Blend Labs, Inc. (NYSE:BLND) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And then the last piece, which is probably the killer app for Blend is it’s not just about getting that deposit relationship Joe, it’s about turning that deposit relationship into a deeper broader relationships where we can do things like cross-sell that deposit relationship as part of the mortgage offering, or add a credit card to their deposit account opening with alongside their debit card opening. And so that becomes a customer for life for that institution. And that’s pretty unique to Blend. I mean, we’re the only platform that solves for mortgage and deposit accounts, which are our two primary product offerings we’re most focused on this year, but all the other products that they might have as well and credit cards and personal loans, auto loans, et cetera.

And so I think those are the core differentiators of Blend and where we’re spending the most time as we go to market and where we’re seeing us win deals with customers who not Blend yet at all.

Bryan Michaleski: Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. Dylan, you can go ahead and unmute.

Dylan Becker: Hey, guys. Appreciate the questions here. Maybe to Nima starting with you on mortgage, you kind of talked about investing ahead of a potential inflection into 2025. And you guys have done a really good job of controlling what you can control there in gaining share and increasing that take per funded loan. But just a broader sense of kind of how you’re thinking about that that landscape evolving over the next kind of several years here, again given, it seems like you’re in a better position now and you’re starting to see kind of some of those originations start to stabilize certainly relative to the prior few.

Nima Ghamsari: Thanks for the question Dylan. And I’d say we’re ahead of schedule. And you see this in the revenue per funded loan ahead of our 2026 targets that we shared at Investor Day on the revenue per funded loan. We’re ahead of where we had planned to be and that’s because our add-ons like the blend close out on are just getting really wide adoption from our customers. And actually, I would say it’s been very helpful to us that the market has stabilized in terms of volumes or haven’t been going up a ton or down a ton. Now we were hoping they were been coming back up slowly earlier and they haven’t. But eventually interest rates will go down. That will happen, but just the stability has allowed our customers to invest forward a little bit because they have visibility into their revenue and their visibility and what their budgets going to look like, they’re worried about that changing is that stability has really helped us and helped our customers invest in things like digital closings, as well as the next generation refinance product that I mentioned on – in the prepared remarks.

And I think is going to be so important for our customers to be ready for that refinance wave that’s going to happen at some point, well before it comes into place. They can get their processes in order, get the right technology, which you know, hopefully, and this is what I described in the call and also the right people in place that often massively scale up their operations to support that.

Dylan Becker: Got it. Okay. That makes perfect sense. And then maybe one, other one too. I know the Builder solution. Obviously, pipeline seems pretty healthy here and it’s early but as we think about kind of the long-term opportunity there for both mortgage and consumer. Wonder how you’re thinking about that partner ecosystem evolution and kind of the opportunity there to layer on configurability and maybe again kind of validation, go-to-market capacity, things of the like. It seems like that could be something that is pretty interesting. But how are you guys thinking about the partner angle and leveraging builder going forward as well? Thanks.

Nima Ghamsari: Yes. I mean it I think of it as actually partners will probably be the next ones to really get Blend Builder platform and start to be able to build things that make sense for a broader set of markets that we historically haven’t been able to focus on. I mean we at Blend have a limited capacity of not just building products but the product marketing, the marketing, the sales and deployment and being able to do that really, really well. We want to be really focused and why our focus is on the mortgage suite and deposit account opening products in particular. But I do think that there is such a powerful platform and it has taken all the components of origination and made them these building blocks that can be used, not just within banking but I think in other industries as well.

And so we’re sort of I think taking it piece by piece. We’re really hardening the platform with our existing customers. We’ve already started conversations with some partners in the context of specific customer deployment some of the big ones that we signed last year to start to build out that muscle with them. I think it will take some time but I do agree that it will open up a lot of doors for us.

Dylan Becker: Great. Thanks, Nima.

Bryan Michaleski: Our next question comes from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Mike you can go ahead and unmute.

Mike Ng: Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I just have two. First, on the consumer banking suite opportunity. You called out the potential to hit a $50 million annual revenue run rate. I was just wondering, if you could talk about the visibility reaching that. Could we — could reach that our annual revenue run rate at some point during 2024? And then I just have a quick follow-up.