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Earnings Call: Q2 2023

Aug 9, 2023

Winnie Ling
Head of Legal, Blend

Good afternoon. Welcome to Blend's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Winnie Ling, and I'm Head of Legal for the company. Leading today's call are Nima Ghamsari, Co-founder and Head of Blend, and Amir Jafari, our Head of Finance and Administration. After the prepared remarks, our team will take questions moderated by our Investor Relations Lead, Bryan Michaleski. You can find the supplemental slides on our investor relations webpage at investor.blend.com. During the call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP measures, which are reconciled to GAAP results in today's earnings release and in the appendix to our supplemental slides. Non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP results. Certain statements made during today's conference call regarding Blend and its operations, in particular, its guidance for 2023, may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws.

The company cautions you that forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, and a number of factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, could cause actual results, events, or circumstances to differ materially from those described in these statements. Please see the risk factors we've identified in our most recent 10-K, 10-Qs, and other SEC filings. We are not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change, except as required by law. I'll now turn the call over to Nima.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

Thanks, Winnie. Good afternoon, everyone. Our second quarter results exceeded expectations for the second quarter in a row, demonstrating continued progress on our strategic priorities. Even amidst a tough market, we are deepening wallet share with our mortgage customers and our Blend Builder platform, a key driver of our growth strategy, is gaining traction, unlocking efficiencies and speeding time to revenue for both us and our customers. With that, we're accelerating on our path to profitability. We outperformed the top end of our total company revenue guidance, owing to strong performance in our mortgage suite of services, as well as our growing revenue diversification as we begin to deploy our builder-enabled consumer banking product lines to more customers. I'm also encouraged to see this translate into a pipeline of nearly 40 opportunities between our mortgage and consumer banking products, even as market conditions remain dynamic.

In Q2, we saw this increase as our customers began to crystallize their budgets for the upcoming year, keeping our sales efforts in full swing. So far in 2023, we've deployed 18 consumer banking products. This translated into strong results from our Blend Platform segment, which also exceeded the high end of our prior guidance. We improved our software margins meaningfully quarter-over-quarter on top of that. We have also taken significant steps to streamline and improve how we operate as a company. We are seeing these savings show up in our results in a meaningful way. As a result, in Q2, we surpassed the 50% operating loss reduction target we set last year. We did it two quarters ahead of our original goal. This is a testament to our focus on execution, regardless of the operating environment.

On top of that, there's more work being done on the efficiency side, which you may have seen from our additional cost reduction announcement effective today. We also achieved two sequential quarterly reductions of non-GAAP operating expenses since the start of the year and have lowered our expense rate by nearly $100 million on an annualized basis since this time last year. We did this all while maintaining the high quality of service and support our customers expect from Blend, and we're just getting started on leveraging the efficiencies that Blend Builder can provide us. To wrap up the highlights, we know that executing well in the current environment will pay dividends as market conditions improve.

We have a great customer base that continues to grow, we continue to expand those customers' use of our products, all the while, Blend Builder is live and enabling our customer success. With that, let's cover our three company priorities for the year and how we're progressing on our mission to bring simplicity and transparency to financial services. Let's start with our 1st key strategic priority, which is to support our mortgage customers through a very challenging period. Mortgage rates are at 23-year highs, origination volumes are sobering as a result. This is a real headwind for our customers and for Blend. We aren't planning around a recovery. We are planning to be profitable in this type of environment. That leaves us with two things in our control on the revenue side.

One is helping our customers grow market share by getting the most value they can out of our core product. The second is providing accretive add-ons that drive even more value per unit to our customers and more revenue to Blend. We're seeing that play out in practice in our customer base today. First, many customers who leverage our technology to power their businesses continue to outperform the broader mortgage origination market, and as a result, they are taking more market share. We only report market share biannually due to lag in the metric and the timing of the measurements of the industry size, but you've seen us grow there.

Because we continue to roll out new value-add features like soft credit pulls and our Spanish language intake form, and things like Condition Sync, which drive efficiency, our customers largely renew with us with more value and at higher prices. On top of that, our add-on products, such as Blend Close and Blend Income, deliver meaningful improvements in cost and time to close rates. Especially in a margin-pressured environment, these gains are front of mind for mortgage customers who want to deliver the highest quality experience at the lowest cost to their customers. In aggregate, these things ultimately are reflected in our growing mortgage rate revenue per transaction, which increased to $93 in Q2 from $77 in the same period last year.

While short and medium-term macro headwinds persist, we're focusing on what's in our control, driving adoption and utilization growth of our value-add features, maintaining strong retention, and growing our mortgage market share, all while continuing to set the foundation for our next-generation mortgage products on the Blend Platform. This is only one of our bright spots, which leads me to the second big priority for the year: growing adoption of our Builder-enabled consumer banking products. In 2023 alone, as I said earlier, we've deployed 18 consumer banking products and 25 since Q2 of last year, and we're already seeing revenue growth from these rollouts in our consumer banking suite revenue. In addition, our customers are interested, and they see the value in Blend Builder.

We have an active backlog of over 12 projects underway, which will continue to drive incremental growth as these go live and ramp over time. While we continue to see market environment lengthening our sales cycles, the level of pipeline that we see gives us a high degree of confidence in the long-term outlook for Blend and Blend Builder and our ability to transform the banking space. Just as our Builder platform generates value for our customers, there are also several other positive outcomes for our business. I'll let Amir cover this in more detail, but overall, we are seeing the benefits that a platform model has on improving the stability and diversification of our revenue profile and lengthening our customer relationships with us as they make longer and larger commitments. That will become apparent in our growing remaining performance obligation.

In all, over the past decade, we became a leader in innovation, establishing a strong hold in the mortgage market, winning leading market share with quality financial institutions, and expanding across the entire consumer banking portfolio, all while developing and strengthening the transformational Blend Builder platform that will propel our mission forward. Now, as we enter our next chapter, in which we shift from building to deploying, we are in a position to leverage the efficiency of the Blend Builder to deliver more innovation per dollar for our customers, which brings me to our third priority, our path to profitability. Now that Builder is scaled across many of our customers and is our primary internal development tool for new products, Blend is foundationally set up to be more efficient. We can innovate on Builder an order of magnitude faster and with marginal cost.

As a quick example, one of our larger long-time clients in the unsecured loan origination space came to us with around 40 new feature enhancement requests as they tried to navigate a complicated macro. Those 40 features would have taken six or more months to do across multiple people to implement. In addition, some of the requests were specific to that client, making it difficult to support because we have a standardized product. Overall, this path would have taken significant resources and cost and led to a less than happy client. Fortunately, we had already been in the process of migrating that client to our Blend Builder platform. We scoped the 40 enhancement requests on the new platform ahead of that go live.

Not only were many of these features simple configurations, but the ones specific to that client were handled by our professional services team as configurations in their unique environment, allowing us to keep our gold standard product suite standardized while offering the customer the flexibility they need. This meant that the entire request list, or almost the entire request list, could be done in weeks and at a much, much lower cost. Our customers can be more successful, happier, and at a lower cost with Blend. In short, Builder allows for a fundamental shift in our operating model. It has been a big investment to get here, but the leverage it gives us sets us up well for the next decade. What does this mean practically?

Well, today we announced a few key changes in support of this to further accelerate our path to profitability and make the most of that platform. First, this ability to build products faster and cheaper allows us to deliver more innovation per dollar that we spend, and we have tightened our research and development spend going forward as a result. We believe we can do this without sacrificing innovation and, in fact, in some areas, increase our pace of innovation in new product development. As a side note for investors, please come to our Investor Day in September, which is directly after our customer conference, Blend Forum, where we'll be announcing some new products. We aren't stopping there. We're also reducing and focusing our sales and marketing spend around the Blend Builder platform and the related mortgage investors for our customers.

We know sales efficiency matters, and the market's tight, and we're paying very close attention to how we spend our sales and marketing dollars and making sure we get the best ROI. This overall simplified organization as a whole has meaningful effects on the required corporate support in our general and administrative functions, leading to further lowering costs in those areas. While the reductions we are announcing today are sizable, they are targeted to the areas I just mentioned. Importantly, there are certain areas we're not touching. For example, our customer support and customer success teams are largely remaining intact and in some cases growing, because we want to be responsive to customers who are navigating a very complicated macro situation.

Professional service and integration are very important to work through the backlog of customer rollouts, which drive more value to them and more revenue to Blend. I also want to address our title business. We have achieved a number of goals with this business over the past couple of years by digitizing key parts of the title process. We have also significantly improved the cost structure and operating model for title for turning it to positive gross margins despite record low volumes. With the steps we've undertaken to date, including today, we are on track to return the title business to positive non-GAAP operating profit contribution within the next several quarters. This is now a more sustainable business for us, with operating leverage potential as the refi market ultimately returns. We remain committed to our title business and our customers.

As a result of all of these efforts across Blend, we're even leaner and more focused today. We expect that these actions will further accelerate our path to profitability. We expect those savings to start materializing in our bottom line in Q3. Because of our overall long-term foundational investments with Blend Builder, we believe we can not only be profitable with this expense base, but we can continue to innovate, grow our customer base and our product suite, ultimately expanding our addressable market even further. Now, let me turn it over to Amir to talk through our key numbers for Q2 and our guidance for the next quarter.

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Thank you, Nima, good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to be joining you today to discuss our financial results for the second quarter. As Nima highlighted, we delivered another great quarter, executing ahead of our targets, both for revenue and non-GAAP operating loss. We are also continuing to take the necessary steps that allow us to both control our own future and ensure we achieve our long-term goals, including our path to profitability. As I jump into the results, let me just remind you that unless otherwise stated, all results are non-GAAP. Total company revenues in the second quarter were $42.8 million, outperforming the top end of our outlook by 4%. We reported Blend Platform revenue of $30.3 million, which was 8% ahead of guidance. We credit this outperformance to two dimensions.

First, our customer base is demonstrating resilience in a tougher origination environment by gaining share in a market where volumes were a little better than we expected. Second, our customers are demonstrating faster adoption and go live of Blend's add-on products. Similar trends are benefiting our consumer banking suite revenue as our backlog converts to new deployments, reaching go live at a time when the industry is seeing stronger than expected personal loan volumes. Our mortgage banking suite revenue declined by 17% year-over-year to $22.3 million, despite the origination environment declining 37% over the same period as measured by the Mortgage Bankers Association. As we gain traction with the customers through continued adoption of add-on products, coupled with the customer renewals and new logos, we are generating improved Mortgage Suite revenue per transaction.

Our fee per funded loan rose to $93 from $77 in the same period last year. Our consumer banking suite revenue totaled $5.8 million in Q2, an increase of 27% as compared to the prior year period. This growth reflects new deployments and ramp-ups on the Blend Builder platform over the past year, particularly our home equity solution. We also generated $2.2 million of professional services revenue, up 10% from last year due to fees associated with consumer banking deployments. We reported title revenue of $12.5 million, in line with our expectation amidst a challenging refinance environment. Moving on to gross profit. Total company non-GAAP gross profit was $23.8 million, down only 8% from last year against a 35% decline in total revenue.

Non-GAAP platform gross margins improved meaningfully, reaching 74%, compared with 61% a year prior. Looking specifically at Blend's platform performance, gross profit on a dollar basis increased 9%, despite a 37% decrease in market origination volume over the same period. This is strong evidence that our software platform business model, combined with the cost optimization and efficiency programs we've undertaken, are materially improving our ability to generate incremental profits in a lower market volume environment. We also reported record non-GAAP software gross margins of approximately 81% in the second quarter, up from 73% for the same period last year. Our gross margin expansion reflects the benefit of increased higher-margin consumer banking suite revenues, as well as the vendor optimizations we've implemented within our mortgage suite.

Effectively, we are lowering the cost to power the origination of the same loan while delivering more value for customers through add-on products, which in turn is driving higher per loan funded loan rates. Q2 gross margin performance demonstrates that we remain well ahead of our target ranges for this year. While gross margins can fluctuate a bit quarter to quarter, partly due to the differences in timing of certain expenses, we expect 2023 will remain strong, and we believe 80% is an achievable run rate for our software business by next year. I also want to point out the progress we've made evolving our professional services model to realize the benefits of the investment in our configurable platform. As more of our deployments shift to Blend Builder, we are deploying more efficiently, positioning us to drive industry standard gross margins from this line item.

In our title segment, we made great progress this quarter to align the cost to deliver this service in a very low refinance volume environment. We achieved our goal of returning to positive gross margins in Q2 and have undertaken additional actions to further support our operating profitability goals for this business. As Nima mentioned, we've executed a business process redesign that focuses title on becoming a profitable entity that will operate sustainably and is ready for scale. Some of these undertakings include, first, reducing processing times by leveraging technology and workflow enhancements that translates to productivity gains measured by orders processed per associate. Second, implementing a flatter organization structure and reducing the span of control. Third, optimizing our utilization of lower-cost resources, including our in-house offshore team.

We believe these measures will return title to positive operating profit within the next several quarters, even with the current market conditions. Non-GAAP operating costs for the second quarter totaled $41.6 million, compared with $65.3 million in the previous year. We are delivering on our operational excellence goals at a faster rate than expected. The actions we announced in January 2023 are now fully realized. We successfully executed against every target, as now evident in our financial results. At the same time, as we've directed more organizational effort towards our platform strategy, we also launched a deeper examination into areas where we felt we have more opportunity to drive incremental operational excellence. You're seeing that in the restructuring initiatives we announced today, which are expected to reduce our operating expenses an additional $33 million on an annualized basis.

We're confident this was the right time to take these actions as we move expeditiously from Blend's first phase to phase two. As Builder deployments accelerate, we are structuring our operating model to support customer growth, rapid deployment, and outstanding service, with the goal of achieving operating excellence across the company. Additionally, our Builder platform enables us to continue our pace of innovation much more efficiently, serving both our mortgage and consumer banking customers. I want to reiterate a point Nima made here as well. The changes that we have made were designed to not have any impact on the level of service our customers expect from us or the speed at which we can deploy these solutions for them. We have always wanted to align our success with our customers, and this remains core to us as we enter this second phase.

We believe these changes have put our business in a position to maximize value for our customers and shareholders as the market conditions improve. Putting all of this together, our non-GAAP loss from operations was $17.9 million versus $39.5 million in the prior year. This step function improvement reflects the velocity of our strategic actions, as I described a moment ago. This surpasses our $20 million net operating loss target for Q4 2023, two quarters ahead of the target we established this time last year. This achievement is a testament to our evolving operational focus and commitment to execution, regardless of the operating environment. This gives us strong confidence we are well on our way to reaching our next goal of becoming a profitable company next year.

The business is positioned to benefit from higher revenue, better margins, and now much greater financial leverage. I'm encouraged that as performance optimization becomes core to our culture, we are finding new ways to do this better every day. This new culture and the ability to leverage the investment we made in our platform is what has enabled us to accelerate the achievement of the ambitious operating loss targets we established last year and drive us to profitability faster than we had initially thought possible. We are making an incredible amount of progress, and we are excited to share more details about how this informs our long-term outlook for Blend at our Investor Day in late September. Turning to our balance sheet. Our cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, inclusive of restricted cash, totaled $278 million as of the end of the second quarter.

With the actions we've undertaken, we've remained confident our business remains well-capitalized to reach our profitability goals, and we have ample liquidity based on our current projections in this macro environment. I also want to note that our remaining performance obligations topped $50 million this quarter at $53.2 million at the end of Q2. As we've discussed on recent calls, our business model is evolving constructively as part of our broader transition to a platform-first organization. Generally, as our customers add more products at renewal, they are increasingly entering into platform deals with longer and larger commitments. This strengthens the foundation of our customer relationships and importantly, brings two primary economic benefits for Blend. First, we are increasing the stability of our future cash flows by adding a recurring SaaS-like fee while retaining the upside associated with our consumption-based model.

Second, we believe this shift in payment terms should improve our overall free cash flow, with more fees being paid in advance. We are at the beginning of this shift, and as we migrate to the platform model with more customers, you will see the growth in our RPO and free cash flow benefits in our financial performance. We are encouraged by the stability of the business and the results we've seen to date. That said, industry and macro conditions related to the mortgage origination market remain highly uncertain, and that is reflected in our guidance for Q3. We expect platform revenue to be between $27 million-$30 million in Q3 2023. We expect our title business revenue to be between $11 million-$12 million. Our total company revenue outlook is expected to be between $38 million-$42 million for Q3.

Our total non-GAAP net operating loss is expected to be between $17.5 million and $15.5 million for Q3, with the midpoint representing an 8% sequential improvement from the prior quarter and a greater than 50% improvement year-over-year. We expect to continue to see sequential improvement in our operating loss through the balance of this year and believe our strong business performance and cost actions we've undertaken have accelerated us reaching our non-GAAP profitability goal earlier in 2024 than originally planned. With that, let me turn the call back to Nima for his closing remarks.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

Thanks, Amir. We are exiting this quarter feeling energized about our position and our opportunity. I'm proud of the accelerated progress we've made on our 2023 priorities and our path to profitability. We still have more work to do, and while we cannot control the market, we can control how we deliver for customers to help them optimize performance and build for the future. If we continue to focus on this objective, we will strengthen Blend's business and performance as well. With that, thank you again for joining. Bryan, we are now ready for questions.

Bryan Michaleski
Investor Relations Lead, Blend Labs

Thank you, Nima and Amir, for your remarks. We'll now turn to the Q&A portion of the call. Our first question comes from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. You can unmute, and please go ahead.

Michael Ng
Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you very much for the question. I just have two, both on gross margins. You know, you saw a lot of gross margin strength in the quarter, 81% in software, and you talked about the higher margin consumer banking suite and vendor optimizations in mortgage. I was just wondering if you could expand on both those points. You know, is there something inherent in consumer banking that gives it a higher margin than mortgage? within the vendor optimizations, are you just using, you know, different or less expensive, like, API tools? You know, what exactly is that vendor optimization?

I have a second question, which is just about the trajectory of gross margins for the rest of the year. Amir, you talked about 80% software gross margins for next year, but is this, you know, 81% gross margin for the rest of the year, a good way to think about the back half? Thanks.

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Thanks, Michael. I think a few follow-ups that well, will just help give you a little bit of clarity for the questions. The best way to think about what we did on gross margins and the execution that we're able to deliver, it's more so from just a structural shift that we're able to execute against with Builder, first and foremost. That ties it to your question with regards to what we see in the consumer banking space and the margin upside that we're seeing from a mix perspective. For the follow-up aspect of it, with regards to just vendors, it's not so much that we're changing the APIs, it's just we're continuing to optimize how the.

Our shift, in essence, this whole notion that we talk about from phase one to phase two in the platform, it enables us to actually allow us to be lower cost in certain aspects of the business, which also then enable us to drive higher margins. The last part of your question, yeah, I think, again, to the prepared remarks, what we stated is we feel very comfortable that in 2024, we'll be able to execute at these levels on a consistent basis.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

Yeah, just, and just one note from a product perspective, Michael. On the consumer banking side, there are fewer the products that are offered in terms of how banks offer these products are simpler, and so there's fewer vendors that we bundle in together. Yes, it's structurally higher margin, but our mortgage product has, you know, additional margin opportunity as well as we optimize the vendors under the hood.

Michael Ng
Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you, Nima. Thanks, Amir.

Bryan Michaleski
Investor Relations Lead, Blend Labs

Our next question comes from Matt Stotler with William Blair. You can unmute, and please go ahead.

Matt Stotler
Equity Research Analyst, William Blair

Hey there. Thank you for taking the questions. Just two for me. One, good to see the revenue per transaction in the Mortgage Suite increase year-over-year. It was down a little bit, sequentially, so I'd love to just, you know, get some color on the dynamics that can, you know, influence that on a quarterly basis, how you're thinking about that in the second half of the year. The second question would be just an update on attach rate with newer products like Blend Income. An update there would be helpful as well. Thank you.

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Let me start with the P&L just to help. I think what you're seeing is really just movements from a timing and a mix perspective quarter-over-quarter. What we stated last quarter is that we expect it to be in the mid to high 80s, where again, we're executing ahead of that. We're seeing strong adoption of the value add-on solutions, the add-on solutions that we're providing, just given the value that they add. That's what's driving the upside on the 93. Then on the for the second part of the question, if you can just repeat that one more time, and I'll answer it.

Matt Stotler
Equity Research Analyst, William Blair

Sure. Just looking for an update on the attach rate that you're seeing with newer products like Blend Income, you know, what that's looking like in the install base at this point and where that can go.

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, again, we haven't shared the attach rate very specific to, to Blend Income, but what you're able to see is the follow-through of Blend Income and also what we do, for example, with Blend Close and some of our other solutions. The ability to actually allow those to attach to what we do in terms of renewals with our existing mortgage customers, it's those two outcomes together that are actually driving an increase in our, in our funded loan rates, and, and to the first part of your question. We're seeing stronger attract, you know, just adoption in general. We're seeing it come through in terms of the results and, and what you saw this quarter in terms of the 93.

Matt Stotler
Equity Research Analyst, William Blair

Got it. Thank you.

Bryan Michaleski
Investor Relations Lead, Blend Labs

Our next question comes from Joe Meares from Truist. You can please unmute and go ahead.

Joe Meares
VP Equity Research, Truist

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I appreciate it. Earlier in the quarter, you announced the availability of soft credit functionality, noting that it saves lenders $50 per file. I'm just curious how, how this is trending so far, if you have any early customer feedback, and if there's any pricing uplift from this feature.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

It's a feature that's built into our platform today, and it's just a you know, we always try to add new functionality for our customers, and that's what creates more value for them. Ultimately, when it comes to renewal time, if we're creating more value, they're often willing to renew with us at higher rates. You're kind of seeing that in our customer base today. We don't charge extra for that feature. It's very important. Basically, the thing it solves is, is a not only cost, but additionally, it's also a conversion because there's this concept called trigger leads in the industry. It's a hot topic in the Mortgage Bankers Association, where when you get your, your credit pulled for a mortgage somewhere, you'll probably get 25 other calls from other lenders trying to sell you something.

By using soft credit during that pre-qualification, pre-approval shopping phase, we're able to help the customer get what they want, the consumer get what they want, which is an approval, without bombarding them with hundreds of calls and maybe tearing them away from the lender that they applied with. It's been a really important feature for our customer base. We're going to continue to investing in our products and our customer base to make sure they're getting the value they need to get through this really tough cycle.

Joe Meares
VP Equity Research, Truist

... That's great, and I bet the, the consumer will appreciate not getting bombarded, as well. Just as a follow-up, you know, how are you thinking about the product portfolio in a higher, for longer interest rate environment? I, I, I appreciate that the consumer portion grew very, very strongly, but if you're cutting R+D with this new cost savings, are you gonna be able to continue to, to develop new products on the consumer side? How are you guys thinking about that? Thanks so much.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

Yeah, I want to go back to something I said in the prepared remarks, which is that Blend Builder is a fundamental structural shift in how we can build things. It's really only this year that we're starting to see those benefits, or maybe late last year we started. Because we're able to make changes, and I gave that example of a customer that had 40 new feature requests. I mean, any company taking on 40 new feature requests would be a bear, you couldn't do all of them, you'd have to get it on your roadmap. I mean, the speed at which we're able to iterate on Blend Builder, because we've made the DNA of any lending product or account-opening product drag and drop.

Because we've been able to do that, or at least many pieces of it, almost all the pieces of it, it just allows us to innovate more with less. Like, I think the real, the real show of strength for a company is how much you can get done per dollar or per, you know, per unit of energy spent, and that's something that we're really gearing towards going forward. No, actually, I think our innovation will speed up. I, I gave it a plug during the prepared remarks. Please come to the Investor Day if you can.

It's gonna be following our, our Blend Forum, which is late September. We're gonna be announcing some really great new product features and new products for our customer base, who they need to see this kind of innovation from us to continue to bet on us. We're gonna keep innovating.

Joe Meares
VP Equity Research, Truist

Thanks again.

Bryan Michaleski
Investor Relations Lead, Blend Labs

Our next question comes from David Unger with Wells Fargo. You can please unmute and go ahead.

David Unger
VP of Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Hi, can you hear me okay? Just one from me. Just wondering how AI Copilot is going with the customers. Any, any initial observations you can share with us in, in terms of productivity gains with the banks? Thanks.

Nima Ghamsari
Co-Founder and Head of Blend, Blend

Yeah, we haven't launched anything formally there. I do think lending and banking, where, you know, a lot of the recent innovation in AI has been around, how you can understand using natural language, you can understand the natural language that a person puts in and really understand the intent of that question and that natural language, and then use that to eventually formulate a response. I think because most people interact with their bank, and a lot of times in person or on the phone, and especially when you get a mortgage, in person or on the phone quite a bit, and that's using natural language, AI is sort of uniquely positioned to help here. So we're excited.

We're, we're not ready to share anything broadly yet, but, but we're excited about the space, and we think it can be used in our customer base and drive material benefit in how they can serve their customers. The end consumer who wants to be able to interact however they want to interact with their bank, and, and we can help enable that over time.

Bryan Michaleski
Investor Relations Lead, Blend Labs

Our final question comes from Ryan Tomasello with KBW. Ryan, you can please unmute and go ahead.

Ryan Tomasello
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, KBW

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. just, just unpacking the cost reductions a bit more. I mean, how, how long should we expect these to take to phase in? Any updated timing on cash flow breakeven beyond operating income breakeven? I guess just thinking about the uncertain volume environment next year, do you feel like you've cut as much as you can here, or are there still other levers that you'd be willing to pull in order to hit these targets?

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Thanks, Ryan. I'll try to get through each of them. Let me know if there's something I missed. First, in terms of just the phasing, it's immediate, so there is no phasing. You'll see the, in essence, the outcomes flow through instantaneously. Second, with regards to the cash flow breakeven, you know, we shared, obviously, in the last call that we were accelerating our path to profitability by a full year, from 2025 to 2024. Again, our targets are, are to, to, to allow our operating profit to match what we, what we target from a free cash flow perspective, and so I think our, our intention is to have a very similar timeline.

Third, with regards to just the, the, the other components that, that you asked, I think for us, and if you can remind me your last question, Ryan, really quick, 'cause I wanna answer both of them?

Ryan Tomasello
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, KBW

Well, just to clarify, I mean, the cash flow breakeven target, I think, would be inclusive of the, you know, $30 million of financing costs. Just wanted to clarify that, what the timing looks like there from a breakeven perspective. Then just the last question was, if there's any other levers you're willing to pull, depending on how the mortgage volume environment shakes out next year, you know, if you feel like, you know, you could cut any further?

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Yeah, absolutely. It was the levers one that I missed. Thank you. First, I think, again, the actions that we've taken, that allow us to achieve our path to profitability, which we spoke to, at an even accelerate rate. That implies that even if the mortgage volumes were to remain at these levels, we feel very confident with our future and the targets that we've set just period for us. That's how we've, that's how we've kind of, in essence, rolled this out. The second part of that, with regards to the levers, what we said in Q1, and really we're re-emphasizing now, is we will continue to look for different ways to, to become more efficient. The level of focus that we have internally today, from the lens of operational excellence, are gonna, are not gonna stop.

We're gonna continue down this path, and so we'll continue to look at those. Ryan, let me know if I missed anything.

Ryan Tomasello
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, KBW

No, I just, I just had another follow-up, if I could squeeze one in, would be-

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Of course.

Ryan Tomasello
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, KBW

... just around the capital structure. I believe you've alluded to it in the past, but just any thoughts around being opportunistic with a potential restructuring or negotiation around the term loan or, or the put option with the title business? Anything that you could explore there to alleviate some of those overhangs, or do you feel like now you're on a path, just in terms of organic execution, you know, to have those be manageable from here?

Amir Jafari
Head of Finance and Administration, Blend

Yeah, the answer is both, Ryan. I think we feel very strong about where we are as a company and where we've positioned ourselves. We'll always be strategic in terms of not just how we listen and explore options, but also the actions that we take. We recognize the difference right now from what we guide to from a net operating loss perspective to, in essence, your question about free cash flow. The biggest driver there is obviously our interest expense, and so that's top of mind for us. We have a great partner in Blue Owl, Ryan, and so, look, we are going to stay very strategic.

We'll explore options, but it's, again, I think what's more important to the question you're asking is, we feel very good about where we are today to be able to sustain with or without this type of optionality in front of us.

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