Blend Labs at Canaccord Genuity Conference: Strategic Growth Amid Mortgage Challenges

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Blend Labs (NYSE:BLND) participated in Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference, where the company outlined its strategic growth initiatives amid a challenging mortgage market. Despite a significant downturn in mortgage volumes, Blend Labs emphasized its expanding consumer banking business and its return to profitability. The company also highlighted the importance of strong customer relationships and technological innovation.

Key Takeaways

• Blend Labs has shown resilience during a 70% decline in mortgage volumes from 2021 to 2023.
• The consumer banking sector now accounts for 36% of Blend’s revenue, with over 40% year-over-year growth.
• Blend has achieved profitability since mid-2023 and reported zero customer churn notices for 2025.
• The introduction of "Rapid" product lines is expected to increase the economic value per funded loan by 50% to 70%.
• A leadership transition has occurred, with Jason Reem replacing Amir Jafari as CFO.

Financial Results

• Mortgage Market: The industry saw a drastic decline from approximately 14 million units in 2021 to 4 million in 2023 and 2024. A slight recovery to 4.5 million units is expected in 2025.
• Revenue and Market Share: Blend’s market share has grown to nearly 20%, with revenue per funded loan at approximately $90.
• Profitability: Blend returned to profitability in mid-2023, a significant milestone amidst the downturn.
• Economic Value Per Loan: The average economic value per funded loan is $88, with Rapid products enhancing this value significantly.

Operational Updates

• Customer Base: Blend has received zero notices of churn from customers for 2025, indicating strong customer loyalty.
• Product Development: The new "Rapid" product lines aim to drive higher conversion rates and offer tailored consumer solutions.
• Consumer Banking Expansion: Consumer banking has rapidly grown to represent 36% of Blend’s revenue, focusing on providing a comprehensive origination stack.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy: Blend is focused on expanding its customer base, enhancing operational discipline, and introducing new product lines.
• Market Position: Positioned as a "coiled spring," Blend is ready to capitalize on any increase in mortgage rates.
• Consumer Banking Potential: There is potential for consumer banking to surpass the mortgage business due to higher transaction volumes.

Q&A Highlights

• Mortgage Market Dynamics: Slight drops in mortgage rates have led to an uptick in refinancing activity.
• Competitive Landscape: The acquisition of Mr. Cooper by Rocket is pushing banks to invest in technology.
• CFO Transition: Amir Jafari’s tenure was marked by resolving profitability issues, with Jason Reem poised to lead future growth.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: All right, Welcome to day two of the forty fifth Annual Canaccord Growth Conference. I’m Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst here focused on FinTech. And we are very pleased to have back with us again the management team from Blend Labs, Neema Gamsari, who is the Head of Blend. And in the audience back here, we have Amir Jafari and Jason Reem. And so we’ll talk about some things going on there in a little bit.

But in our view Blend is a truly cutting edge software company whose platform is used by leading financial institutions to take a lot of the pain out of what’s always been a tedious process in getting a mortgage done both on home purchase and refi. The company has leveraged its bank workflow know how and technology platform is now offering a broader consumer banking platform for functions such as opening savings and checking accounts and other key functions in banking. Blend touches probably 20% of U. S. Mortgage applications with a per transaction revenue model.

And while the interest rate environment remains a little bit elevated, the company is well positioned to benefit from any rate cuts on both new and refi mortgages. We think investors should stay current on what’s going on with the company. Any rate cuts coming up soon or upticks in mortgage volume, I think the stock will react pretty quickly. So with that little intro, thanks for being with us, Nima.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Great. So some investors know the Blend story, some don’t that well. But maybe we just kind of give a quick intro of the company and then we’ll get into some questions.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me again. So Blend was founded about thirteen years ago when me and a few other people saw that this industry is the mortgage industry and banking more broadly is the technologies from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and not built for, the time, a digital world and we’ll talk about AI later. And so we were wondering why nobody had built a modern technology platform for banking and it’s just not a cool thing to do when you’re in Silicon Valley. And so we set out thirteen years ago to do the to build a new platform for mortgage lending.

And fast forward thirteen years, now we have, you know, six or seven of the top 10 banks. We have six or seven of the top 10 credit unions, many of the largest independent mortgage banks in the country, many of the largest mortgage servicers in the country on our platform. And it’s pretty simple. When you apply for it, when you click apply for a mortgage on their website, all the way through that closing process that used to be sitting in a title office, we’ve digitized. And so that’ll be our platform.

What you it’s always white labeled. We don’t have a public facing brand. And like Joe said, we we do charge a per transaction model, which, you know, has its pros and cons, but we we do charge a per transaction model for for the funded loans. And then about four or five years ago, because we’re a vertical software company, our customers, the banks and credit unions, pulled us in and said, hey, we want to bring modern technology to all of our other software all of our other product lines, and we want to have modern software for all of our other product lines. And that included, initially, home equity lines and loans, and then expanded it to deposit accounts and credit cards and personal loans and auto loans.

And now I think what how I would how I would simply describe Blend is we’re an origination platform that sits on top of the sort of legacy loan origination system players and works across all the product lines that a consumer bank would offer, including also now small business lending.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That’s great. Thanks, Nima. Maybe we just stay at a high level for a minute here, talk about how the mortgage market is acting right now and then just some other moving parts away from your in particular in your story, what banks are thinking about, what they’re preparing for. And then we recently had Rocket, right, acquire Mr. Cooper and vertically integrating more with their digital platform in the mortgage market and implications for banks and then the implications for you through the banks?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yes, sure. So let’s start with the mortgage market. From 2010, after the last mortgage crisis, which is right around when when Blend started, until 2021, it was, you know, up into the right for the mortgage industry volumes. And relatively low interest rates, although 2020 and 2021 were were very low interest rates. And then it shot up in the other direction to the other extreme, where in 2022, it start the rates started to increase and mortgage volumes dipped.

And just to put in perspective, you know, coming into that 2020 cycle, we had about think 2019, we had something like six or 7% market share, and we were chart our revenue per funded loan was in the sixties, something like that. And in that year, in 2021, the the biggest year, there were about 14,000,000 units. And then in 2022, that dropped to about 6,000,000. And then in 2023 and 2024, that dropped to approximately 4,000,000 units. And so just to put the you know, that that means that the the industry dropped 70% in a very short amount of time.

And it’s because homebuyers couldn’t afford to buy new homes and nobody was refinancing or buy existing homes and nobody nobody was refinancing. And so, you know, we at Blend were obviously affected by that, and we used that time to really clean up house and get everything in order. And now I’m happy to say that, despite these still there are still very low mortgage volumes. We’re expecting somewhere around four and a half million units this year or something like that in 2025. But, you know, we’ve we now have almost 20% market share like like Joe said.

We have you know, our revenue per funded loan is about $90 so we’ve grown our revenue base. We’ve grown our customer base. Consumer banking is about 36% of our revenues. That was, single digit percentage probably in 2019, 2020. So that’s grown a ton, growing over 40% year over year.

And so in some ways, I’m grateful for the mortgage downturn because it it really did allow us to figure out, you know, what are we really special at, what makes Blend really important to our banks and and credit unions and independent mortgage companies, build up our customer base, and build up our consumer banking business. And so I do feel like we’re a coiled spring right now. You know, when mortgage rates tick down a tiny bit we saw this in September I last don’t know if you guys remember, but

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That head faked when people thought the Fed was gonna start to ease.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yes. Right. They they had faked everyone and mostly And

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: and and refi volume started to just kind of pick up, like, almost instantaneously, it felt like. Right?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: They picked up instantaneously because there’s so much untapped capacity in the mortgage industry right now. And as we’ve been growing our customer base and getting ready for this next boom, our customers are ready. You know, they’ve been ready for three years now, going on four years. And so I do feel like we’re a coiled spring, and and I’m also very proud of our consumer banking business. And I’m also proud of the fact that our team was able to, in a market which is it is abnormally depressed right now, four and a half million units.

Like, the 4,000,000 units two years ago and last year, historic lows. Hasn’t been this low since people weren’t really getting mortgages. And so those were historic lows, and four and a half million units not far off that. So I feel good about the fact that we were able to get profitability starting mid last year till now despite that. But, yeah, I think we’re we’re feeling good about the future.

And and the other thing I’ll say is, this is something I said on our last earnings call that I wanna highlight. 2023 was every mortgage company had way too many people and, you know, way too few loans, and so almost all of our customers in 2023 were deeply unprofitable. And and then banks, the same time, while they weren’t unprofitable as banks, there was a First Republic Bank crisis and SVB crisis in that year. And so that was just sort of a and that was also the first year mortgage volumes dipped to be be that low. And so that was a really rough year for the industry, and we we did you know, in that year, we lost a good amount of customers.

Not a not a crazy amount, but a good amount. And and I can say now the industry is stabilized. Like, they’re investing in the future. Not only is our pipeline really, really good, including some big names that we signed in the last six, seven months that we announced publicly, some of the largest servicers, a top 10 bank, top five credit union, But our pipeline going forward is also really good. And probably the thing I’m most proud of is that in 2025, we have gotten zero notice of churn from our customers because we are sort of the loan company that’s been able to both become profitable and innovate and be a good partner to these banks and lenders during this time.

Like, that’s that’s really hard to do in a in a market like this. And and so I you know, I’m super proud of the team for that, and that is I think of as the foundation for the future and probably the thing I’m most proud of in the Yeah.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: And I just underscore, company is nicely profitable now at these still depressed mortgage volume levels.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Extremely depressed.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right. And I mean that was a big lift over the last couple of years. But, know, here we sit being profitable waiting for, you know, the potential rebound in the mortgage And

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: not just waiting, I mean we’re building.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: We’re building our customer base, We’re building more we’re being more operationally disciplined as a company. And we’re adding still, with those things in mind, we’re adding amazing new product lines, like the rapid product lines. I don’t want talk Rapid too much refi. Rapid refi.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah, rapid

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: home equity. These are product lines that we have think of as the next generation that is sort of an add on to our existing platform, it’s easy to adopt. But it adds a decent amount of revenue per funded loan for us. And what it does for our customers, it drives conversion. And the difference between our old not our old, but our current products and these add ons is it has a very detailed, very high conversion flow around an actual offer for you specifically as a consumer, which says, here’s exactly what your new your old rate was and what your new rate will be.

Here’s exactly how much equity you have in in your home and how much you can tap and the rate it will cost you. Here’s the debts you can consolidate. And so we’re building cool things in this time too and we’re not just sitting and waiting. Although I think that would actually be a winning strategy as well.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Sure. Fair enough. And for those that don’t know, as you call it, value per loan or basically the pricing

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yeah.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: On your rapid refi product is Yeah. It’s materially higher than your current refi or the legacy refi product as you roll out Rapid, right?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yeah. So the list price so our average economic value per fund loan across our customer base is $88 So for every mortgage is done through our platform on the just on the mortgage side, it’s different on home equity, it’s different on deposit accounts and consumer loans and things like that and credit cards. But $88 in the mortgage suite, and that includes two core offerings primarily. The first is our mortgage application process that gets you through all the application, the conditions, the you know, making sure that you upload all your documents, sign all your documents. And then we have another product called the blend close product.

And blend close is the way that you don’t have to sit in in a dingy title office to close your loan. It’s actually really good for lenders too because they can get loans sold into the secondary markets faster, which helps their carrying costs. And so those are the two primary products. Those add up to it about $88. The economic value per fund of loan of our rapid add on, which we announced late last year and we’ve been signing a very good amount of customers this year on, and we’ve shared some numbers in the past few earnings calls, is about 1.5 to 1.7 x the core mortgage offering in terms of the add on.

So it adds 50 to 70% in economic value per funded loan. And it and it drives the ROI for the customer, so they’re willing to pay it. In fact, our go to market on that was go try it for a few months as an add on for free, and you can turn it off if you don’t like it. And so if it’s not creating enough conversion for you, enough savings on the operational side, then then don’t use it. Like we’re that we see it in the numbers.

We know how much better it is for our customers. And so we’re confident in that number of what we can charge.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That’s great. Yes. I think Blend is known as still today more of a play on the mortgage market, but your broader consumer banking platform is now almost well, I mean, we’re still at depressed mortgage levels, but it’s now 40% of revenue from a standing start a few years ago, right? How big could that product be? And I mean, it’s probably a larger TAM than mortgage theoretically.

And even in a more normalized mortgage market, could it be as big as mortgage over time and maybe just give people a flavor for the growth rate there and kind of the pace of new logo signings over there.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yeah, sure. It’s actually similar similar play to when we started in mortgage. When you go and you look at how, let’s pick some region large regional bank in Ohio, how they do personal loans or home equity loans or something like that today, it’s on a sys I mean, most of them are actually working in green screen systems that are hosted on mainframes on their sites. And so and I mean, not just the front end, the consumer workflow, which is a small part of it, but of course, we offer, but the end to end process. And, you know, it’s again, same thing I said on mortgage.

The reason people haven’t built technology for these banks, some of it’s the lack of understanding when you’re leaving call you’re leaving, you know, MIT. It’s not the first thing you think of is how do I go serve Fifth Third Bank. But part of it is also you have to have it’s chicken and egg. You have to have enough relationships with the banks where they can trust you, but you also you you need to have customers for them to trust you, but then you also need your first few customers. And so it’s not an easy sales cycle.

It’s not an easy

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: It’s regulated.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: It’s super regulated.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Super regulated. Right.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: And and, yeah, we already have those relationships. And and not in every case, but in a lot of cases, we have those relationships. And so I haven’t been surprised at how fast that’s grown. Like I said, I think it’s grown 43% year over year. It’s now 36% of our our revenue.

And it’s it’s a simple these are simple products, but they lead to the overall value proposition for our customer of driving depth of product penetration with consumers. So if you just sign up for a bank and all you get is a checking account and a debit card, that’s good. But if you sign up for a bank and you get a checking account and a debit card and it notices that you have maybe some some debt that you need to consolidate in our flow, it will we will actually drive the consumer to consolidate it with that bank at a rate that’s good for the bank and better for the consumer than their current debt rates, and it it builds deeper relationships. You’re providing more value to consumers. And so and then I think mortgage the fact that we have mortgage on the same platform is this is the first time a bank can look at technology across the enterprise instead of in vertical silos.

Historically, the you know, mortgage has been over here in one bucket, and home equity has been over here, and deposit accounts have been one team over here. But this is the first time the chief lending officer or the chief digital officer or the head of the consumer bank can look at one platform and say, wow, I can do a lot with my customers in one place and help serve our customers and their broader needs.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That’s great. I wanted to circle back again to one of my first questions.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Let me just say one one other thing, Joe. Yeah. Absolutely. The the the short answer of can it be bigger than

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Than mortgage? The reality is that the scale of transactions so I said that, you know, in a normal year, in a great year, it’s 14,000,000 mortgages. In a terrible year, there’s 4,000,000. The expected amount of mortgages in a year is somewhere in between in between around 8,000,000 mortgages a year. And it you know, in times when interest rates are declining, it’s it’s higher than that.

In times when interest rates are going up or elevated or staying elevated, it’s it’s lower than that. But in you know, we have we have one customer on the deposit accounts product that does almost 2,000,000 transactions a year alone of new accounts. And so the scale of the transactions are so much bigger. So even though we’re charging less on a per unit basis for the all these consumer products. The scale of transactions is much bigger.

So yeah, the opportunity is I think it’s larger than mortgage, but it doesn’t mean we’re not focused on mortgage too. Just means that we now have two And it’s a little bit irons in the fire.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: And it diversifies out the revenue stream a little bit for sure, right?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: That’s a nice side effect. But actually, just when you’re a vertical software company, part of the magic of you know, I like I like to think about Veeva as a software company. Veeva, what they did is they started with one product, CRM for pharma, and then they kept adding things like Vault and other components that create a lot of value for their customers based on what their customers needed. Mhmm. And in this case, for our customer base, the top 200 financial institutions in the country, what they need is a better software origination stack.

Because originations is how they drive a lot of their revenue and their net income. Loans and and new Deposit. Deposit accounts. Like, that’s how they drive most of their revenue almost, unless it’s a very heavy commercial bank. And so they need better tools to support their revenue generating activities, and they dragged us in there.

It wasn’t us saying we want to diversify our revenue, it was them saying we need help.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right.

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: But it happens to be a nice side effect that it diversifies our revenue.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Right. And the war for deposits among the banks continues, and they need the tools to attract and retain those guys. I just wanted to also go back to Rocket buying Mr. Cooper and what that means for the industry, what it means in arms war of technology for banks and other players in the mortgage market?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: I mean, I think the really good companies are really good customers in this space have similar similarly to what Rocket is doing, they’ve done a combination of and actually to what Blend did. A con combination of really, you know, clean up their house, simplify the things that they’re you know, drive the things they’re really good at, and then consolidate market share. And so Rocket’s doing that a little bit with mister Cooper. They already had a mortgage servicer at Rocket. They just wanted to grow it, and they wanted to add more capabilities there.

And and I think that what that’s done is that’s opened the eyes, especially of our largest customers, to say, what does it look like to compete with Rocket when they now offer personal loans and they offer auto loans and they do servicing of these all these loans? They’re not a bank, but they do most of the things in terms of value add that banks can do for consumers. And so it’s really I think it’s been a catalyst. I think I I give them some credit for our pipeline being so strong this year and and and, really, I guess, since late. I can’t remember exactly when the Mr.

Cooper rocket announcement. Was early this year, maybe late q one, something like that. So I give them a lot of credit for driving some pipeline to us, but it’s good. These are the types of things that have historically helped blend. I mentioned that they’re super long sales cycles.

Mhmm. Well, our first couple deals, it was chicken and egg. I couldn’t get any of the big banks to bite in 2015 when we were, you know, first getting our product off the ground. And then at the end of that year, Rocket did a Super Bowl ad that said push button, get mortgage. And then I was already talking to all the banks at the time.

I was trying to get them to move, but there’s inertia to to do something, to do the what whatever’s happening day to day already. And then suddenly, within six months, the floodgates opened. And I think a similar thing, probably a little bit less extreme than that now, but a similar thing on the pipeline side today.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Got it. We have a lot to talk about Neiman, we’re going to run out of time. I just wanted to just one last question for you. You announced the other day, I think, that you are having a CFO change. Amir Jafari has done a great job for the last few years.

He is here, but Jason Ream is taking that position. Just why, you know, why the change now and, you know, any other comments you have on that?

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, Amir joined us about when I said 2023 was a rough year, he joined us at the, you know, it was already known that it was gonna be a really rough year, he joined us at a time when I don’t think many people would have joined us. And we were pretty unprofitable. And while we had a lot of good things going for us, good technology, good customer base, we had a lot of things to fix. And Amir spent the last almost three years, I’ll call it, fixing that.

And now we’re profitable, and we’re simple a much simpler company, and we’re growing. And then, you know, Jason coming in, you know, Amir sort of said, hey. Like, I you know, it’s time I think I feel like I did my tour of duty here, and and Jason coming in and take the reins. And, you know, there’s there’s a there’s a lot in our future too. You know?

It’s while we did a lot of good things last three years, I think Jason coming in will help us over the next three or five years, hopefully. So I’m very excited about thankful very grateful to Amir and excited about Jason joining last week.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: That’s great. Blend Labs, just watch those mortgage volumes everybody and watch watch them

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Watch the ten year treasuries.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Thanks,

Neema Gamsari, Head of Blend, Blend Labs: Nemo. Alright. Thank you. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Vaffy, Equity Research Analyst, Canaccord: Thanks, Nemo.

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