, deepen relationships, and provide differentiated experience, Composable Origination provides the agility and speed you've always wanted so you can execute on your product strategies. It also provides you with the data and insights to help inform decision-making for you and your business going forward. And lastly, most importantly, for your customers, you can provide elegant, intelligent, and seamless workflows to move them through the origination process, all while maximizing conversion and maximizing customer satisfaction. These are game-changing sets of capabilities that we've built into the Blend Builder platform, and they will enable you to accelerate innovation to build and launch new products faster and easier than you ever thought possible. You'll be able to differentiate your products and reduce your costs. For your consumers, this means providing them with experiences that are highly personalized, simple, and delivered to them proactively. Okay, I could talk about Composable Origination all day. Rather than having me talk about it, let us show you. I'd like to welcome Lili from our product team, who will share a demonstration of the Blend Builder platform and how it unlocks Composable Origination. Thanks, Nima. Today, I'll be focusing on the unique benefits the Builder platform brings to the industry. Here's a deeper look at some of the key pieces our Blend Builder platform brings to your institution. At the heart of the platform is the Blend Builder, a low-code development environment that leverages a drag-and-drop interface packed with a configurable component library. Our ever-growing set of builder blocks include ready-to-use, reusable, and purpose-built out-of-the-box products and workflows to help get you started right away. We have a rich set of integrated third-party and native Blend services, including verification of assets, income and employment, identity verification, pricing, decisioning, and more. A configurable data model can be tailored for every one of your products to enable standardized reporting and data capture the way you need your data to be structured. And an integrations manager supports an easy connection to your existing systems using open architecture principles like Kafka and RESTful APIs, so you can choose to work with your own infrastructure when needed. Currently, your customers might be applying for a product without meeting your automated underwriter qualifications. Maybe their QualiFile score is too low, or you're finding additional flags that fail your automated check, and you might be denying them on the spot or referring them to a manual underwriting process. Now, with our Builder platform, instead of denying that applicant or moving to a manual review, we make it possible to seamlessly guide consumers into the right product fit without skipping a beat or moving through that redundant application workflow with the use of an easy-to-add counteroffer. Digging in a bit behind the scenes, we can construct dynamic workflows for every product that reflects your brand and visual identity within the application experience. To accelerate this construction, we offer builder blocks, which can be reused across multiple products and experiences to help compose an origination story that suits your product's needs. Blocks help you modularize your key experiences and can include a UI layer, an integration layer, workflow logic, and composite scopes. Now, let's look at a Builder platform example. Similar to the counteroffer workflow you saw a moment ago, we can use something like a cross-sell block to do more with the onboarding service. In this deposit account opening product, if I want to drive the consumer towards a credit card offer at the end of the funding process, I can take this existing cross-sell block and drop it on the last application screen. This is an example of blocks we can leverage as we build out a form. And as you can imagine, a dynamic cross-sell block like this can surface personalized offers, making it usable across many different product types and consumers. But blocks don't just end there. As fraud and verification is an ever-growing area for concern, it's also ripe for consumer and operational efficiencies. You should be able to rely on having the latest and greatest technology when it comes to identity verification and fraud detection.... Here, I'll turn the identity verification workflow from our deposit account product into a reusable block. I can grab these nodes and simply create a block to share with other products. This will allow us to update the block in one place as technology changes or we add new capabilities, and push that change to each product that's opted in for the update. This allows us to drive consistency and ensure we're offering modern and compliant user experiences across every product. Now, I'll navigate over to my credit card product, and before I add this identity verification block to this credit product, I want to highlight an important element that our platform offers. Here's what the data model looks like for this credit product as it stands today. You can see I've got a credit object, a decision object, an array of parties with authorized users, incomes, and various personal information, all of which can be made available from our public API. Now, I'll switch back to the workflow view, add this new identity block and connect it to my existing workflow. When I add this block to my flow, the data model was automatically updated, and now you can see we've got a new identity verification object with metadata relevant to the IDB evaluations. As I publish this new version of the credit card product, the API is automatically updated and all of your consumers can access the latest version of your product. This is a great example of how pushing an incremental change takes just a fraction of the time with our platform. Now, I'll go ahead and show you that new user experience in a sample credit card app. With our pre-fill and fast-forward capabilities, I can jump right into reviewing the terms and conditions of this product and kick off our new identity verification experience. I'm using a test profile here to show off some of the power of this platform behind the scenes. And you can see this applicant has been pushed to manual review even after the step-up verification process. As you can guess, I've done this on purpose because that identity block isn't just an experience for the consumer. Eventually, one side of your product experience should drive the other. We don't just define the applicant's journey with the Blend Builder platform. We can also create a back office experience that allows your bankers to drive the intake and review process, rerun integrations, and update applicant information using the same technology you offer your consumer. As I open this application in the banker workspace, I can see the status of the application, why we've moved to manual review, and in this case, rerun identity verification after receiving updated information from the applicant. With this new run, the identity evaluation is approved. I can review the auto-generated report and, more importantly, congratulate that applicant on their newly approved credit card. What I've shown you today is just a slice of what the Blend Builder platform is capable of. With this modern infrastructure, we're enabling financial institutions to create, design, deploy, and optimize new financial products with speed, scale, and security. The power of our Blend Builder platform means you're not going to be looking for the latest and greatest technology in two to three years. With our constantly evolving platform, your products and experiences will never get stale. With that, I'll hand it back to Nima. Thanks, Lili Next, I'm so excited to introduce Ken Meyer, who's the Chief Information and Experience Officer at Truist. Welcome, Ken. Hey, Nima. Thanks for having me, bud. Yeah. So maybe we can start, Ken, with what's you had the merger a few years ago. What's been the focus since then? I guess a lot of that's been merger work. What's been your focus since then? Yeah, I mean, I think it's exiting the merger, where we're focused on conversions and making sure we're taking care of our clients, and then obviously pandemic fun, with trying to make sure that we were there for our clients throughout all of that. But now it's about what's next and how do we continue to advance our client experience? How do we make sure that we're providing the right products and services and, and offerings into our clients' hands in the way that they want to, to ultimately receive those? And how do we really make sure that we continue to modernize our way towards the future? Yeah. You know, I've always felt that you and I have been aligned on what the future looks like, but I don't know if you remember this, but we sat down pretty early in COVID together, and you said, "Nima, here's all the reasons why, how I need to see Blend evolve for us to really consider using you at Truist." And I remember that conversation very well, and some of the things you told us was, "Make this more composable, make this more API driven." How do you think of that those kinds of concepts as fitting into your world of serving these seamless experiences for your customers? And why does that help you so much? Why was that so important for you to mention it to me a few years ago? Yeah, it's awesome that you actually listen to the stuff that I say sometimes, Nima. Because it doesn't always happen, but I appreciate it, and I think it is important. And when we think about architecture in today's world, with technology and how it continuously evolves, architecture matters. And in the past, you know, if you look at how a lot of the legacy technologies worked, a lot of the banking world just continued to kind of take off-the-shelf technologies and start, you know, plugging one into the next. The next thing you know, you have this giant Frankenstein, if you would, of architecture. And when you think about the evolution of client experience and how those needs change, you want to be able to have those composable blocks where you can continuously be building and never finished. Right? So if there's a new service or a new capability that your clients need, you want the ability to give them that service or that you know, that particular experience in the way that they need it. And if you've got to rewrite entire platforms all the time, because you haven't been able to create that modularity in what you're doing, then the speed in which you can deliver those experiences to the clients, it won't keep up with what their expectations are. And so when we talked, we talked a lot about APIs, we talked a lot about being able to create that modularity in the architecture. We also talked a lot about, you know, being able to own the client experience, right? And differentiate. And we believe that where we want to build is where we can create a competitive advantage and really change the client experience, versus we want to consume things that are more commoditized, but in an elegant way that allows us to integrate faster than we might have been able to do with software companies and others, you know, in the past. Now, let's talk about some of the... Whether it's internal legacy infrastructure that you all built ten, twenty, thirty years ago, or other software companies. What's, I guess, what is it that's kept those things from being able to get you there? Is it the lack of flexibilities? If they're written in old languages, and how do you work around those, or are those things you just want to replace over time? Yeah, I think a little bit of, you know, the all of the above. In some cases, it could be just the age of the technology itself, right? And what you end up doing a lot of times, if you can't replace it, you end up wrapping a lot of things around it, which creates more complexity when you look at your architecture and then how do you get to where you want to go in the future. So in a lot of cases, a lot of this technology that has aged over time has been wrapped multiple times by different layers of integration, by different bolt-on, you know, accessories or capabilities, and it becomes really hard to unwind when it comes to actually moving in a new direction. So, in some cases, you know, we're able to look at the layer stack differently and focus maybe more on a channel experience before we get to that system of record. In some cases, we've been able to extract data in different ways and create different data stores and other things, so that way we lessen the dependency on those downstream system of records that might be a little bit older in the stack. Talent's another thing, right? Our talent wants to work on, you know, the stuff that is available to them today, right? I mean, it's difficult to find COBOL programmers these days. They don't hang out quite often looking for jobs. So, you know, I think it's a mixture of all the things, but at the end of the day, it really comes back down to strategy and the experience that we're trying to drive for our clients and making sure that, you know, we can unravel some of this stuff without creating unnecessary interruption to them, because that's the other part. A lot of this legacy tech also runs, and it's run for a long time. So as you're making that change, you can't push that risk to your client. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely. And these systems, some of these systems are so complex, you almost got to take a piecemeal approach to, you know, going back to the blocks you mentioned, a piecemeal approach to shifting them or changing them or minimizing them or, whatever it may be. You did get an early look at Composable Origination, and you got an early look at Blend Builder, the Blend Builder platform, a few months ago. I guess, what were your first impressions? And, you know, I know that it was just an early look, and it wasn't a full deep dive, but what were your first impressions? What excited you about it, and what things were still unanswered or open questions for you? My first impression was, "Oh, my gosh, you actually listened to me." Which was great. I mean, going back to that conversation we had, you know, it was a lot of people... We worked with a lot of companies, Nima, and I'd say a lot of people talk about being API first or having APIs, and then when you really start to unravel it and really look at it, they don't really have APIs, right? It's not, it's not as advertised, but I think you guys did a really nice job of, you know, creating kind of composable blocks, if you would, of services and APIs, and elegantly putting them together, and being able to, to not just string together workflow that makes sense, but, but also giving the client the ability to configure that workflow and make changes that are necessary for them. So, again, we don't necessarily want to reinvent all the wheels, which with what you guys have built, you're putting together those services in really nice ways that allow, you know, consumers to consume. But at the same time, we don't want to be just like everybody else. So if we want to make some changes, if we want to add some additional services or some, you know, differences in the workflows, then that ultimately would allow us to do so. Yeah, and I think speed, and we're the first users of this platform. We've been using it for a year or so internally, building some of our out-of-the-box templates and blocks on that platform. And speed is something that's just... It's just dramatically different when the changes don't all need to be code, and there's a lot of reusable components that are easy to drag and drop between product lines and have them work. I mean, just the speed. I feel like speed is everything for this industry, and it's so hard to move fast with legacy technology. Speed is the new currency, right? I mean, when you think about why do teams change. Why did Sleepy Gold go from methodology changes of long waterfall cycles to smaller, you know, agile sprints and incremental type approaches that way. I mean, it's because they needed to work faster because, again, clients, you know, the clients don't care how long it takes you to do something, they just want it. And not only speed of that, but also what I liked about the platform is the fact that, you know, it didn't feel like a super complex platform that you couldn't even have your legal or your risk or your compliance or your business folks side by side and be able to visually understand the steps and how it actually works. So I feel like the ability to translate, you know, from the technical components, which there's a lot of tech underlying that platform, into a way that's consumable for all the different parties in the bank to provide that experience to clients is, was pretty impressive. So I think it's a great start, and I commend you guys for looking at a different way to approach it. Yeah, I appreciate that. And yes, it's been a year... A few years in the making and still a long way to go. Maybe just to close out, what- how do you think this, this could be used, whether it's within your company or in the industry, more broadly, in areas that we haven't even thought about yet, or, or areas that we've thought about, maybe talked to you about, but you're just still not sure yet? Yeah, I mean, I think, and we've talked a little bit about this. I think, as you kind of understand the different channel experiences and the different types of users, and so not just the development communities and the application development teams that would be working with a platform like this, but who are the actual users, whether you're in operations or you're in sales or, you know, front office, back office, middle office, and making sure that, you've got the ability to really engage and integrate with those, all the different roles. I think that's something that we've talked about, and I think we're interested in learning more about. But also, you know, I would just say the more that we get comfortable with understanding how to consume some of these types of services and be able to put the user experience that's ours on top of it, and be able to get comfortable with the integration levels, if you know, if we think that it can do a lot of the things that it might be able to do, I think it's a huge accelerator in our ability to speed up our process but also start to blur the lines between what was traditional application intake with an origination platform, and it really helps, you know, understand, do you really need the traditional app plus the origination platform to the servicing, or can you start to blur the lines there? And I think that could be a massive disruptor to how we've thought about software in this space before. Yeah, and I'll tell you, who doesn't care about app versus origination platform is your clients. They're probably... They're like, "I just want the product. If you can help me get the product as fast as you can, that's what matters to me. That's right. It doesn't matter if it's one application or thirty applications, they just want it. So, it'll be... We're looking forward to learning more and continuing to see how the product continues to evolve and, you know, we'll see what's possible together. Thank you so much, Ken, and thank you for the great partnership. It's been amazing working with you all, and it's great to hear your perspective on Composable Origination and Blend Builder and what those, that concept and that platform can mean for the industry and for you all at, at Truist. It's great to hear that from you, and we look forward to the continued partnership. With that, I'll turn it over to Cassandra. Thanks, Ken and Nima. It's great to hear your enthusiasm for Composable Origination and the Blend Builder platform. And thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your engagement and questions throughout the event. We'll have the on-demand recording available and deliver it to all who registered. You can expect that in your inbox shortly. If you're interested in learning more about the Blend Builder platform and enabling Composable Origination for your organization, reach out to your account team or visit us at blend.com. We'll also be at CBA Live in Las Vegas in just a few weeks, March 27th to 29th. If you're attending, come see us at booth number one. And don't forget to check out our on stage demos and breakout sessions, where we'll dive deeper into Composable Origination and the Blend Builder platform. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great day.