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

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. To help support this, we want to make sure our customers are set up to do this with our current teams without having to massively scale up resources when rates come down and streamlining time lines for consumers who will desperately need to save it. Achieving this name monumentally complex task and one that our team and our platform are uniquely positioned to solve, 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 to the consumer can lock in their improved mortgage rate and savings and prepare for their digital closing.

It’s a culmination of every aspect of our software suite and as 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 the recovery. 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 million in 2023 and improved our net operating loss in every quarter of this past year.

We’ve taken out a significant amount of costs, but to be clear we’ve done it in a way that strengthens structurally and sets us up for much more efficient growth. That’s where our blend builder platform become 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 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 the fourth quarter of 2024 were to remain at historically low levels of origination from this past quarter our profitability target for this year would not change. For 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. One we remained on track with our growth plans for our Consumer Banking business. Two, we’ve protected the most important parts of our mortgage business and are increasing the value we deliver to customers. And three, we’re staying committed to achieving non-GAAP profitability this year. Now I’ll pass it over to Amir who will go over our financial results and 2024 outlook.

Amir, over to you.

Amir Jafari: Thank you, Nima and good afternoon, everyone. I’m pleased to be joining you today to discuss our financial results for the fourth quarter. Our fourth quarter 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. We are picking up pace as we move forward. 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 or non-GAAP. Total company revenues in the fourth quarter were $36.1 million in line with our guidance range. We reported platform revenue of $25.9 million which also fell within our guidance range.

Our mortgage Suite revenue declined by 3% year-over-year to $17.2 million despite the origination environment declining approximately 20% to 25% over the same period by our own estimates. 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 Glen closed are growing in adoption quickly. Turning to Consumer Banking our consumer banking suite revenue totaled $6.4 million 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 Nima shared with you these deployments and are already live customers give us a direct line of sight to $50 million of revenue run rate once fully ramped keeping us well on pace to the 35% growth CAGR we shared at Investor Day. We also generated $2.3 million 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 $10.2 million near the high end of our guidance range and in line with our expectations amidst a challenging environment. Moving on to gross profit, total company non-GAAP gross profit was $19.9 million, 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.

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 fee 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 fourth quarter increasing meaningfully year over year from the fourth quarter.