Bitcoin Just Showed Us The Future Of Mortgages | Michael Tannenbaum

Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure and a former executive at SoFi and Brex. In this conversation, we break down housing affordability after the midterm blue wave, how Figure cut the cost of a mortgage from $12,000 to $1,000, and why the business is growing at a “Rule of 150” pace. We also discuss tokenization, crypto-backed bitcoin loans, AI, and the future of lending on chain. ======================= Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ======================= Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ======================= This episode is brought to you by Investor Health — clinician-prescribed protocols for weight, metabolism, energy, and longevity, delivered to your door in 48–72 hours. No office visits, no referrals. Plans start at $149/mo. Learn more at http://www. InvestorHealth.com/pomp. Investor Health is a telehealth platform, not a medical provider. Compounded medications are not FDA-approved. Individual results may vary and treatment requires evaluation by a licensed provider. ======================= 0:00 - Intro0:54 - Housing affordability & the midterm blue wave3:34 - How Figure makes mortgages faster & cheaper7:21 - Rule of 150 & how the marketplace makes money13:32 - Expanding beyond HELOCs into auto & small business15:30 - Tokenization: plumbing vs the consumer pitch18:27 - How Figure uses data & AI25:52 - Growth outlook & regulatory risk30:05 - Crypto-backed loans with bitcoin & ethereum31:45 - What keeps him up at night33:49 - Figure’s future & message to investors

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:27Speaker 02

  We've never lost money in that product because of how quickly Bitcoin in particular or Ethereum, you can liquidate the loan. And that is a really, that's kind of the power of lending on chain. And that's ultimately that same power we're trying to bring to other asset classes. And so if you kind of extrapolate, well, no one loses money. It's really hard to lose money in a Bitcoin loan because the market's so liquid. Imagine if mortgage could be similar, right?

• 1:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on, guys? Today we have a great conversation with Michael Tannenbaum. He's the CEO of Figure. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on in lending market, how mortgages are evolving, especially with the recent blue wave in the midterm elections. And then we get into what's going on in the tokenization world, how they are one of the leading consumer fintechs when it comes to debt on chain and where exactly this business is going, how the rule of 150 applies and what investors are getting right and wrong about the business. Here's my conversation with Michael Tannenbaum. All right, Michael, obviously the midterm elections was a massive mandate across the country. There was a blue wave, pretty much a sweep across the board. States like Texas completely flipped blue, just huge, huge change to the way that Americans are feeling and they heard their voices, you know, at the ballot box.

• 2:37Anthony Pompliano?

  A big part of why this happened, if you listen to all of the commentary online, is it is very unaffordable in America right now for the average person. And a big piece of affordability is can I buy a home? Can I afford to actually own a home? You guys are the largest HELOC originator in the entire country. You guys are very tuned in to what's going on with interest rates, what's going on with people buying homes, getting equity value out of their homes. Can you maybe just give me your view as to what's going on with affordability and specifically with homeownership in America?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. And just to clarify, Figure is a marketplace of partners that collectively originate the most home equity lines of credit in the country. But us, we are ourselves the rails that that happens on. And but to your point around affordability, you've seen a huge increase in home prices, and that's obviously benefited homeowners. You've also at the same time seen interest rates come up, which has locked people out of the market and actually kept people in their homes, right? Because people who have these low rate mortgages don't want to leave those low rate mortgages because they're now in the money. And that has set up a very, I guess fruitful environment for home equity.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  People have a lot of home equity and they don't want to refinance their mortgage. So what they're doing is taking money out of their house and using that, for example, to consolidate debt. So that gets into affordability because as we know, as rates rise across the board, there's just this overall sense that prices are up, rates are up, costs are up. It's increasingly hard to buy a home. And so people are looking at ways to save time, to save money. Figure is a big solution there. That's true for consumers and it's also true for our partners, which are the fintech companies, the lenders, the banks that are struggling with a very expensive origination process. For anyone in the audience who's gotten a mortgage, they know how painful that is, how much paperwork, how much back and forth.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  So all that ties into affordability as well, because that process and the costs that come with that process also add to these costs. And Figure has stripped out so many of these. You know, a mortgage done through our process is about $1,000. Industry average is 12,000. That's kind of 3X over the past couple of years. So this affordability, these costs are out of control and Figure is cutting through all that with a very streamlined approach to home equity and mortgage more broadly.

• 5:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's like the price of the home, then there is the like cost of the money to help buy the home.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And then there are like the transaction fees. And you see a lot of movement here, right? You see the realtor, kind of the legal ruling that, hey, maybe the 6% isn't going to end up being the standard and now people can kind of negotiate. What you're talking about is specifically the transaction fees around getting the mortgage, getting the title insurance. And when it comes to some of that stuff, it seems like maybe there's two inputs. If I'm understanding correctly, there is the speed at which you can do this, and then there is the cost. And these are related, but they are technically separate things. Can you describe maybe, you know, like what are the concrete things that you guys are doing to speed this up? And then how does that have an impact on the cost side?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the average on the speed side, the average mortgage process is around 45 days. Our actual average time is nine, and that includes a government mandated three day waiting period. So it is a very fast process. And the reason why we're able to do on the speed side, the primary reason is that we use an embedded technology in capital markets. So normally when you're originating a mortgage, right? You have to figure out, well, who's going to buy that mortgage? It's a 30 year asset. It's often somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million. So it's hard to quote, find a home for that, right? And a lot of the companies that do mortgage aren't banks and even banks themselves don't

• 6:25Speaker 02

  want to own an asset with interest rate risk for 30 years. So what normally happens is a, there's a lot of back and forth trying to figure out where that loan goes and a lot of kind of crappy software in the middle. Figure is an integrated software and an integrated capital market. They go hand in hand. So everyone using our software, every customer and every loan partner that we have knows exactly where the loan goes. It goes on Figure's marketplace. And as a result, there's not nearly the back and forth that you would have. I think a great example of that is we don't have traditional human underwriters as part of the process, looking at the loan and the situation and making a judgment.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  It's an all model based approach, looking at the customer's bank account and the cash flows associated with that bank account. We don't have a traditional appraiser process where you may, you know, your audience may be familiar with when you buy a home, often a person will go out to the house, check it out and come up with their assessment of value. Again, we use models for that process. So we strip out a lot of the third parties in a one kind of integrated software that comes hand in hand with that capital market. And the result is that nine day average as fast as five versus the 45. So it's much, much faster by removing third parties. On the cost side, similar because so much of the cost is that back and forth. But that's actually where blockchain starts to come in.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  And our capital marketplace, which as I mentioned, comes hand in hand with that software, it is on blockchain rails. So there's two primary things that we've done there. One is we've taken the attributes of the loans, right? The credit score, the income, all that. We've put them on blockchain and we've reduced the amount of time that an investor buying a loan will have to go back and check that data because they know it's verifiable on chain. We've cut 80% of the cost of third party diligence review doing that. And the other thing's fraud. You know that fraud is such a big deal in financial services. We use the blockchain to track the loan over its life and ensure that someone can't double pledge it or double sell, double sell it.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And if you go back to 2008, when there were all these liar loans, this is a great use of blockchain to get around that. So it's a lot about software and speed on the front end and kind of blockchain on the back end to increase the speed and to lower the cost.

• 8:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you think about kind of the scale at which you're doing this, you guys have grown incredibly quickly. One of the things that I see a lot of people talking about online and, you know, I invested in the business in the private market. We have held shares in the public market. The rule of 40

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Is a way that most people will analyze a kind of enterprise software type business.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And the idea is how fast are you growing revenue and how fast are you growing EBITDA? You add those numbers together. If you're over 40, that's excellent. If you're going more than 20%, 20%, that'd be great.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys, rule of 150, I think, in the last quarter, where you guys are actually growing both revenue and EBITDA at such an incredible rate. Where is that growth coming from? Like, why is it growing so quickly?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we've broken the trade off between margin and growth, to your point, right? Normally, it's like, I'm investing for growth, so my margins are lower. I think with Figure, that really gets to that marketplace strategy that we have. So, you know, we have a bunch of partners that are leveraging our technology to originate assets, and they're doing the marketing, right? They're doing the sales. So it's almost in some way like franchising, right? Where you have a franchise that uses your brand, and you're not spending all of those costs, and you're just getting the higher margin piece of that business. It's kind of similar with Figure in that we've got 500 different partners, all spending marketing dollars, all hiring sales forces to use our product.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And as a result, we provide the capital market, the software, for them to create these mortgages, but we're not out spending money to get the customers ourselves. We're not, we're not out using our own balance sheet to lend to the end customer. And as a result, it's a higher margin business, and it's, and we're able to make a bunch of different bets on different customers. So just as an example, we have Lowe's Home Improvement, right? They're out there using the home equity product in stores, you know, in home improvement stores across the country. At the same time, we have regional banks that have historically had not as strong technology in this space, using the deep investments they've made in their branches and in their brand.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And we're just, you know, sort of piggybacking off all that. And you, and we've got 500 different individual bets that are all growing. And at the same time, we're, we're just not putting out as much capital or marketing dollars. And so I think you're seeing that in the margins, and that's also fueling the growth.

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• 12:32Speaker 02

  There's probably three main reasons. One is the, the home equity environment that we're in. Two is the technology that we talked about, and three is the fact that we're helping people go after what is generally a greenfield market. So on the first, if you just look at the home equity environment, we talked about that, but there's about 35 trillion of home equity outstanding. And in the rate environment that we're in, home equity is red hot, right? People are looking to take money out of their homes. The second is the technology. We are far and away the market leader from a technology standpoint. We do almost 2 billion of this a month. We've done 30 billion to date. We're triple A in the capital markets, S and P, and Moody's. So we're, we have this great platform that, that is attracting people.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And then I think, lastly, what you're seeing from the partners is they're looking to grow their business in this environment. It is a tougher environment for consumers, as we talked about with affordability. It's a tougher environment for rates, and we're offering a greenfield product, a way to monetize customers, and essentially go after a customer base that would have previously been not profitable. And just to kind of put it in perspective, our average loan amount is around $100,000. With a $12,000 cost to originate a mortgage, it's 12%, right? Simple math, that's not tenable. Whereas with Figure, we can turn a customer, which would be maybe smaller balance, again, back to the affordability point, potentially ignored previously,

• 14:02Speaker 02

  now is profitable because we've taken so much cost out of the system. So a previously $12,000 cost originate now is one, and that unlocks a whole segment of customers that are now profitable for our partners.

• 14:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So how do you guys make money, right? If the cost comes down so significantly?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  So we take, basically, you could think about our business as the loans that are originated have somewhere between 5 and 8% value, right? Between the fees that are charged and the interest rates that are earned by the investors. And we take a portion of that out when our customers sell the loans. So it's sort of a marketplace fee earned at the time the loan is sold. That's the main way. But we're also the servicer on a lot of the loans, which means on behalf of the investors, we collect payments and manage compliance disclosures, et cetera, and we get paid to do that. So we earn an upfront fee at the time the loan is sold, and then a fee over the life of the loan.

• 15:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, we've been talking a lot about HELOC and mortgages and stuff like that. You guys are really in the lending business, right? It's not just HELOCs. You guys are starting to do a lot of other things as well. Can you talk about maybe the expansion of the business and how you think taking this idea of like, how do you compress fees, how to use technology to really attack this, and how it applies in these other areas?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the mortgage is obviously a major asset class. It's the largest consumer asset class, but the opportunity in the capital markets with blockchain, the opportunity to standardize and drive efficiency is not just a mortgage opportunity. It's not just a home equity opportunity. So you've seen us do a few things to expand beyond there. One is we bought a company that actually focuses a lot on investor mortgages. So people that buy homes, fix them up and sell them, or fix them up and rent them out. That, I think about 25% of the US housing stock is actually owned by an investor. So that's a really big opportunity. We bought the market leader in that space, and we're taking their technology, which was market leading, bringing it on chain,

• 16:02Speaker 02

  and making it part of our, our, our capital market. But you've also seen us do things in the auto space, right? We partnered with an auto lender to bring their capital market activity onto blockchain, onto our platform, and standardize that as well. And you're also seeing us do that in small business lending, which is another great opportunity. I mean, it's equally, talk about affordability, you have, you know, very high small, you know, ask anyone who's tried to get a small business loan, rates are really high. Your alternative would be the small business administration, which is capped annually in terms of the amount of money that they give out, and also is known to be a little bit slow, right?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And so we are breaking through that area as well by branching out into these other asset classes. Ultimately, our mission is to bring the entire capital markets onto chain, and we're doing that in all these different lending asset classes.

• 16:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at these other areas, tokenization is really kind of the underlying thing. When I go on your website, though, I don't really see, like, the consumer websites don't talk about tokenization in any material way. Can you talk a little bit as to like, the plumbing versus like, the consumer pitch?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  I think one of the reasons Figure has been successful is we put things like tokenization and blockchain in the back and let that be about the infrastructure and the piping, to your point. If you go back to 2010, right, and, and look at the cloud era, people weren't celebrating, excuse me, people weren't celebrating the fact that software was in the cloud. They were focused on what they could get from the cloud. Whereas I think with crypto and blockchain, there have been people who do blockchain for blockchain's sake, which is fine, but that's not what Figure does. We use blockchain to add real value in the capital markets, ultimately, to your, you know, to your opening point around affordability and, and cutting costs.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  And so for us, we don't focus on blockchain because ultimately, people who are in homes and who are looking to save money and save time are not saying, I want to tokenize, you know, my, my mortgage. But they're seeing the value of that tokenization, the capital market sees the value of that tokenization, the real-time data. We use stablecoins to settle loans, which, which again, saves time and money. So there's a lot of benefits to it, but that's more for an institutional audience. So if you go to our website, we're not necessarily preaching, at least on the hero page, the, the virtues of blockchain, but we are very much building that infrastructure, which is powering the future of the capital markets.

• 18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Where else can you expand to?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Well, the consumer credit space that we're in is a very large space. I think within mortgage, it's about a $2 trillion annual market and we are doing about $2 billion a month, as I mentioned. So there is a huge amount of white space for us to go after there and a huge amount of, I think we have about 500 partners. So we're very early innings in growing that marketplace out. That said, we've been at this for about eight years. I think the results are really impressive in eight years, but we, you know, we're 500 partners in after eight years. So we recognize that to expand into all these other asset classes, like we've been talking about, into auto,

• 19:18Speaker 02

  into personal loan and consumer loan, into small business. If we're going to do that, we're not going to be able to convince every customer to use our software. We're going to have to take closed loans and bring them into our marketplace and standardize that way. And that's actually where AI has come in. So we built a pretty interesting loan adapter, which takes closed loans and ultimately adapts them to our marketplace. We took what used to be, take months to do, happens now in weeks because we've been able to standardize those assets and bring them into our ecosystem.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about doing this, it does feel like you can own a relationship with a consumer. So you start to say, hey, we were able to get you a HELOC. Now we're able to help you with, you know, XYZ loan, then this one, then that one, and let's grow with you throughout your life. Is that kind of the plan is to have like this direct relationship that you can own?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  It's less the plan because so much of what we do is B2B to C, infrastructure, private label or white labeled with our partners' brands. So we're, what we're, we're not building a direct relationship with the customer pretty much explicitly. Similar to, you know, other marketplaces, our focus is on serving the marketplace participants, which in our case are the, the partners, so the banks, the credit unions, the mortgage companies, the fintechs, as well as the loan investors. But what we are doing that is similar is we're getting a ton of value out of that data, right? Because, and we're helping our customers in particular, use that data, especially with AI, to make intelligent offers, to your point,

• 20:58Speaker 02

  on customers, to use the power of marketing in today's era where user generated content is so valuable and we're showing the way. So sometimes I use the analogy of Google Pixel and Android, right? Google owns Android and Samsung and all these other, all these other phones build on it, but they also have their own first party. We are like, they have the Google Pixel, right? Their own first party phone. Similarly, we do market directly to customers so we can hone in on the best marketing strategies, the best uses, the best use cases for AI, and bring those to our partners and show them how a figure can be at its best. Great example

• 21:41Speaker 02

  of that is a loan officer assistant that we actually just built with, it's so it's, it's essentially a bot that we built with Sierra, which is Brett Taylor. You know, he's on the, chairman of the board of OpenAI. And we built this very impressive loan officer assistant. We trained it on our own data and now we're rolling it out to all of our customers. And what it does is essentially increases conversion by about 20%. So it's a huge deal. And we were able to train that on our own data and then now partners trust it and we're able to now roll it out to all the 500 partners that we have. And that's going to be a huge lever of growth in the coming months.

• 22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  We've talked a lot about tokenization. AI seems like a no brainer for you guys to be using. How are you using that internally?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Three main ways for us. There is how are we building software, which, you know, we generally use Cursor, but we use a lot of, a lot of different models actually, which is interesting because actually Grok is a big part of what we do. And so we're definitely using AI internally. I think about 20, 25% of our code at this point is written with AI. And I would call that, you know, standard for a tech company. We're also using it in the manufacturing process of the loans. So I think a great example is when you're creating a mortgage, you have to make sure that the loan deed match, right? That the,

• 23:06Speaker 02

  the way the property is described by the county is essentially the same in your mortgage note, right? In the instrument that you're, you're creating. And that process used to be a stare and compare painful process. We've used AI to completely automate that. And that, those are products that we're building in-house. And then on the customer facing side, we're, I think we're implementing AI in really innovative ways, but we are partnering, I mentioned the partnership with Sierra. We use a product called Decagon, which is pretty popular on the customer service side. So that's where we're leveraging, I think, best-in-class vendors, but at the same time, using very thoughtful implementations to lower costs

• 23:48Speaker 02

  and improve the customer support model. I mean, that, that's a big part of why we have been able to take costs down so much on behalf of our partners. And we're at that $1,000 versus the 12. And if you look at who we partner with, they're looking to figure to help them make those AI and technology decisions. A bank today is not necessarily going to be building its own mortgage chatbot the way that we've done. They're looking to figure to provide that same innovation we brought with tokenization, also with AI, and help carry them through this next technology wave.

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• 27:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think the last quarter numbers, you guys were doing about $200 million or so in top line revenue. So let's call it annualized 800 million or so. As I mentioned, very fast growth, you have that rule of 150. What guidance have you guys given, you know, going forward?

• 27:33Speaker 02

  We generally give volume guidance and I think volume is the metric that we focus on most because it's ultimately the best expression of how our products are rolling out throughout the market. So we tend to give volume guidance and we've given medium term margin guidance to around 60%. So for us, we really focused on maintaining a very capital light marketplace model that grows quickly, expands into new asset classes. And as I mentioned, we did a pretty big acquisition of a company called Kyavi, the market leader in investor mortgage. And that's going to really supercharge our growth in the coming months because what Kyavi

• 28:15Speaker 02

  did was, and it's kind of gets you, gets into a little bit about the way that marketplaces are built. Kyavi was not a marketplace. They were kind of a standard fintech company in that they went direct to customers, like almost like all of our 500 partners. But what we're doing is saying, okay, since we bought them at one time, we can do a one time conversion where we take their market, market leading technology and open that up to all of our partners who have wanted this, right? They're the market leader. They have about 10% market share, but we, we've already shown this with our own HELOC product. When we open it up to partners, we can grow much faster, right? Figure started direct to consumer as well, and then opened up to our partners and we're going to do the same with Kyavi

• 28:58Speaker 02

  and supercharge that growth. And that's a big part of the future for where we see growth coming for in 27.

• 29:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you look at 27, is there any sort of headwinds that you guys worry about? Crypto policy? And we started off the conversation talking about, you know, the blue wave, right? They aren't so excited about AI. They aren't so excited about crypto in some cases. There's, you know, this is generalizations, but I do think that people are like, hey, healthcare stocks should do really well, right? Are the AI and crypto guys going to be okay? The truth is always kind of like somewhere in between and the extremes are usually not true. But how do you think about operating a business in really like less of one environment versus another? Or just like, it's an evolving environment? If you look over the last four or five years, different types of politicians, different policy regimes, different type of regulatory regimes, like it is changing.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  No, for sure. I mean, I've been in fintech since I joined SoFi in 2014. And that was coming out of what was a very big mortgage crisis. That was the beginning of the student loan, kind of the wave of student loan crisis. And obviously SoFi was doing a lot of student loan refinancing. So I've seen a variety of regimes come in and out. And absolutely, you know, it can, it feels like ping pong in some ways, right? You go from people that are totally risk on and pro deregulation to some of the tightest regulation. And I think the lesson that I've gotten from all that is you need to be prepared to run a business that survives and thrives in any regulatory environment. And Figure has been, not only

• 30:28Speaker 02

  to your point about our website, right? We, we lean into the benefits of blockchain, not necessarily blockchain for blockchain's sake. We're not crypto in that way. We're much more focused on using blockchain to power the future of the capital markets. And also from a fintech perspective, we have invested a lot in regulatory infrastructure. We're licensed in all 50 states. We have money transmission license. We have crypto licenses, both domestically and internationally. So we've got a broker dealer. So we've really invested in that regulatory infrastructure. Our stablecoin, which is called yields and is a little bit like a tokenized money market fund, was actually approved under the Biden

• 31:10Speaker 02

  administration. So we've definitely been a company that's focused on thriving regardless of the regulatory environment in many ways, because of the point you're raising, which is this ping pong nature can really derail you if you, if you try to focus on capitalizing on any one particular opportunity versus building a business for the long run. And that's very much what I've been focused on, both at SoFi, in between at Brex, which was in the card space and very regulated, and now at Figure.

• 31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about the, the CBL stuff that you guys are doing. Maybe just describe like, what is the product? How does it work? And then why are people so excited about it?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for the crypto back loan, that's, you know, it's a phenomenal product, right? I think we've never lost money in, in that product because of how quickly Bitcoin in particular or Ethereum, you know, you can liquidate the loan. And that, that is a really, that's kind of the power of lending on chain. And that's ultimately that same power we're trying to bring to other asset classes. And so if you kind of extrapolate, well, no one loses money. It's really hard to lose money in a Bitcoin loan because the market's so liquid. Imagine if mortgage could be similar, right? Where of course there's an underlying consumer that may not pay, but if you can, again, go after that collateral and try to

• 32:23Speaker 02

  make it more liquid, you as a lender can be repaid if there's enough cushion there, right? Obviously, it's never going to be, you can't compare real world assets and crypto, but I think you see, see where I'm going. And so for Figure, that we're very much focused on the future of the capital markets on chain. Crypto back loans is a part of that. And we've seen that product be, you know, we've started to build out the capital markets infrastructure for that product, warehouse lines, and really institutionalize it, which we think as Bitcoin, Ethereum, other crypto assets are more and more a part of the portfolios of the next generation of investors, lending against that will also be really important.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  So we're very much setting ourselves up for the future and focused on that future of the capital markets on chain, whether it's real world assets or crypto assets.

• 33:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you worried about? Like what keeps you up at night in terms of the business?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  The, I think for us, the concerns that I'm always worried about the capital markets in particular, you know, we're a company that focuses on the future of the capital markets and they can be really volatile. There's been times in my professional career where the capital markets shut down for periods of time. And we focus a lot on how to make sure Figure is a sustainable business. A huge part of the value proposition that we bring to those 500 origination partners is that we're providing liquidity for an asset class that previously didn't, right? If you think about Fannie Mae, I think is, is a great analogy. And in many ways, what we're offering to our partners is similar to Fannie

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Mae in that they're getting liquidity and standardized capital markets for an asset. And that's so valuable. And it's most valuable when markets aren't as strong, right? When markets are really hot, everybody feels like they can sell any loan. But when there's less capital in the market, that's where people are really going to look to Figure to make sure that we're there and bring that liquidity. And so we've, and so that's what I focus a lot, lot on is the downside scenario where the markets aren't as hot and how do we still deliver for partners? And we've done a ton, a ton there. For example, one of the big things that we started to do is actually have investors commit to funding the loans prior to the loans being funded, which is very unique, right? It's normally

• 34:43Speaker 02

  like you, you fund a loan and you go find someone to buy it. But here, we're actually pre-funding that and getting the commitments upfront increasingly. And we're doing that because we want to make sure that our partners are always supported. And that just reduces risk in the system. So that's a big part of where we want to take the marketplace. And you can only do that if you have the standardized asset, right? No one's going to say, oh, I'll buy something before it's even created unless they know exactly what that's likely to be. And that's the power of the on-chain data and the power of what we've brought to the capital markets.

• 35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. That, that makes sense. And then I noticed you guys always do these like promo offers, which are like pretty effective. I know you've got one for the crypto back loans now. You guys have done ones for, you know, HELOCs also.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm assuming you're doing them because they're working, right? Like, like you keep doing, can you just talk a little bit about like, it's not just a clear message to the right consumer, but also I think you guys have really kind of unlocked this idea of like, you're very good at consumer marketing. And then you have this great thing. So there's like substance, but there's a little bit of sizzle on the front end to some degree.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Well, consumer marketing has, was a strength of SoFi. It was a strength of Brex where I worked previously, even though it was B2B marketing. So I mean, it's, it's super important to have that differentiated brand and put that out there and really be associated with the future. I think when people think about Figure, it's products that are relevant in today's market and relevant to the future, right? Whether that be the crypto back loan or the HELOC. And we're putting those offers in front of customers because that's what they want to hear about in this market. And like I said, our goal is ultimately to show how we can do it and then bring the other partners around, right? That's part of that rule of 150, which you keep talking about. If we want to be that high margin marketplace,

• 36:25Speaker 02

  we ultimately have to use our marketing abilities, our great products and bring those to other, other originators and lenders and, and banks who can then use the same thing. And so we're kind of showing the way and leaning into podcasts like this on behalf of our partners where they might not do that without kind of us showing the way, for example.

• 36:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the one that you guys have running right now is new users of the crypto back loan can earn up to $1,250 if they complete a crypto back loan. And so that's pretty, 1,250 bucks is, is no joke just for going and.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Talking about affordability.

• 37:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, well, it, it's weird, right? Because.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  We have this like K shaped economy in America and there's some people who have been very fortunate, made a bunch of money, have a bunch of assets and they're, they'll look at something and they're like, oh, the difference between $12,000 and $1,000 on the mortgage. Like I'm, if they're buying a multimillion dollar home, they're like, it's kind of a rounding error.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:26Anthony Pompliano?

  As you mentioned, you buy a $100,000 home, that is a massive difference.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 37:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I do think that a lot of times the affordability is, affordability critiques are critiqued by people who don't have, you aren't succumbing to the affordability.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean? Why are you guys complaining? It's like, well, you're in a different situation. And so these people have very, very different view of, you know, kind of the state of America, the cost of America. And I think the midterm elections, that was part of it, right? Was people saying, look, the only way they can have their voice heard is to go into that ballot box and say, hey, I'm not happy with the way that things are going.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I also think the role of agents here is relevant too. You've seen Meta release Muse and as people are thinking about like, is it, you know, is $1,250 worth it to me? Obviously that's a lot of money for anyone, but when you think about an agent acting on your behalf that has more time than you do, more patience, this is something that we saw back at SoFi where the number one reason why people didn't refinance their student loans was simply inertia, right? It just, the amount of money they would save just wasn't worth it to go through the process. But theoretically, if you're going to save 15 bucks a month, like that actually can add real value, especially over 30 years. So now if you can have agents and figures very much preparing for this future, if agents

• 38:42Speaker 02

  are going to be operating on behalf of say even some consumers and looking at saving money, looking at affordability, I think they will naturally find their way to the figures of the world that cut costs and save time and they will have a relentless appetite to do that. So we're really excited about the opportunity that people can use their home equity with an agent, pay off debt, save themselves money and not have to do nearly as much. And we think we're very much building for that future, both for ourselves and on behalf of our partners, like I've been saying, who are looking to figure, to figure out how the world is moving so quickly with AI, with blockchain.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of the business, let's say in two, three years, how will somebody talk about it? Is it going to be still, you know, 70 plus percent HELOC mortgage stuff? Is it just like the largest consumer lending platform marketplace? Like just?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think people will be focused on multiple asset classes, trading on chain with a lot of standardization and liquidity in these asset classes, the likes of which people have not seen outside of something like Fannie Mae. Meaning Figure will become the standard through which new fintech companies, banks, credit unions, launch new products. And so when someone is looking to get into small business lending, they'll say, okay, well, we could do it, we could, we could launch a Figure program tomorrow with liquidity, with capital, with technology. And that will be, it will be the rails and the piping behind so many different lending products as a part of that broad marketplace that we're building.

• 40:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense to me. What's your message to people who are watching this, who are investors? I think that's like the most interesting crowd because I see a lot of people talking online and some people are very bullish, some people have questions, whatever, like maybe as the leader of the business, like what's your message to them?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  My message is we're building a very capital efficient, high growth marketplace that is going to endure over a long period of time. And we see, we're firing on all cylinders in terms of growth and margin and we couldn't be more excited about the future.

• 40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a pretty good pitch there, my friend.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you.

• 40:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you for taking time to do this and do it in the future.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, sir.