Okay, we are live. I'm getting the signal that we are live. We are getting started, and I have a feeling we'll have a very enthusiastic and alert audience this afternoon to talk about Figure, which is, you know, one of our two most recent IPOs on NASDAQ that's here at the conference today, doing exceptionally well, and so excited to have this chat with Macrina today to learn a little bit more about Figure, so welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for having me here, Brandis.
So excited to meet our investors.
So this is your first conference since Figure became a public company. So for those who are not familiar with the company, why don't we begin the conversation with a good overview?
Sure. So we are Figure Technology Solutions. We went public in September of this year. What we do in a very high-level overview is that we provide a capital marketplace for private credit today using the blockchain technology. So our loans are native to the blockchain. And what Figure provides is a loan origination system that is differentiated and unique and much faster than the overall mortgage industry. So we offer HELOC products that go on to the marketplace. And our partners use our loan origination system to use the marketplace. And we have a place where private credit buyers can come into our marketplace to be able to buy these types of loans. And the technology and the standardization behind our marketplace is that because the loans that are originated can be from Brandis's company or Figure itself, it's using the same technology. So it's homogenous and it's standardized.
That's how we can go on to a blockchain. We have a layer one blockchain called Provenance that is providing the database foundation to have all of these loans on the blockchain. And what makes that easier for the capital marketplace is that the information is out in the public realm. So the data can be readily available on a second-by-second basis if you want to see the information as a loan buyer. Or you can download the loan tapes on a day-to-day basis. In the traditional world, what happens is if you own private credit and you're owning a loan, a servicer provides the data to you on a monthly basis. And so you're always looking at history, whether that's 15 days old or 45 days old, versus using Figure, you're looking at information on a day-to-day basis.
So it's very attractive to the loan buyers to use our marketplace.
That's perfect. Thank you for that. And so let's dig a little bit into your strategy. So what are the broad aspirations for Figure? And remind us of your top two to three strategic priorities for the next 18 months. I know it's hard. You just became a public company two months ago, but let's look into the broader horizon.
Sure. So we offer a marketplace called Figure Connect. So Figure Connect is something that we want to continue to broaden deeper in terms of more loans coming into the ecosystem, work with different partners. We currently have about 250 partners, and we want to be able to continue to grow that. Our third quarter partner count increase was actually more than the first half. So we have seen the flywheel impact of being a public company, being a great marketplace for our origination partners to work with us. The other side of the house would be working with a different type of marketplace because the Figure Connect marketplace today is really a permanent buy vehicle. So loan buyers would come in and buy the whole loan and take it permanently off of the balance sheets of other players.
We want to also be able to provide shorter-term type of product to the marketplace. We call that Democratized Prime within Figure, and it acts like an overnight market where debt is provided to whoever is bringing collateral, so if I use our Figure loan product as an example, you could be using the Figure loan product instead of going to a bank to provide you with a warehouse facility. You can actually use our Democratized Prime product and be able to lend out the loan using the collateral as a loan and borrow the money from multiple different buyers, and that's the reason we call it Democratized Prime, because it could come from a Goldman Sachs or a Morgan Stanley, but it could also come from someone like yourself or myself if we wanted to lend $1,000 into the ecosystem.
Yeah, that's definitely, that's the future, right?
Yes. Decentralized finance.
Yeah, 100%. And we're going to talk about tokenization at the end of this, but I definitely, you know, that all plays into it. But before we do that, let's focus on the core HELOC product. You had mentioned it earlier in your introduction, where the key driver of growth appears to be adding the loan origination partners. What's driven the significant growth in origination partners over the last few quarters, and how should we think about the growth of origination partners going forward?
Sure. So if you are a partner that is working on Figure Connect, the part that you would be focused the most on is your customer acquisition and your customer relationship. Once you have a relationship with your customer and you want to be able to offer them a loan product, Figure brings on the different technologies behind the scenes, including the blockchain technology and a liquidity provider that has a certainty of takeout through our marketplace. And so what's attractive to our partners is that they just need to be able to bring the customers and use our origination system and be able to use our liquidity. And ultimately, if they wanted to, they could lend this out on Democratized Prime as well.
So we have more partners joining our marketplace because they don't have to worry about having a warehouse facility for themselves and dealing with different lawyers and banks that are using customized agreements. They also don't have to think about having a loan agreement, purchase agreement with the likes of many different hedge funds out there. And all of these agreements, I'm sure all of you go through the work as well, is that these are unique agreements. It's not standardized. It's not the same agreement being used. But if you're part of the Figure marketplace, it's one agreement. We don't have one hedge fund getting a different agreement to another hedge fund. The important thing is that we have every single buyer on the marketplace under one agreement. And so it takes out a lot of the concerns and risks and liquidity that these mortgage originators are bringing in-house.
And so we are continuing to build the partner network. I talked about mortgages, but a lot of our partners are non-mortgage companies. So if you are a large company that provides home improvement products, I don't want to say names particularly, but I'm sure you can get a sense of what these companies are. And at the point of sale, even if they don't have a mortgage origination license, they can actually work with Figure. And we can provide the backend to be able to work with their customers, give them a lower-priced, lower-rate loan, which is better for the customer as well, because today they would have used a credit card and have a credit card debt that's in the teens in terms of interest rate or even more than that. And they can come to Figure where our rates are on average 9%.
Wow. Let's drill in on that specifics a little bit more. So we talked about a variety of different origination partners. So if you can drill into that a little bit more. So what sort of origination partner is attracted to the Figure platform? We've seen broadly non-bank adoption, which you just mentioned. But what about banks, small, big, both? Tell us a little bit more about that.
So we work with a variety of credit unions in the U.S. We also work with different types of brokers that have mortgage interest and also companies that may be able to originate because they have a mortgage license, but aren't able to have the equity, not just equity in the sense of shareholder equity, but funding to be able to provide for mortgage origination. So having all of those diverse partners, including regional banks, work with us actually makes a lot more sense. And to give an overview of why a bank would actually work with us, one is our loans take about five minutes if all of the data is there to have a decision on whether you will be approved to take the loan. And that's really fast.
That's really fast.
Knowing that I've had a mortgage, I've had a HELOC, and it takes a much longer time to be able to get a decision, and then the other part is our loans take as fast as five days to close versus, and our average is about 9 to 10 days versus the industry average is around 45 days, and so if you're a bank who is really focused on the customer relationship, and many banks are, they have an offering, an alternative. It's not that all of their customers need to come through Figure. They can actually use our product as a white label and be able to give the customer something very quickly as an approval and be able to fund within 9 to 10 days.
Wow, that's tremendously fast.
My HELOC took 60 days.
Yeah, same, same. Painful, painful. Without it, it's very painful, right? Just waiting to hear. Yes, I think we all can sympathize with that. So let's just talk about overall innovation, right? I mean, you're innovating, you are innovation, but you're innovating specifically across a variety of financial services products. What allows you to drive such rapid technological developments and large TAMs, all while maintaining such a strong cost discipline and strong margins? So let's get into the nitty-gritty CFO stuff.
Sure. So our co-founders actually are second-time co-founders. They co-founded a company called SoFi. So they have been in the industry for quite some time. So they understand lending quite well. And with the lessons learned in building out the technology and the product, they brought that to Figure. And so the vision of creating a marketplace built on blockchain technology, they could use a system that could be built on a modular basis. It's not that you're starting out fresh and not thinking about what's going to be coming next and you're a regular startup. They actually had a vision of knowing what was going to be built.
And so the modular nature of our technology is very helpful because if we wanted to originate a different type of product or add a different type of feature or tweak certain things in our lending, we're able to do that in a very short amount of time. And I think that innovation using blockchain technology is very helpful. The other part I would add is there are very few companies out there that use a layer one blockchain called Provenance to be able to originate the loans. And our founders actually created Provenance as well because they looked around the overall ecosystem and saw that there really wasn't a blockchain that could work with real assets that are digitized and tokenized. And so our Provenance blockchain is able to read the information and have the key terms minted on there.
So it doesn't have any PII or anything like that, but it will show the loan balance. It will show the interest rate. It will show the term of the loan. So that type of information, if you think about it, I don't think Bitcoin chain or Ethereum can actually house that information.
Yeah. A shameless plug for SoFi, another NASDAQ-listed company. So we're very proud to have the founders bringing another one here to NASDAQ and continuing with that innovation. I'm going to drill back down to the question again, though. So talk to us a little bit about cost discipline and your margins.
Sure. So we are very proud to say that we have been GAAP net income positive since 2024. That is unique in many of the tech companies out there. Our adjusted EBITDA margin for Q3 came in at 55%. And if you think about our adjusted EBITDA, it's very straightforward. It's the regular things that you would see in add-backs, because I just wanted to mention that as people will be looking at the information. And the benefit of our adjusted EBITDA margin, and it continues to grow over the longer term, we actually want to get to 60% and plus, is that we have the great technology that's been built. And so technology and product is not something that we focus on to continue to grow headcount. So we have been able to maintain a smaller headcount, and that's been very helpful in stabilizing our fixed costs.
And so tech and product and G&A, so people like me, are in the fixed cost area. And then on the variable cost side of the house, as like any other company out there, we are looking at AI. That's been very helpful because we are a marketplace and we are becoming capital light. The loans aren't coming onto Figure's balance sheet. It's actually moving on to the marketplace. Our cost of funding is going down as well. So we have the benefit of variable costs going down and fixed costs staying pretty stable. And that really helps at the end of the day in terms of operating margin. Sorry, I've been talking so much.
No, no, that's great. That's great. And I have a longer question, so you can take a drink of water before I ask it.
Thank you.
I'm going to ask two more questions, and then I'm going to open it up to the audience for their questions. I have a feeling there may be a few. I can see a lot of eye contact, a lot of not multitasking. So clearly, they're very interested in this discussion. So you started in traditional HELOCs, but you're expanding into other loan products. What are the more significant new products that you're looking at? How many of these greenfield loan products that might otherwise have been unsecured consumer loans are first mortgages or something else?
Sure. I talked about the duration of how long it takes for our loans to be funded. The part I missed earlier is that our loans cost about $750 to originate versus if you look at the overall industry, on average, it costs about $11,000-$12,000 to originate, so we are actually opening up a greenfield opportunity to be able to originate smaller balance loans, so banks would not want to deal with a $100,000 loan. Our loan size on average is $100,000, so it makes sense for us to originate smaller balance loans, and it penetrates a larger market, so I think that's an overall benefit that we do bring to the table, and as part of that, because we have HELOCs, which can be second lien or third lien, in particular, we also have first lien HELOCs.
So there is about $36 trillion of home equity in the U.S., and we are tapping into that $36 trillion of home equity by offering first lien HELOCs. And the volume for first lien HELOCs has tripled in dollars year over year. In terms of the overall percentage of our origination volume, we're coming in around 17% for Q3. So we see that as a pretty significant opportunity because I'm sure you know HELOCs, you think about second lien. It's not something you think about as first lien. So that's a product that we think of a lot because it continues to grow. We're also looking at SMB loans.
These are small, medium business loans, and it is still collateralized by a home, a property, but we are seeing a lot of inbound from business owners who want to be able to use our type of mortgage product, HELOCs, and use their home as collateral. The underwriting is pretty much the same. It's just that because these are business owners, we're expanding the spectrum to be able to read the business accounts when we do the underwriting instead of just looking at personal bank account information to read what your average salary is. So we have expanded that product. We're seeing a lot of interest come through from our partners. So we had a lot of partners joining Q3. This is just a recent product that really launched in Q2, and we're seeing the traction in Q3. So very excited about continuing to expand there.
And then if you think about our marketplace and digital tokenized assets, we can also offer crypto-backed loans. So we have cryptocurrency that is on our exchange, and that could also be used to generate loans. And we're seeing that traction come through in Q3 as well. Yeah, yeah. So we're really excited. Lots of products.
Very exciting. Lots of products, and so you are leading the witness here for me, so thank you for making it easy. You had just talked about crypto and crypto products and tokenization, so let's dive deeper into tokenized equities specifically. Very hot topic in the markets right now. Lots of feelings from the corporates here on what that's going to look like for them, so remind us what your strategy is with this development and what differentiates Figure's tokenized equity product with some of the, there's a lot of noise out there from other broker-dealers about tokenized equity, so talk to us about what you're doing that's different.
Sure. So first of all, just for the record, so that everyone here who is an investor or a potential investor, our tokenized equity offering is secondary. So it's non-dilutive to any of the existing investors, and there's going to be no change in price, theoretically, if everything goes well. So we have filed an S-1 with the SEC for our tokenized blockchain equity. The difference is that our equity is actually truly native to the blockchain. So the equity that is being issued in the U.S. is with a DTC. So there is a company you have to go through to be able to make sure the name of the investor changes, and it takes about two or three business days to be able to make that change happen. So if I sell my shares to Brandis, it's not going to immediately say it's Brandis's shares.
It's going to take a few days. If the token equity is native to the blockchain, what happens is if I transfer and sell my shares to you, it'll take nanoseconds to be able to say it's your shares and it's not my shares. And on top of that, because our equity is on the blockchain, we could use stablecoin, and we have our own stablecoin called YLDS that is registered with the SEC and is yielding. And that's why we are very original and called it YLDS. That's the other thing. And then the democratized prime platform that I talked about earlier, you can actually bring your tokenized equity for collateral and be able to borrow and lever to be able to consolidate your debt or do other things that you want to do with your business.
And even further, if you are a large asset manager (stop myself from saying the names), then you can have all of your public equities actually come to the Figure Exchange and trade as a blockchain equity. And what that does for you is that if you're lending out these stocks yourself instead of through an intermediary, you can actually earn the benefits and the interest by doing that yourself instead of giving it to somebody else that you're working with, like a prime broker.
Collateral, collateral, collateral, right?
Yes. And we also have all the licenses to be able to do this. We have a broker-dealer, we have a transfer agent, and we have also an SEC-registered alternative trading system.
Perfect. All right. Any questions from the audience? There we go. If you can hold on one second for the microphone so that way we can capture it on the webcast, please.
Thank you. And maybe if I can, a couple of questions on my side. The first one is, what's the liquidity on your marketplace once the mortgage or the HELOC instrument is there? Is it possible? What's the liquidity on the trading side if people want to buy and sell the same instrument? And the second one, do you see the opportunity to expand outside the U.S.?
Thank you.
So the first question is: is there liquidity on the other side in terms of buyers? The U.S. private credit market is currently $2 trillion. And so we had $2.5 billion of volume in Q3, and it continues to grow. We were 70% year-over-year growth. But there are a lot of buyers on the other side who are interested in our type of paper because our performance of the loans has been quite good. As I mentioned earlier, it's on blockchain technology, so the information can be readily available. You can look at it daily if you wanted to. And so there is certainty of a performance on our loans. On top of that, we also received a securitization AAA rating from S&P and Moody's. And so there are the major rating agencies that are looking at our information and the performance of our loans.
And so there are a ton of investors who actually want to work with us, but it's a marketplace. So we want to make sure that it is balanced and we have the origination volume in matching with the buyers that are out there. So we are selective in continuing to add buyers to our marketplace.
Do you want to touch on expansion outside the U.S.?
Yes, so it's actually been really exciting for me to be here and to meet investors outside of the U.S. because what we are seeing is the next question usually being asked is, can you bring that here? Can you use that blockchain technology and create a marketplace for different types of loans that are in Europe and the U.K.? It's something for us to consider in the future. Immediately, our roadmap is in the U.S. because the TAM is so large and there is a lot for us to tap into. But it is a conversation that we'll continue to have. We do have presence in Ireland. We also have presence in the Cayman Islands, so it's not that we are just in the U.S. We are thinking about our product and our company globally as well.
Great. Thank you. Any other questions?
It's early days, I appreciate. So this may not be valid, but what do you see currently and what do you envisage with default rates on your HELOCs?
Rates on HELOCs? Did you say default rates?
Default rates.
Default rates.
So we are actually the servicer for most of the loans that are originated on our platform. So we do see the information, and it's also on the blockchain, so we can harvest the information and look at it. Our loss rates are coming in less than 1%, so the performance has been quite strong. And we have been around for eight years, so we have been seeing the consistent rates.
Great. Anything else? Okay. So let's wrap. We have two minutes left. Can you just give us an outlook? First of all, touch on anything that I've missed or forgotten to ask you. And after that, do you mind just giving us an outlook on what you're excited about for 2026 outside of what we discussed?
Sure. As a public company, we actually don't give guidance, but as the CFO, I do want to talk about financials a little bit. So our overall medium to long-term goal is to get to a 60% Adjusted EBITDA margin. As we move our products onto a marketplace instead of Figure actually originating the loans ourselves, we also expect to become capital light. And I talked earlier about the fixed and variable cost advantage that we have and the reason why we think that we can go from a 50% plus Adjusted EBITDA margin to 60% plus. And we're really excited to show that execution to our investors. In terms of what's to come in 2026, we are going to be very busy. We need to speak with the SEC on our tokenized equity and make sure that it gets through.
We're talking to a lot of investors because they're interested in how it works using wallets and how the transactions can be done in a very quick manner. We want to continue to expand our partner network. Doing an IPO has been very helpful because it's a brand moment for us.
It really is.
And the partners recognize us a lot better, and they can also trust that because we're a public company, there's some level of corporate governance and transparency that's provided on a regular basis. So the excitement and the synergies are enormous. So we're really, really happy to continue to be working and expanding the network.
Perfect. I love the shout-out to being a publicly traded company. So Macrina, thank you for joining us. I hope that you've had a successful trip in London. We look forward to welcoming you back for many, many more years to come. So thank you.
Thank you, Brandis.
Thanks everyone.