Blend Labs Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 14, 2024

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to Blend's Q4 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Winnie Ling, and I'm Head of Legal for the company. Joining us today are Neema Gamsari, cofounder and Head of Blend, and Amir Jafari, our Head of Finance and Administration. After Neema and Amir deliver their prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions moderated by our Investor Relations Lead, Brian Mikileski. You can find the supplemental slides on our Investor Relations webpage at investor.blend.com.

Operator

During the call, we'll 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. Also, certain statements made during today's conference call regarding Blend and its operations, in particular its guidance for the Q1 of 2024, 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 ks, 10 Qs, and other SEC filings.

Operator

We're not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change, except as required by law. With that said, I'll now turn the call over to Neema.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Winnie, and hello, everyone. Welcome to today's earnings call. The past year was one of focus and execution for Blend and the Q4 proved to be no exception. Let me walk you through some of the highlights first. To start with on the consumer banking side, we signed several major deals in Q4, including Citizens Bank, a top 20 bank by retail customer base.

Speaker 1

And we have a solid slate of deployments that give us a high degree of visibility into our expected revenue growth for 2024. At full rollout of all existing customers, including those signed but not yet deployed, we expect our consumer banking suite to be approximately $50,000,000 in annual revenue run rate. 2023 was an expansion year for us and 2024 has already started strong. Our consumer banking business is well received by existing and net new customers, driving growth with a robust pipeline of 70 opportunities. On the mortgage side, we welcome 2 new top 100 financial institutions by retail customer base to Blend in Q4.

Speaker 1

We maintained our industry leading market share and we continue to see adoption of our value accretive add on products, expanding our economic value per funded loan and giving us even more leverage for revenue growth independent of the macro environment. And on the cost side, we delivered significant efficiencies across our business, allowing us to report ahead of our guidance for non GAAP net operating loss and keeping us on track for our profitability target in 2024. Achieving this momentum despite 2023 being one of the worst years on record for mortgage industry origination volumes increases our confidence in our ability to navigate the year ahead as the market looks to stabilize. And the cherry on top, we also signed 2 multi year 8 figure deals in Q4, which validates the trend that our large stable customer base is continuing to expand their relationship with Blend across multiple products. More customers than ever treat us as a critical software powering their enterprise and we're happy to see this continue into the new year.

Speaker 1

Before I pass it on to Amir who will go into more detail on the financial results and 2024 guidance, let me first dive deeper into the progress across these three focus areas. Starting with our consumer banking business, we're seeing growing interest across our entire product suite. This is starting to play out in a huge way for us. By the end of 2023, we had 7 of the top 30 depository financial institutions by retail customer base signed up for 1 or more of our core consumer banking products excluding our traditional home equity product. And I'm pleased to announce that in Q4, we signed yet another significant consumer banking deal, a multiyear partnership with Citizens Bank, a current mortgage and home equity customer to help them deliver a more consistent, frictionless application experience to their customers for their other consumer products.

Speaker 1

Having one of the nation's oldest and largest financial institutions choose Blend as a key part of their digital lending strategy is a strong validation of our consumer banking capabilities, and we are proud to partner with Citizens to bring more value to their customers. This adds to our already strong revenue base. As I mentioned earlier, at full rollout of our current signed customer base, we expect our consumer banking suite to be at approximately a $50,000,000 annual revenue run rate. Given that about half of this was signed in 2023, we have quite a number of active deployments. While it takes time for these rollouts to be completed, which has implications as to when we recognize revenue, the market is starting to speak to the necessity of modern technology across all banking originations.

Speaker 1

And just like in our mortgage suite, our early success starting with the largest financial institutions matches the playbook we applied in the early days of Blend with our mortgage product. We started there and once we had proven the product could work at scale and for the most demanding institutions in the country, we took it to the rest of the market leading to our almost 20% market share in mortgage today. This is exactly how we're approaching the consumer suite. We're only just getting started and 2024 will be the 1st year we cast a broader net and plan to serve customers of a variety of sizes. And casting that broader net is already working.

Speaker 1

Our pipeline in consumer banking alone is 70 opportunities and we're only 2 months into the year. We're very active in the market and expect 2024 to be another strong year in growth for our consumer banking business. Moving on to mortgage, let's start with the tough news. 8% interest rates in Q4 led to lower mortgage industry volumes than forecasters were expecting. While MBA was projecting 380,000,000,000 in volume in Q4, Inside Mortgage Finance and Fannie Mae data leads us to believe the industry was closer to 300,000,000,000 to 330,000,000,000 in Q4.

Speaker 1

Using an approximate loan size estimate, this translates to somewhere between 825,000 to 875,000 units or approximately 15% to 20% below the forecast from the NBA. We expect Q1 will be roughly similar unit volume to date in the quarter. Despite this, we still achieved our platform guidance range, which we credit to the strength of our customers in this market and the growing unit economics we are seeing even on lower loan volume. We've always said when the industry consolidates, our customers would benefit because they are more efficient compared to the rest of the market and we're seeing that in practice with many of our customers gaining market share and our overall share remaining very strong. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, we signed 2 more of the top 100 financial institutions measured by retail customer base to our mortgage platform, including another top 10 credit union.

Speaker 1

We're seeing customers use this environment to set up a scalable, tech forward foundation for the future. Already this year, we've seen a credit union sign away from a competitor and deploy our solution within 60 days to prepare for the future. Adding to that, we have approximately 30 other opportunities in our mortgage pipeline including one of the largest financial institutions in the country. Our key add ons like blend close are also driving pipeline growth and improved unit economics and I'm encouraged that this trend will only continue in 2024 as some of our largest customers are currently in pilots to enable the defaulting of e closings across their entire loan portfolio. Digital closings have obvious benefits for consumer experience, but shortening the timeline to close a loan has meaningful financial benefits for our customers as well.

Speaker 1

The growth and adoption of digital closings is helping grow our unit economics and setting the industry standard for a modern closing experience. We're also seeing tailwinds on the adoption from state regulators as well with California approving out of state remote notarizations as of January 1st this year. These are encouraging trends that we believe will propel our mortgage suites economic value per funded loan even higher than the record $91 we saw in this quarter. These advancements highlight only some of the innovation we had in 2023. We were early integrators of soft credit verifications and deriving asset based income verification and also kicked off work on a Spanish language flow.

Speaker 1

We also added early funnel features to help drive conversion as well as more features for loan officers to serve their customers better than ever. Layered on top of that was our announcement of Blend Copilot, a generative AI product on our platform designed to turn every loan officer into a super loan officer. In all, our customers expect us to drive innovation in the space and 2023 was no exception. The combination of all these factors increased our confidence in the embedded leverage of our business to a recovery. Not only do we have customers gaining share, we're signing new customers and they're using more of our products.

Speaker 1

There is of course some churn in the tough environment as there's consolidation and some customers have gone to lower cost or free options to manage a low margin environment, but this is more than offset by the other vectors of our growth. Lastly, as we prepare for a recovery, we're investing ahead of it, preparing our customers for scalability in what will likely be a very different market in 2025. In particular, we're building a next generation refinance flow during a historically bad time for refinance volumes. Why? Because the longer this high rate environment lasts, the larger the backlog of customers who will benefit by refinancing when rates ultimately come down.

Speaker 1

To help support this, we want to make sure our customers are set up to do this with their current teams without having to massively scale up resources when rates come down and streamlining timelines for consumers who will desperately need the savings. Achieving this is a monumentally complex task and one that our team and our platform are uniquely positioned to solve. It involves combining existing customer data, all the verified third party data sources we've worked on for over a decade to integrate with, the ability to quote and approve a loan in real time and delivering an accurate actionable loan estimate so the consumer can lock in their improved mortgage rate and savings and prepare for their digital closing. It's the culmination of every aspect of our software suite and is a direct result of our focus on creating simple, proactive and instant consumer experiences. We believe this will mean our customers can capture a greater share of refinances at a lower cost to them and to consumers during a recovery.

Speaker 1

It's a win for everyone and something that our customers can use to come out the other side stronger. Shifting gears, lastly, I'd like to give an update on our final priority, which is to manage our business to non GAAP profitability this year. This was a huge effort for the company in 2023, and I'm proud of the amount of progress we made. We managed to reduce our operating expenses by over $90,000,000 in 2023 and improved our net operating loss in every quarter of this past year. We've taken out a significant amount of cost, but to be clear, we've done it in a way that strengthens us structurally and sets us up for more efficient growth.

Speaker 1

That's where our Blend Builder platform becomes such a critical differentiator for us. Because of its built in functionality and configurability, we believe we'll be able to innovate and scale at an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than before we had Blend Builder deployed. And as the market eventually recovers, we have significantly enhanced our operating leverage for each additional loan or consumer product that funds on our platform. We'll continue to manage our expenses and revenue to ensure we will reach our target of non GAAP operating profitability by the end of 2024 regardless of the macroeconomic environment for this year and without sacrificing our commitment to innovation and supporting our customers. Even if the Q4 of 2024 were to remain at historically low levels of origination from this past quarter, our profitability target for this year would not change.

Speaker 1

We're reassured that the continued growth in consumer banking, the improved economics in mortgage and continuing to drive efficiency give us sufficient insurance to achieve this goal regardless of the macro. Overall, I'm encouraged by Q4 being another period of strong execution. 1, we remained on track with our growth plans for our consumer banking business. 2, we protected the most important parts of our mortgage business and are increasing the value we deliver to customers. And 3, we're staying committed to achieving non GAAP profitability this year.

Speaker 1

Now I'll pass it over to Amir, who will go over our financial results and 2024 outlook. Amir, over to you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Neema, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to be joining you today to discuss our financial results for the Q4. Our Q4 marks another period of strong execution. I'm encouraged by the progress we made in 2023 and more importantly, the momentum we are building across the business. We improved our operating loss in every quarter of 2023.

Speaker 2

We are picking up pace as we move forward, and I'm encouraged by what's ahead for 2024. Before I jump into the results, let me just remind you that unless otherwise stated, all results are non GAAP. Total company revenues in the 4th quarter were $36,100,000 in line with our guidance range. We reported platform revenue of $25,900,000 which also fell within our guidance range. Our mortgage suite revenue declined by 3% year over year to $17,200,000 despite the origination environment declining approximately 20% to 25% over the same period by our own estimates.

Speaker 2

Our mortgage suite economic value per funded loan rose by $10 over the same period last year, reaching $91 This puts us ahead of schedule on the targets we shared with you at our Investor Day, with plenty of runway to expand this further as our value accretive solutions like Blendclose are growing in adoption quickly. Turning to consumer banking. Our consumer banking suite revenue totaled $6,400,000 in Q4, an increase of 15% as compared to the prior year period. This growth reflects new deployments and ramp ups across our builder powered consumer suite of offerings over the past year, as well as contribution from incremental platform fees. As Neema shared with you, these deployments and our already live customers give us direct line of sight to $50,000,000 of revenue run rate once fully ramped, keeping us well on pace to the 35% growth CAGR we shared at Investor Day.

Speaker 2

We also generated $2,300,000 of professional services revenue, up 11% from last year due to fees associated with our ongoing slate of consumer banking and mortgage deployments. We reported title revenue of $10,200,000 near the high end of our guidance range and in line with our expectations amidst the challenging environment. Moving on to gross profit. Total company non GAAP gross profit was 19,900,000 which was 33% above the same period last year despite a 16% decline in total revenue. Our non GAAP Blend Platform segment gross margins showed continued improvement reaching 71% compared with 59% the year prior.

Speaker 2

For software, we reported non GAAP software gross margins of 79%, up from 72% from the same period last year. Our gross margin expansion reflects the benefit of increased high margin consumer banking suite revenues as our consumer banking segment now accounts for 27% of total software revenue compared to 24% from the same period last year. Our margins are also benefiting from the vendor optimizations we've implemented within our mortgage suite. We continue to be optimistic regarding our gross margin performance and affirm our belief that 80% represents an achievable target for our non GAAP software gross margins in 2024. Our non GAAP title margins came in at 15% for the 4th quarter, increasing meaningfully year over year from the Q4 this time last year when we reported negative gross margins for title.

Speaker 2

This improvement reflects the ongoing cost optimization programs we've undertaken and highlights our ability to align the costs to deliver this service with the current economic climate. Non GAAP operating costs for the Q4 totaled $33,000,000 compared with $58,100,000 in the previous year. This improvement reflects the full realization of all cost savings initiatives we started last year and additional programs we've identified to ultimately manage our costs per employee to more competitive market rates. As we move forward, these initiatives are gaining momentum and we continue to identify more areas for efficiency without compromising sustainable growth and investment. Our non GAAP loss from operations was $13,100,000 in Q4, coming in well ahead of the high end of our guidance range and finishing the year having improved this in every quarter of 2023.

Speaker 2

We expect to continue this momentum into 2024 as we track towards our ultimate goal of reporting the Q1 of non GAAP profitability in Q4 this year. While we continue to take efficiency actions that we believe could accelerate this earlier in the year, the timing will remain dependent on the level of origination activity, which is still uncertain. With that, we remain committed to this goal and have identified areas to adapt our operating model to achieve this profitability target should the market environment deteriorate further. We saw strong renewals and new customer signings that incorporated committed fees. This translated into growth in our remaining performance obligations this quarter, which reached $94,900,000 in the 4th quarter.

Speaker 2

We expanded RPO by more than $35,000,000 versus Q3, reflecting 5 new 7 digit contracts and renewals in the quarter. We expect to see continued expansion in our RPO as we land new logos, execute more renewals under our subscription model and as we enter into platform deals with longer and larger commitments. Q4 marked another quarter of improvement in our cash burn, as measured by our free cash flow. We continue to make improvements here, including interest burden following the opportunistic pay down of our term loan. As a reminder, during the quarter, we prepaid $85,000,000 of our term loan balance and amended the maturity date to provide for a 1 year extension to 2027 provided we meet certain conditions.

Speaker 2

With our balance sheet in strong position, we made a decision to reduce our debt load to optimize our capital structure and add optionality around the maturity of this obligation. Our actions to operate with efficiency in combination with our resilient top line and improved margins are having a significant impact as we reflect toward positive cash generation. Now turning to the balance sheet. Our cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities $144,000,000 as of the end of 4th quarter. We are confident we have taken the appropriate measures to ensure our business remains well capitalized and that we have sufficient liquidity based on our current projections and in this macro environment.

Speaker 2

Lastly, let me move on to our outlook for the Q1 of 2024. We expect platform revenue to be between $22,000,000 $24,000,000 in Q1 2024. We expect our title business revenue to be between $10,500,000 $11,500,000 Our total company revenue outlook is expected to be between $32,500,000 $35,500,000 for Q1. Our guidance is based on our internal assessment of customer level growth as well as our own outlook of Q1 origination activity based on the application volume observed to date through our own customer base, which we feel is representative of the broader market. We see Q1 mortgage volume to be consistent or slightly below Q4 2023 for approximately 800,000 to 875,000 total originations.

Speaker 2

Our total non GAAP net operating loss is expected to be between $12,000,000 $14,000,000 for Q1, with the midpoint representing a greater than 50% improvement year over year. We believe we have built the business and operating model to respond swiftly to the market fluctuations and will continue to adapt as the conditions evolve. I want to reiterate that we remain confident in the long term targets we've shared with you at Investor Day and are encouraged by the strong set of opportunities we have in front of us. As we continue to execute, we are building resilience in our model against the short term fluctuations in the market and adding further diversification in our business that will serve as countercyclical offsets in the future. This is paramount to our strategy within our 2nd phase, and we look forward to continuing to update you on the progress here.

Speaker 2

With that, thank you again for joining. Brian, we're now ready for questions.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Neiman Amir for your remarks. With that, we'll begin the Q and A portion of this call. Our first question comes from David Unger with Wells Fargo. David, you can go ahead and unmute and please state your question.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for taking the question. Well, I've covered in the prepared remarks. I appreciate it.

Speaker 4

So definitely want to get a better sense for where Blend stands relative to its 2026 forecast provided from the Investor Day. Obviously, rates have been less favorable since and maybe the base case is closer to the conservative case today based on the updated mortgage volumes. That said, I wonder if the lower volumes impact your market share or revenue per fund loan in a good way. I heard the comments on the big pipeline. So wondering if a challenge macro can keep improving your market share given your strong footprint, any color there would be great.

Speaker 1

Yes. Good question. Thanks, David. Couple of things. 1, we definitely are seeing some of our customers gaining market share in our numbers.

Speaker 1

And taking and that's one piece. And we mentioned that earlier, and that's how we've really maintained and plan to grow market share over time on top of signing new customers. The other thing I would say is they are using this time to get more ready to scale. And that's doing things like digital closings. So you're not sending paper back and forth with title companies.

Speaker 1

And there are a lot of those things not only help them but help us not on the market share side, but help us on the revenue per funded loan side. So those kinds of things are the baseline and then some of the new logos. I also mentioned that we had one of the largest banks in the country as a potential new logo for us that's in the pipeline. And so we're seeing a lot of interest across the board.

Speaker 2

And David just answered the first part of your question with regards to the 2026 numbers. We still feel good about what we've shared at Investor Day across both mortgage in terms of the long term outlook. And to your point, we obviously gave those scenarios intentionally. And then also with regards to consumer banking reiterated just by what we shared in the prepared

Speaker 3

remarks. Our next question comes from Brian Thomassell of KBW. Brian, you can go ahead and unmute.

Speaker 5

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. As we think through the components of the fully loaded revenue per funded loan opportunity in mortgage, are there certain areas you think are more actionable near term? For example, the income verification product seems pretty interesting relative to the incumbent solutions out there. Just trying to think about what are some of the lower hanging fruit opportunities there to grow revenue per loan and just how you're thinking about the income verification opportunity in particular?

Speaker 1

Well, just just to call out, we do have a really good near term pipeline of the blended income product. And that's a nice product because it's very simple to turn on. It's a flip of a switch and it pulls in new revenue for us in within a quarter of them signing that deal typically. But I think where we see the most near term upside, Ryan, is on digital closing side and in particular, eNotes and remote online notarizations. It's becoming very important for our customers and we're seeing improvements around even states expanding their coverage of what they allow.

Speaker 1

California had a big change earlier this year. And, and our customers are taking note because it drives real savings for them. I kind of said this in the prepared remarks, but one of our biggest customers is doing a standard rollout around every single loan going towards remote online notary by default. And of course, there are exceptions, and the consumer can opt out if they really don't want to do that. But those are really good for the consumer.

Speaker 1

It's really good for the bank or lender and of course, really good for Blend as well.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks for that color, Nima. And then just as a follow-up on the remaining performance obligations, clearly strong growth in the RPO metric, dollars 36,000,000 sequentially. Just as the market maybe starts to focus more on that disclosure going forward, can you just help us understand what is included in that metric given the different contract structures you have? For example, how the success based pricing on the mortgage side is factored in there versus platform fees just as we think about the visibility we can get into your growth profile out of that metric going forward?

Speaker 2

What you're seeing in it, Ryan, is exactly some of what you described with regards to it is indicative of the customers that we're signing up, whether it's renewals and that new logos. It illustrates both what we're seeing from a commitment perspective given our unit economic structure and our revenue model, also platform fees to the point you mentioned. And we've shared this historically. We obviously saw an incredible quarter this last quarter in terms of what we've shared. We expect this to continue to grow as you see just us continue to execute.

Speaker 3

Our next question comes from Joseph Vafi from Canaccord. Joe, you can please go ahead and unmute.

Speaker 6

Can you guys hear me?

Speaker 1

We can. Go ahead, Joe.

Speaker 6

All right. Sorry about that. So we focus on the consumer banking sector a bit here for a second and kind of talk about what are some of the dynamics going on here with some of the strong recent signings. Obviously, there is a continued kind of war for deposits going on out there amongst financial institutions as consumers look for the best interest rate and banks look not to have their customers turn those deposits. Wondering if you could balance that versus product offering versus the competitive landscape there, provide us a little more color on how you're winning some of these new clients?

Speaker 1

Yes, good question. And I think the hardest parts of opening a new deposit account, I'll break into 3 different components. The first part is you have to be really good at fraud verification. And we have connection to so many different fraud providers through some of our partners. We're not a fraud engine ourselves.

Speaker 1

We connect to some of the best ones in the market, and we do quite a bit of orchestration around that. So that's one piece. The second piece is actually funding and making that your primary deposit account. That's something very, very important to our customers, and something that we help with. We have the ability to fund in so many different ways now.

Speaker 1

Debit cards, ACH, direct bank connection, wire transfer. Those things are all built into the Blend platform now, so to help maximize deposits. 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 relationship where we can do things like cross sell that deposit relationship as part of a 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.

Speaker 1

And that's something that's pretty unique to Blanton. I mean, we're the we're the only platform that that solves for mortgage and deposit accounts, which are our 2 primary product offerings we're most focused on this year. But all the other products that they might have as well in credit cards and personal loans, auto loans, etcetera. 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 aren't even on Blend yet at all.

Speaker 3

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

Speaker 4

Hey, guys. Appreciate the questions here. Maybe 2. Neema, 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. Just a broader sense of kind of how you're thinking about 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?

Speaker 1

Yes. I'd say we're thanks for the question, Dylan. And I'd say where we're ahead of schedule is and you see this in the revenue per funded loan ahead of our 2026 targets that we shared at Investor Day is 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 add on, are just getting really wide adoption from our customers.

Speaker 1

And actually, I would say it's been very helpful to us that the market has stabilized in terms of volumes that haven't been going up a ton or down a ton. Now we were hoping they were coming back up slowly earlier and they haven't, but eventually interest rates will go down and that'll happen. But just the stability has allowed our customers to invest forward a little bit because they have visibility into the revenue and they have visibility in what their budget's going to look like. They're not worried about that changing. And so 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 the pro in the prepared remarks.

Speaker 1

And I think it's 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 play so they can get their prosthesis in order, get the right technology, which hopefully, obviously is what I described in the call, and also the right people in place. They don't have to massively scale up their operations to support that.

Speaker 4

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.

Speaker 4

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, maybe again, kind of validation, go to market capacity, things of the like. It seems like that could be something that's pretty interesting, but how are you guys thinking about the partner angle and leveraging Builder going forward as well? Thanks. Yes.

Speaker 1

I mean, 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 limited capacity of not just building products, but the product marketing, the marketing, the sales and the 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, the 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. And it can be used not just within banking, but I think in other industries as well.

Speaker 1

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 deployments, some of the big ones that we've signed in the last year to start to build out that muscle with them. And I think it'll take some time, but I do agree that it'll open up a lot of doors for us.

Speaker 4

Great. Thanks, Neema.

Speaker 3

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

Speaker 7

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I just have 2. First, on the consumer banking suite opportunity, you called out the potential to hit a $50,000,000 annual revenue run rate. I was just wondering if you could talk about the visibility in reaching that.

Speaker 7

Could we reach that annual revenue run rate at some point during 2024? And then I just have a quick follow-up.

Speaker 1

Yeah. So it's a good question. And the way that we sort of calculate this is these are existing signed customers for rollouts that are already planned with them. In terms of being of when that happens, some of these things for what it's worth, Michael, are, we'll sign a customer for 2 product lines. And if it's a big one, maybe they roll out the first product line in 2024 and the second big product line in 2025.

Speaker 1

And so I don't think it'll all happen in 2024, but these are sort of preplanned things that we've already started working on with our customers in a lot of cases to space out. And so, and I just also wanna call out, I should have mentioned this in our prepared remarks, about half of that was signed last year. And so, you know, we're feeling really good about the growth in that business. Again, it's going to take time for that revenue to come to be because of the way that we recognize revenue. But that business is really healthy and we're seeing a lot of interest.

Speaker 1

And I don't want to give away too much on Q1, but pipeline has been healthy and our customer list is growing. So something we're excited about. Wonderful. Thank you. And

Speaker 7

just on OpEx, obviously, you guys have done a good job with OpEx coming in better than expected this quarter. And it seems like you're already on track to hit that $130,000,000 OpEx number for 2024 that you gave at Investor Day. Are there opportunities to, you know, reduce OpEx further and and exceed that 2024 target and, you know, what factors might result in profitability coming sooner than the Q4 if it does? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Mike. I would say starting with the latter as we think about it. Obviously, the macro has a component to that with regards to when could we potentially hit profitability faster. The piece that we're focused on is really what we can control, and it's indicative of just what you've seen on the top line, but also to your point where you're seeing with regards to our operating expenses. We have stated this and I think we will continue to reiterate.

Speaker 2

We're looking at everything that we do just through the lens of operational excellence. We're checking and revamping a lot of our processes to ensure that there's velocity, that there's efficiency. It's these types of things in addition to kind of what builders exposed, which is our ability for us to do things more efficiently, ironically as well. It's these things that are allowing us to kind of get to the point that you're making, which is we are performing quite well with regards to our expectations as it pertains to OpEx.

Speaker 7

Great. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Our next question is a follow-up from Ryan Thomassell from KBW. Ryan, you can go ahead

Speaker 5

and unmute. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Yes, just on mortgage, Neema, I think you called out continued headwinds from churn. Can you quantify where the churn rates have been in recent quarters, whether on like a percentage basis or revenue basis?

Speaker 5

And also when you think that might bottom out? And then also on the competitive side, have win rates in the mortgage business changed at all over the last year? Just any general trends in terms of competition.

Speaker 1

We don't have this we don't share the broader sort of churn numbers. But what I'll say is that we've actually in aggregate, we've kept our market share pretty steady based on our calculations throughout the year. And so while there is some times churn, I think the market share being steady and the revenue per funded loan going up, the combination of those two things is just setting us up for the future. And some of the customers that churned, who churned to lower cost and free solutions, some of them are already starting to plan and come back to us. And those kinds of things become indicative of where the market needs to be in the future, which is being able to scale.

Speaker 1

As far as the competitive environment, I would say in the top 50 to a 100, it's pretty similar to what we've always seen. I mean, we're, especially with banks and credit unions, that's our sweet spot. That's where I think we do the best, the biggest banks and credit unions. We also have some of the biggest IMBs. And when we're brought into a process and we are competing head to head, I haven't seen any notable changes in our win rates in that work.

Speaker 1

So if anything, like I said earlier on the prior question, as the market has stabilized and people are starting to look towards the future again, it's really benefited us.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks for that color. And then another follow-up for Amir. The share count guidance looks like it implies incremental growth of around 2,000,000 shares in 1Q. Is that a reasonable run rate for share count growth going forward?

Speaker 5

And then just broadly, if you can discuss your approach to managing dilution from stock comp, if that's a focus as you think about managing the business to profitability inclusive

Speaker 2

We continue to leverage obviously equity because of for the way we want to, in essence, incentivize top talent. But we do it just within the confines of being very focused with regards to our overall dilution levels. You could see it with regards to the Q4 performance. I think again as you think about this on a perspective basis, the best way for me to describe it is just know that it's an area that we spend a lot of time, we focus on it, and while we will continue to ensure that our employee population and base is incentivized given that just we build this on their backs. We will continue to focus on dilution.

Speaker 2

You'll see those numbers kind of be a priority for us, Ryan.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the follow ups.

Speaker 3

All right. Seeing no further questions, this concludes today's earnings call. Thank you all for joining. Have a great day.

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Earnings Conference Call
Blend Labs Q4 2023
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