cover a range of fintech companies and companies in the property and mortgage technology space. Blend is actually at a nice cross-section of all of those categories. Very excited to have with us today Nima Ghamsari, co-founder and head of Blend. I know, Nima, there's a lot of folks in the audience that probably aren't as familiar with Blend's story that's been around in the public markets for about three years now. So let's start just with the origins of the company, founder, CEO. What brought you to found Blend and the moat that you've carved out so far in mortgage and also increasingly consumer? Yeah, sure. I have to go back to 2010. I was at Palantir at the time, and we got a call from one of our big bank clients, and he said, "Hey, we need your help with our mortgage book." This is in the wake of the financial crisis. It's like, "We need your help with our mortgage book. All these people are underwater. We shouldn't foreclose on them all. We can't foreclose on them all. It'd be really bad for the economy." So I got on a plane, a red-eye, flew to this bank, and they were like, "Hey, we have X million customers, and we want to find alternatives to foreclosure for all of them." And it was a really cool problem because it was kind of noble in a way. You're helping people not get foreclosed on. And it also happens to be good for the bank and for the economy and for the investors in those loans. And my assumption going into it was, "Oh, well, this is a pretty big industry with pretty big dollar amounts tied to each loan. Probably has pretty good technology," because it was a simple data science problem from there. And it turns out, no, they were using the technology that I like to refer to as filing cabinets and green screens. And it was horrific. I mean, it was really bad. It was actually a really hard technical problem, not because it was something that was a difficult mathematical thing to solve, but because it was a difficult systems thing to solve, which is not good for an industry that's underpinning so much of the economy. And that was 2010. I worked on that problem for about two years at Palantir. And I just kept looking around. Is there good technology in this space? There was no good technology in the mortgage space. In 2012, I left Palantir to start Blend and said, "Hey, I want to bring modern technology to the mortgage industry." Then obviously since then, we've evolved beyond. I mean, we do 20% or so of the mortgages in the country through our platform. It's digital origination. When you apply it at a bank that uses our software, it's powered by Blend, sort of like powered by Visa or powered by Mastercard or powered by Intel Inside or whatever. And then we use data instead of documents to underwrite these loans. We'll connect to your payroll provider. We'll connect to your other bank where you're bringing your deposits from or your down payment from. We'll do your digital scan of your credit report to find the things you have to do. So we can give you a faster, cheaper answer than maybe the alternative would be able to. And so, but now we do 20% of the mortgages, but we also do probably our second biggest business is home equity lending. We also have probably our third biggest business is personal loans. We do a ton of personal loans, a lot of credit card origination. And so think of us as a digital origination platform that is meant to be the most modern, fastest, simplest, most frictionless way to open any of these accounts at a bank that uses our software. Again, for those that aren't as familiar, just give us a quick rundown of where Blend, as it relates to your mortgage business, where you sit relative to some of the incumbent infrastructure providers that folks might be more familiar with, like an ICE and Encompass in that sense. Yeah. So yeah, there's sort of a back-office servicing system, which is also owned by ICE now, called MSP. It used to be called Black Knight. And then there's sort of an origination system that's a processing fulfillment system that they'll also use. And that could be something like Dark Matter. Constellation Software just bought one called Empower. ICE has a solution called Encompass. And those are used by processors and underwriters to do manual review of tasks. We'll call it sort of the old way of doing these things. What we do is we sit in the layer that the consumers and the loan officers use for any of these products, and we try to do all the decisioning, all the work that is possible to do upfront in the process. So by the time it gets to that middle office system, that Encompass or Empower, it's already a pretty complete file, and it's been decisioned, and the consumer has been given their decision. And it's just meant to be the layer that sort of sits on top of all that stuff and then gets the work done so that by the time it gets those systems of record, it's pretty ready to go. And Blend, I think, has somewhat of a more unique story versus other fintechs in terms of how you originally went to market and, you know, starting out winning some of the largest, you know, enterprise mortgage lenders in the country. Walk us through what led to that success and if that was an intentional decision and how that's accreted to your, what is pretty meaningful market share today in the mortgage market. Yeah. There were two companies that I really looked up to at the time in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, that time frame when we were deciding how to go to market, where to go to market. One was a company you may not know because it's not in the fintech space, but you might have heard of called Veeva. It's a really good vertical software for pharmaceutical. It's like a CRM for pharmaceutical companies. And I met with the CEO there, and he was like, "Be all about customer success. Focus on customers. And you're in a vertical industry, so get the core logos and then build out from there." And then the other one was a company called Guidewire, which you might be familiar with. It's sort of an insurance back-office origination underwriting platform. And same thing, Marcus over there. I don't think he's there anymore, but Marcus is the CEO and founder over there. And he said, you know, "If you're in a vertical like this, it's very concentrated, even if it doesn't seem concentrated, just really focus on the big guys." And that was our approach. It was very different. Internally, it was even somewhat controversial to start with the big guys because there's one thing you know about big financial services companies. One thing I know about big financial services companies is that they can be a pain in the behind. And they really were. I mean, there was a lot of work to work with the biggest ones, to land the biggest ones, a lot of work to work with them, a lot of work to get them to use a standardized product because we wanted to be a product company from the first moment we started. We didn't want to be all the I was telling you about this this CIO of a credit union who just reached out to me, and he told me that there's like 10 different cores that they use. There's 10 different versions of some FIS thing that they use, and we don't want to be that. We want to be the system that is the best way to originate any of the most core consumer products that you might get from a financial services, a bank or credit union, or a mortgage company, and so we wanted to be a product company, and so yeah, it was really difficult going for the top of the market. But what we did was once we did go to the top of the market and once we were successful with a few of those names, it created a wave of momentum behind us where once a few dominoes fell, it felt like all the dominoes fell from there. And so it was different. It was controversial internally because people wanted to work with you. You're in tech and you're in Silicon Valley. I'm not saying we're soft, but we wanted to work with people who were nice to us. And so it was definitely interesting to start at the top, but it's worked out really well for us. And it's the same approach we're taking with consumer. I mean, our consumer business, which is now on the cusp of, you know, eight figures of revenue a quarter as well, that business, we started at the very top of the market too. We're seeing the same thing happen where the top of the market sets the standard and then everyone else sort of follows. We'll get to how you're now considering moving further down market, which is also really interesting. The last three years that you guys have operated in have not been the most forgiving mortgage market since your IPO. You guys have really done a commendable job executing through that. I think just this last quarter, your first quarter of adjusted profitability. How did that, how did this mortgage downturn change your approach to managing the business in terms of focus on product and innovation while also accelerating this path to profitability? You've cleaned up the balance sheet. Just walk us through that evolution over the last three years. Yeah. And just, I mean, I don't know if people know this, but the way our business model works is we get something like $80 per mortgage, something like that, where every time a mortgage is done in the country, we'll get something like $80. The way our contracts work, they'll have some commitment to us saying, "We'll do 1,000 mortgages with you, and we'll pay $80 for every mortgage over that," which, you know, it's good because you're aligned with success with your customers. It has really positive things. It allows you to get market share very quickly. And it allows customers to feel like you're in it with them, so they're willing to sign with you because you have skin in the game. They won't be paying you long-term for things they don't use. The downside is when you go from 14 million or so originations in 2021 to 4 million originations in 2023, and your origination industry drops over 70%, it has a big hit on revenue. Now, I'll say the one silver lining on the revenue side before I talk about cost is that we've grown market share and we've grown our unit economics significantly since 2021. And that's a combination of adding new features that allow us to charge more for our product, but also adding add-ons like digital closings. Nobody wants to close a loan in a title office anymore. So we have a digital closing product that's getting super quickly adopted by our customers. So if you want to close your mortgage, you can just do it on your phone. You could be doing it right now if you wanted to. And so those are the kinds of things that we've had to do on the revenue side and growing market share, expanding our business lines. I mentioned the consumer business. But then there was a lot of work on the cost side. I mean, look, we don't need to rehash the story of Silicon Valley and how we probably overspent in 2021 and 2020 when money was really easy to come by. The cost of capital for us was essentially, you know, I don't want to say it was zero, but it was essentially zero in that we could raise money very quickly. The last private round we raised as a company was in late 2020, and it was over the course of a weekend, raised $330 million at a pretty high valuation at like $3.3 billion or something like that. It was just different. And so but then, when the world shifted, the mortgage market shifted, and the private and public investing market shifted at the same time, it was a double whammy because multiples compressed on top of our revenue taking a 70% baseline hit. We had to rethink the company internally. And so everything became about ROI. How do you make things that you're doing prove an ROI? How do you do things as efficiently as possible? I mean, I have to tell you, I went through every line item of our expenses down to low small dollar amounts on a regular basis to say, "What are things that we're spending on that we do not need to be spending on?" And I'm still doing that because it's one thing that now it happens is it's ingrained in my brain. It's ingrained in our team's brain where culturally now we're just like the most frugal company I could have ever imagined, and it took a while to get to that cultural shift, but it's just allowed us to be more free, actually. It sounds weird to think that a frugal person is more free, but now we have the financial freedom to do the things we want to do because we're so frugal on the things that we have to do, and so it's been actually a really special last three years. I've had to learn a lot. I mean, I'm a first-time founder, first-time CEO, first-time public company, so I've had to learn a lot. It's been a lot of trial by fire, but it's what keeps me going. Frankly, I'd get bored if I didn't have to learn a lot. And so I've actually really enjoyed it in some ways. I mean, there's a lot of parts that you don't enjoy. You don't enjoy digging through spreadsheets. You don't enjoy having to let people go who have been really good, great, actually great in some cases, team members for in some cases years. But this is like a pretty long-term mission, and they're all shareholders, and I think that they're going to do a lot better for it. And so as a result, the stock's gone up a lot recently because we've had our first profitable quarter, non-GAAP operating profitability quarter, almost GAAP profitability quarter. And we're on pace to both positive free cash flow and positive GAAP profitability in the worst mortgage market since since the 1990s. And so I'm pretty proud of that. I'm proud of our team for that. You should be. It's been a fun story to watch evolve over the last three years. You alluded to it earlier. One of the areas that you have been able to drive growth through one of the worst mortgage markets in history has been higher value that you extract per loan closing. I think, you know, $80 baseline, and you guys are running it around close to $100 today, plus or minus. Talk about some of these add-on products that you've been able to expand monetization of with your customers, and you know, bigger picture question, how is that maybe blurring the lines around what Blend is as maybe more than a POS and this collision course with with the POS and other areas around mortgage processing for these originators? I would say from first principles, I don't really look at what the current architecture of the industry is and say, "Let me figure out how I fit in that box." It's not because I think I'm special or we're some snowflake. What I see is we take a very customer-focused lens, and we say, "This is a problem the customer has." In this case, the closing process is very manual. Actually, what people don't realize, not only is it bad for consumers to close a loan in person because they hate going into title offices, but it's also bad for the lender because if they get one signature wrong, which happens a lot, 25% of the time there's some sort of QC issue that has to be addressed on a mortgage closing because it's done by somebody has to go in. And if you've ever done a mortgage closing, you've seen this where they have little tabs, and you have to figure out where to signature and where to initial. If you initial below the line instead of above the line, or if you initial on the line, but it's not clear that it's your initials, it's a QC issue. These are all issues that they have to deal with. And so I see these problems that our customers face, and then we go and solve them. It's not super complicated, but it doesn't matter to me whether an LOS used to do it or not, or a POS used to do it. These terms are sort of made-up terms from the industry anyways. But the problems are real problems to manufacture a real product that gets real consumers into real homes. And so that's our focus is to solve those things. And so yeah, so I think the digital closing piece is one piece. We actually have a really good story around one core product you have to do in the mortgage to get a mortgage is you have to get homeowners insurance because the mortgage company doesn't want your house to burn down and then they're on the hook. And so we built a whole digital homeowners insurance practice that is, I guess, allows a consumer to shop in our flow for homeowners insurance, see their rate, find the lowest rate, bind it, get the policy over to the lender automatically so the consumer doesn't have to do any work to find it. And that's actually ended up being a really good business for us. And we just announced a big partnership there too that's going to help drive that further growth and further profitability from that business. And so yeah, it's interesting because I've always heard, "Hey, Blend, it's kind of a front end on top of this back end." I'm like, "No, it solves a wide array of problems that mortgage lenders have, a wide array." And and our job is going to be to keep solving those problems until loans are as frictionless as they can be. And they're not in the mortgage industry. There's still a lot of that. Crystal guy was up here earlier, and he was talking about how much more work there is to do. Yeah, there's a lot of work to do. Most of the stuff that you're doing with your financial institution today is probably powered by paper still. Even if you know, with all the efforts our team and other teams have made over the last decade, there is still so much manual work and so much paper. Even if it's digital paper, if it's a PDF, it's still paper that we got another decade of work ahead of us at least. So $80 baseline fee, you're at, I think you got it to $95. Close to $100. $99, I think, was the most recent number. Where could that go? I know you guys have set goals that you're already well on track to hit. I mean, where can that go over time? And just to check the box, I mean, what's the ROI that the average lender is getting for that $100? And I'm sure you can rattle off a number of really interesting stats around that, but just to give us some context around the ROI. We've had public case studies that customers and third parties have done on our product. And it's in the order of $500 plus dollars. As a rule of thumb, for every dollar that a customer spends with me, I like to save them or make them $10 more. I have this 10 to 1 rule. But just to put it into perspective in the mortgage industry, which is just a piece of what we do, the average spend for a loan is $10,000 plus dollars, $10,000 plus dollars. And so there is, and that's mostly people and sales and marketing and processing and underwriting and those kinds of things that over time, those are costs that consumers ultimately pay. It makes mortgages more expensive. It makes houses less affordable. It makes those financial products that they want to get less approachable by the consumer. If you have to spend $10,000 manufacturing something, you have to make money on it as a bank or a credit union or a mortgage lender, and so our goal is going to be to make that as simple and as frictionless as possible. We've set a medium-term goal of we want to get to 170 a unit through more add-ons, more capabilities. We announced this Rapid Refi product, and you know, we haven't hit our Refi wave yet, but one of the things we want to do is make it so that when rates do come down, if you had to get a mortgage in the last three years while mortgage rates were 7%, 7.5%, 8%, they're 7% right now. If you had to get a mortgage in that time, call it 12 million mortgages in that three-year period, we're going to make it a few taps for you to get your mortgage payment lowered as a consumer, and that's super important because if we can make that so cheap, the consumer who's going to be hurting if they're paying a 7%-8% mortgage, just taking a significant amount of their groceries or whatever it may be, we're going to make it so simple and so frictionless for them to do it. It's going to be way cheaper for the bank or lender. It's going to allow the consumer to get lower rates over time much faster than they historically would have. It's not going to be a 60- or 90-day process with our system, and so yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. That'll be a way we drive those kinds of innovations are the way we drive up our unit economics, which ultimately allows us to be a successful business that's around for a long time. The Rapid Refi product is a nice segue into just talking about the state of the mortgage market, which I don't want to spend too much time on, but you guys obviously have a very broad view with your market share. So 3Q, we obviously had what maybe you can call a mini Refi wave, some fits and starts with the volatility. We had one month of good Refi in Q3. September was a good month of Refi. That was it. In your commentary in your past earnings calls, you've talked about this noticeable shift in tone from your customer conversations around how they're thinking about reinvesting into their tech stacks. Just talk to us about what you're hearing, how sentiment is out there in the industry thinking about the volume recovery next year. Maybe I think it is important to unpack how meaningful this Rapid Refi product could be to the extent we do get mini Refi waves over the coming few quarters with lower rates. Yeah, I mean, the mortgage industry sentiment. I actually said on my most recent earnings call, I'm not going to talk about the macro anymore because we got to profitability in a terrible macro. But I will, and this I'll make an exception for KBW. The mortgage market, I'd say the biggest thing that was happening behind the scenes while volumes were low was that every lender that was going to stick around was making massive changes to also get to profitability. They were unprofitable for eight or nine quarters in a row. The entire industry was unprofitable. It was losing money for nine quarters in a row because volumes had compressed so much that it wasn't enough to overcome their current cost structure. Because they make variable profitability too and variable revenue as well. And so, and so now in the last quarter or two, they've started to reach profitability. The industry started to reach profitability, which has opened up the door for them to go and innovate and invest. And I felt that I was at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual conference a few weeks ago, two or three weeks ago, and you could just feel it. People are ready. They're like, "All right, we did all the really painful stuff. We got that behind us. Now let's go and build again for the future." I felt it. The energy was there. It was in the room. You feel it from customers. When you feel that energy from customers, you know, we're signing big new logos now, which is amazing, that had been dormant for three years. That just wasn't an investable time for them. If you're a bank and you're setting a budget and you have a money-losing business, do you think the CEO of that bank is going to give them additional budget to go and reinvent their future? No way. And so yeah, so anyways, you feel the energy there. And last question on the mortgage market, on mortgage in general, just before we shift to your consumer practice. The competitive landscape has evolved just as meaningfully around you over the last few years, just as much as the mortgage market has. You've had other big players like nCino acquire SimpleNexus. There's a litany of other smaller players around the edges. How has that landscape evolved? How has that accrued to the benefit of Blend? And do you see a path for more market share gains from here on top of the 20% that you're currently sitting at? Yeah, I mean, you know, I said this going into the beginning of this year. Our pipeline was as good as I'd seen it since 2019. It's been a long time since our pipeline was this good. And our Q4, as a result, Q3, Q4, and I said this on our earnings call, has been the best we've seen in a long time. And I think part of the reason is competitive dynamics, have. We don't build our company around competitors, but obviously we're aware because sometimes we see them in deals. What was interesting about the most recent very large deals we signed was that it was us or nothing, which is a very unique situation to be in, where you just have to be good enough to beat nothing, which is like status quo is actually a pretty big hurdle to overcome. But it was actually an interesting tell on what the state of the market is, where there's a very small number, maybe one, us, a company who's really investing in this space and really innovating. And the reason we're able to do that is because we've been so fiscally responsible the last couple of years. And we built a platform that allows us to drag and drop. This Rapid Refi product we built for one tiny fraction of what it costs us to build our original mortgage product, and it's 10 times more capable. Because we have a drag-and-drop platform that we built all the primitives of lending and origination on, credit, income, assets, you know, all the verifications, all the fraud tools into the system. Now we can build these things so cheap and so much faster than we historically could. And so yeah we're, you know, I don't want to say that nobody else matters, but our focus is our customers. It's just, that's the reality. And so I'm going to keep building. And the competitive things are obviously promising for us, but we're not resting on our laurels at all. Consumer banking, it's an area where you guys have spent a lot of time investing. And really overnight, over the last few quarters, that business has been scaling, I think, a lot faster than what anyone thought, and even relative to your targets. I mean, this past quarter, just for context, that business grew 50-some-odd% year over year, right, on top of. Yeah, more. Yeah. So walk us through what drove the extension of the Blend platform into consumer banking, the types of products you're offering there, what that competitive landscape looks like, and what that pathway is in terms of the broader growth algorithm for Blend from here? I mean, like pretty much everything else that has happened at Blend, it was driven by our customers who said in 2018, 2019, came to us and said, "Hey, we think home equity lending is going to be really big because people are building equity in their homes. Can you help us automate this process and make this self-serve?" And we explored it, and we said, "Yeah, actually we can." It's a lot of the similar overlapping technology for the mortgage. And then once we did that, they said, "Hey, this is a way that we're drawing members to our credit union or new customers to our bank. Can we do the deposit account opening so that we can bring over deposits when we open these accounts?" And we looked at the problem set, and we're like, "Oh yeah, similar DNA, similar problem set." So yeah, we can do that. And that was in 2021, I think. And then we had a big customer who said, "Hey, we already use you for mortgage and home equity. Can we also now use you for our personal loans? Because we want to make home equity and personal loans sort of an interchangeable thing where if they don't have enough equity, we can offer them a personal loan." So we looked into that problem. Again, similar DNA of challenges, similar technology solutions. And so yeah, it's been a very organic. And then once we had gotten those three business lines, they said, "Hey, we're thinking of launching this credit card with a partner. Can we do that credit card on your system rather than standing up a whole new system for that?" We're like, "Yeah, of course." And now that's been a hugely successful credit card. And so all this has been very organic. And the most important thing is that it's the same DNA underlying originating any of these consumer products. You have to understand if the consumer can pay back a loan. You have to understand what their creditworthiness is. Do they make their payments on time? You have to understand, are they a fraudster? You have to understand potentially some additional attributes about them. There's certain things you have to look up and understand about them. But it's the same type of thing, which is why we built this drag-and-drop platform, where all these products are built on a platform that it's the same components, and we are just rearranging them. And over time, we've been opening up to our customers to build their own things. Like we have this really interesting solar lending deal. We don't have a solar lending product, but our platform supports all the primitives of solar lending. And so they're considering using that for solar lending too. In consumer banking, it's a pretty different landscape from a competitive standpoint in that space versus mortgage. Who are you most often competing against? Is it the do-nothing, you know, legacy Frankenstein solutions of some of the, you know, core processors? I don't want to diss anyone in the room, but who are some of the next-gen players in that space that you run up against, or is it really a greenfield? No, I think it sort of depends on the segment. I think a lot of the the very top end of the market where we started, there's not a lot of solutions that really work for the top end of the market. Because the top end of the market needs a certain level of, I'll call it technical flexibility that really only a platform like ours or maybe Salesforce, something like that, could in theory offer them. And so because it has to be able to integrate with all sorts of weird touch points at the bank at the top end of the market. And it's just different working at the top. And that's where we started in consumer, and we've been really successful there. And then as we go down market, we do see new age competitors in certain parts. Like it'll usually be a point solution for the mid and down market, where that competitor probably started in the down market because it's really tempting to start in the down market, and you can build a really good business in the down market. I don't want to take anything away from them. MeridianLink built a great business in the down market or the mid-market and down market segment, and so yeah, we definitely see point-type solutions in the down market, but my approach to this is, again, let's go back to the problem statement of the customer, the customer being the lender or bank or credit union. What they're trying to do is they're trying to form deeper relationships with consumers so they can do more products with those consumers, so that drives benefit to the consumer and profitability for the bank or credit union. And so for us, the unique value proposition is, how do I make it so that a bank or credit union that's using Blend can benefit from the fact that we have all these products? I don't want to lose to a point solution when a bank is trying to do multiple products per consumer. That's their whole objective. Most banks have some measure that they if it's a publicly traded bank, that they share publicly. And small credit unions, they talk about how much member benefit they've driven per member. They care about that. We should be the pole position for that. We're still learning in that mid-market, down market space, but we're excited about what's possible there. And have the low-hanging fruit initial wins in consumer been largely driven by the overlap with your mortgage customer base? Has it been a combination? What's been driving the new logos in consumer thus far? Yeah, I mean, look, one of the benefits of being a vertical software company is when you get really close to this goes back to Peter Gassner, the Veeva CEO. When you get really close to your customers and you make them really successful, they want to do more with you, and so it was intentional. We wanted to build these products when we were getting into this space three, four, five years ago, two, three, I guess, two, three years ago in the consumer, and then five years ago in the home equity was we wanted to build alongside some marquee customers. That's just how we think. Because we're like, if we build alongside some marquee customers who trust us, who've already done business with us, we can build something that has the highest ROI for them, that creates the most value for them, and maybe most importantly in this world, because so many things don't work, something that works. And so yeah, all the early customers that we signed for these things were existing customers who loved us and wanted to do more with us. And then now recently, though, as we've gotten a little bit more of a foothold in the market, we're winning more customers who have never talked to us about mortgage, but they need a consumer solution, and we're the best consumer solution in the market. And you've talked about, and you alluded to it earlier, moving down market more in consumer now. I mean, is that a similar opportunity to attack? Does it require a different product? What kind of adjustments to the sales efforts does it require? And what's been the early success so far? And just to be clear, when I say down market, I'm talking about financial institutions with a billion assets and above. There's like probably 6,000 or so financial institutions, banks, and credit unions. I'm talking about the top 1,000. I'm not talking about sort of the longer tail when I say down market. Historically, in consumer, we've really only touched the top 50 or so for what it's worth. Some smaller ones here and there, but onesies, twosies. Yeah, the product is the same. The objective for them is the same. They want to digitize their origination process across all their products, and they want to do it in a way that is future-proof and is always going to be evolving and growing like a software platform should. The sales motion is very different. The implementation motion is very different. The way you talk to the customer is very different. You've got to be. I don't know how to describe it. You've got to be so confident and so prescriptive in the ways that you say things. It's not like we're looking for them to come in and help us understand, how do you do credit card origination? We do credit card origination for one of the biggest banks in the world. We should be explaining to them how to do credit card origination, not as an arrogance thing, but like, here's how we think it's best to do it to get the highest conversion, the lowest fraud. We've seen this at scale. So let's help them understand how to do it at their scale. And then, of course, they'll have some things of like, hey, we want to offer credit cards to minors or this college campus. They'll have their own idiosyncrasies, but it just requires a different mindset, I would say, is the biggest difference going into these mid-market accounts, and so yeah, I'm excited about it. I don't think the product is very different. I do think there's more work to do, and we're still kind of figuring it out because we just have only focused on the top of the market in consumer, but we'll figure it out. I want to open it up for questions from the audience in the few minutes we have left. Otherwise, I can continue to lob some hard ones over at Nima. Any other questions from the audience? Since we're at a KBW conference, I have to bring up bank M&A, and obviously top of mind right now, given what's gone on with the election, Blend's moat in some of the larger banks and financial institutions. I mean, historically, have you been on the right side of M&A? And do you view that as maybe, I mean you know, an organic kind of catalyst for the business in the coming years to the extent we do see more consolidation in the industry? All but one case that I can think of, we've been on the right side of M&A. There's one case, and I'll talk about the one case that we weren't for the sake of just this discussion: First Republic went out, was acquired, didn't go out of business, was acquired, was taken over by regulators, was acquired, was a big customer of ours, and unfortunately, the acquirer had their own tech stack and didn't want to use our tech stack, but that was it. That was the only case. Every other case where we've had any kind of major M&A, Truist and BB&T merged, and we were on the right side of that M&A. There's been so many cases like that that it's really worked for us to actually get bigger. I think consolidation is generally very good for us unless Chase acquires everybody. That would probably be bad for us. But no, I think consolidation is really good for us. But there's been a lot of consolidation in the mortgage space. There's a lot of independent mortgage banks that are basically they're non-depository institutions, and they offer mortgages through loan agents who act almost like their own independent brokers in some ways. And they've been merging a lot recently. And that's really worked in our favor too. There's been a lot of consolidation in that space too. And I like it. I think it's good for the industry. It's going to help make the industry focus on the future again because the winners are going to get to be able to invest in the future again. And the ones who invest in the best technology that allows them to have the lowest cost service are going to be the ones that survive. And so I think it's just good for us. It's something we thought would be good for us, and it has been good for us in the last couple of years. I would suggest a decent amount of our market share growth in the last couple of years, a couple of percentage points probably at least has come through stuff that's happened that's totally not our sales team going and selling new customers. Any questions? Nima, I have some presentation. Two questions on. How do you? Oh, thank you very much. How do you differentiate yourself with potential new entrants, especially as you consider generative AI and how that could maybe leapfrog the technology that you have today? That was one question. But I think that's a great question because my view is that just like I said, I don't view the architecture of the industry as some gospel thing. I don't care about our technology in the sense that if there's a better way to do it, we're going to do it. We have the unfair advantage of the distribution of all these banks and credit unions. We have the unfair advantage of the brand and reputation of working with them in the market. And I'm a software engineer by background. I live and breathe this stuff all day. Generative AI is going to completely change the way banks drive revenue and profit to their bottom lines. And so we're going to be the best is how we're going to be the one who does the thing that the new entrant should do. We're not going to have innovator's dilemma. I don't care about our existing technology. If it's bad, we're going to replace it. And so yeah, so we're going to lead the charge in generative AI for our customers. It's important that we do it because the time it would take for them to go and find somebody else to go and bring them in the door and the cost it brings them to do their third-party risk assessments and all that stuff, it is prohibitively expensive for them. And it would mean that they would invest less in other things. And so for us, we can go and we have an example of one customer right now who we're launching some generative AI stuff with. They're an existing customer of Blend. And we're making it so easy for them. We're just going to let them flip a switch to turn it on in their production environment where they're already processing millions of applications a year. And so I just want to make it as easy as possible for them so that they can use the latest and greatest technology, which is what I promised them from the get-go for what it's worth. But yeah, I think the way that you don't get disrupted is you disrupt yourself. And so we're going to keep disrupting ourselves. And I was on a long plane flight over here from the West Coast. And I was thinking on the plane, just like how much there's almost too many opportunities in generative AI. And how do I figure out what's the one or two that we really want to go all in on? Because I do think that that is a big opportunity, not for us. I mean, yes, for us, but for the industry. If you want to be the best bank, how do you make sure you understand your customer at a deeper level than anybody else could possibly understand that customer and help understand what do you offer them? How do you make sure you offer them the right thing at the right time so that they do the next piece of business with you? I mean, it's a really interesting and complex problem that involves lots of different vectors that you have to look at as an institution. And historically, they've done this with, you know, marketing databases and SQL views and just stuff that's not the right solution for what is a very complex human problem. Did you have another question? Sorry. Do you think you said you had two questions, but? They were kind of together because of how do you differentiate yourself in the first place? Because I know that there's a lot of competition in this space. But it sounds like one of the ways you're differentiating yourselves, or are you historically, has always been the GUI, advanced GUI, and simplifying the steps. But you're seeing more and more of your competitors doing that, right? So somehow you need to take it to the next level. And that's why I brought up the generative AI. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And by the way, that was definitely the thing. Ten years ago, nobody had a digital experience. And so we went to the customers and we said, look, we're going to start with just the digital experience. But that was 10 years ago. I mean, it's funny that people are investing in that now. I mean, that's like three lifetimes ago for me. And so the next phase of our company is not about actually, my hope in the next phase of the company is that there is no UI. The bank is just telling you, hey, here's what I can do for you. There's not like a complex UI that walks the consumer through asks and their goals, things like that. It's like, no, we noticed you are paying 7% on this auto loan. Auto loan rates here at Nima's Credit Union are 5% now. Click here to save $48 a month. Click here to save $153 a month. That is the future if you get the process to be so frictionless and so simple for consumers. They will benefit from it. They'll use it. The throughput of the industry will be so much better than it is today, so it's funny to me that people are investing in UI. I'm like, that's the opposite of where you should be going. You should be going to where the future is and skating to where things are going to be in three to five years, not what Blend did over the last three to five years. Great. I think we're up on time. But thanks so much, Nima.