Earnings call transcript: Upstart Q3 2025 beats EPS estimates, stock dips

Upstart Holdings Inc. reported its third-quarter earnings for 2025, showing a significant earnings per share (EPS) beat but a slight revenue miss. The company posted an EPS of $0.52, surpassing the forecast of $0.42, representing a 23.81% surprise. However, revenue slightly fell short of expectations at $277 million, compared to the forecast of $279.59 million. Despite the EPS beat, the stock price fell by 2.59% in after-hours trading, reflecting a cautious market reaction. This volatility aligns with InvestingPro data showing Upstart’s high beta of 2.27, indicating the stock typically experiences more dramatic price swings than the broader market.

Key Takeaways

• Upstart reported a 71% year-on-year revenue growth, reaching $277 million.
• EPS exceeded expectations by 23.81%, a notable achievement.
• Stock price declined by 2.59% in the aftermarket, despite positive earnings.
• The company saw a 6x growth in GAAP net income from the previous quarter.
• Upstart’s AI-driven lending platform continues to expand with new products and partnerships.

Company Performance

In Q3 2025, Upstart demonstrated robust financial growth, with total revenue increasing by 71% year-on-year. The company’s innovative lending products and strategic partnerships have contributed to this expansion. Newer products, including small-dollar loans and auto and home loans, accounted for a significant portion of originations and new borrowers. The auto retail business, in particular, saw a 70% sequential transaction volume growth. This impressive performance builds on Upstart’s 5-year revenue CAGR of 29%, as reported by InvestingPro.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $277 million, up 71% year-on-year
• Earnings per share: $0.52, exceeding the forecast by 23.81%
• Net interest income: $19 million
• GAAP net income: $32 million, a sixfold increase from the previous quarter
• Adjusted EBITDA: $71 million

Earnings vs. Forecast

Upstart’s EPS of $0.52 outperformed the forecast of $0.42, marking a 23.81% positive surprise. However, revenue came in slightly below expectations at $277 million against a projected $279.59 million, resulting in a minor -0.93% revenue surprise. This mixed result reflects the company’s ability to manage profitability while navigating revenue challenges.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Upstart’s stock price decreased by 2.59% in after-hours trading, closing at $45.93. This movement contrasts with the company’s strong EPS performance, indicating that investors may have been concerned about the revenue miss. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $96.43 and a low of $31.40. InvestingPro analysis indicates Upstart appears overvalued compared to its Fair Value, with analyst price targets ranging widely from $20 to $105, reflecting the market’s divided outlook on this fintech innovator. The stock’s YTD return of -24.9% and high P/B ratio of 6.17 further illustrate the premium investors are paying for Upstart’s growth potential.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Upstart projects Q4 2025 revenue to reach $288 million and expects a full-year 2025 revenue of $1.035 billion. The company anticipates a GAAP net income of $50 million for 2025 and remains optimistic about growth in 2026. Upstart plans to moderate take rates slightly to boost origination volumes. This aligns with InvestingPro tips indicating net income is expected to grow this year, a positive sign for the company’s $4.48 billion market cap. For investors seeking deeper insights, InvestingPro’s comprehensive Pro Research Report transforms complex financial data into actionable intelligence for smarter investment decisions.

Executive Commentary

CEO Dave Girouard emphasized Upstart’s leadership in AI-driven lending, stating, "The opportunity for AI and credit is unimaginably large, and there’s no one better positioned than Upstart to lead this trillion-dollar industry." CFO Sanjay Datta noted, "The model taking a bit of a conservative breather is a feature, not a bug," highlighting the company’s strategic response to macroeconomic signals.

Risks and Challenges

• Potential macroeconomic pressures affecting lending volumes.
• Revenue growth may face hurdles if new products do not scale as expected.
• Increased repayment speeds could impact future loan origination.
• Competitive pressures from other AI-driven fintech companies.
• Regulatory changes in the lending industry could pose challenges.

Q&A

During the Q&A session, analysts raised questions about the conservative approach of Upstart’s AI model in Q3. Executives explained that this was a strategic response to macroeconomic indicators, which could be a positive sign of credit health. The company also addressed concerns about the auto lending market, indicating no significant impact from recent disruptions.

Overall, Upstart’s Q3 2025 performance underscores its strength in AI-driven lending, despite mixed market reactions and revenue challenges. The company’s forward-looking strategies and robust product offerings position it well for future growth.

Full transcript - Upstart Holdings Inc (UPST) Q3 2025:

Conference Operator: Good afternoon and welcome to the Upstart Third Quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Sonya Banerjee, Head of Investor Relations. Sonya, please go ahead.

Sonya Banerjee, Head of Investor Relations, Upstart: Thank you. Welcome to the Upstart earnings call for the third quarter of 2025. With me on today’s call are Dave Girouard, our co-founder and CEO, Paul Gu, our co-founder and CTO, and Sanjay Datta, our CFO. During today’s call, we will make forward-looking statements, which include statements about our outlook and business strategy. These statements are based on our expectations and beliefs as of today, which are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and should not be viewed as a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors that have been described in our SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events, except as required by law. Our discussion will include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for our GAAP results.

Reconciliations of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings materials, which are available on our IR website. With that, Dave, over to you.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Thanks, Sonya. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. To kick things off, I’ll share my perspective on our business. Upstart today is a dramatically stronger company than it was just a few years ago. Our technology, our business, and our teams have never been better. The opportunity for AI and credit is unimaginably large, and there’s no one better positioned than Upstart to lead this trillion-dollar industry to this exciting and inevitable direction. Now, turning to Q3, Upstart continued to execute on its 2025 game plan of rapid growth, profits, and AI leadership, all under the auspices of exceptional credit performance and precise macro handling. In addition to 80% year-on-year growth in transaction volume and 71% revenue growth, we were nicely profitable once again. In fact, Q3 GAAP net income grew by a factor of six over the prior quarter.

Consumer demand for Upstart continued to grow rapidly, with more than two million applications submitted in Q3, up over 30% from Q2 and reaching the highest level in more than three years. Despite this awesome demand, transaction volume on our platform was less than we anticipated. Our risk models responded to macroeconomic signals they observed by moderately reducing approvals and increasing interest rates. This drove a reduction in our conversion rate from 23.9% in Q2 to 20.6% in Q3. If you follow the Upstart Macro Index, you would have seen that this macro indicator ticked up modestly in July and August, which is essentially what our model responded to over the course of the quarter. We believe this to be nothing more than a speed bump, with UMI reverting to lower numbers since.

To be clear, we see no material deterioration in consumer credit strength, and in fact, we’ve seen recent signs of improvement. You can and should expect that our models will always do their best to price prevailing risk appropriately. Precise and rapid tuning to changing economic conditions is a foundational capability of Upstart AI, and we’re confident this precision is winning hearts and minds for Upstart in the credit market right now. The system is behaving exactly as it was designed. At a minimum, our Q3 results should give you confidence that we don’t sacrifice credit performance to achieve transaction volume targets. Turning to our newer products, which include small-dollar loans, auto, and home, these offerings continue to improve and mature, accounting for almost 12% of originations and 22% of new borrowers in Q3. Transaction volume for auto, home, and small-dollar each grew in the range of 300% year-on-year.

Our auto retail business, in particular, has really begun to accelerate. We more than doubled the number of live lending rooftops on Upstart in Q3 compared to the prior quarter. Transaction volume for auto retail also grew more than 70% sequentially. We expanded to four new states in Q3 and made some significant improvements to our software. This is really a breakout business for us. Additionally, we’ve been quietly working on a hybrid product called an auto-secured personal loan that’s beginning to gain traction. As it relates to our home business, beyond continued process innovation, our unique partnerships with banks and credit unions mean we offer the best rates to the primest borrowers compared to other fintechs by as much as 300 basis points. Best rates and best processes are what we’re all about.

Our continued process and automation breakthroughs in our secured products, meaning home and auto, give us confidence that we’ll be real growth drivers for Upstart in 2026. Finally, with respect to funding on the Upstart platform, we’re in an exceptionally strong position in our core business with significant excess capacity. On the bank and credit union side, we added seven new partners, our best quarter for new logos this year, and we reached a new all-time high in monthly available funding from these partners in Q3. On the capital market side, we continue to have exceptionally strong execution with our institutional partners. Having signed our first agreement in 2023, we now have 10 active partners. In August, we renewed one of our largest partners for the second time, and importantly, Upstart has 100% retention of all private credit partners to date.

We believe that we have the industry’s best AI for responding rapidly and precisely to changes in the environment, and this is a central reason why our partners have confidence in us. In September, we also issued a securitization with strong demand leading to significant oversubscription of all classes, despite upsizing and tightening of spreads. This ABS deal involved 30 investors, including seven first-timers, demonstrating the strength of Upstart’s reputation in the market. We’ve also continued to make progress securing third-party funding to support our newer products. We’ve signed 17 partner agreements this year, including nine signed in Q3 alone, and expect to ramp these partners into production this quarter and next. All in all, we’re all systems go to finish the year strong and get ready for what we think will be an amazing 2026 for Upstart.

To wrap things up, we’re making rapid progress as the leader in AI-powered credit. The somewhat complicated macroeconomy we all see today is, in my view, the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the strength of our AI platform, and we’re doing just that. While legacy financial service execs continue to ponder the use of AI in credit, the Upstart platform has now generated more than $50 billion in AI-powered loans since inception. Unlike other AI platforms, we generate our own training data with more than 98 million borrower repayment events to date, with about 105,000 more repayments due each day, driving improved separation and model accuracy. This is enabling us to build quickly toward a future of always-on credit, where every American is persistently and precisely underwritten, providing them with the best rate anywhere, 24/7 credit access right from their phone with little to no process.

That is a proposition and a future that we’re betting on 100%. With respect to the investor community, I feel more than ever that those who stay will be champions. With that, I’ll turn things over to Paul Gu, my co-founder and Upstart’s Chief Technology Officer. Paul.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Thanks, Dave. I’ll start by addressing the model conservatism we experienced in parts of Q3. Over the past few years, one of our biggest advances has been our model’s ability to respond with speed and precision to changes in macro conditions. This progress stems from a suite of techniques that are proprietary and critical to resilience through a diversity of economic environments. A few months ago, that led the model to tighten on credit while certain risk signals were elevated before recently normalizing. That model behavior partially reflects irreducible volatility in the outside world, but is also a function of our model design and sampling variance, both of which continue to improve. Since the start of Q3, the improvements we’ve made to our calibration methodology are expected to cut unwanted month-to-month volatility and model calibration-driven conversion changes by about 50%.

As we continue to innovate on our model calibration techniques, we’ll increasingly be able to minimize conversion volatility in the business while delivering on-target credit performance. Beyond calibration, Q3 was a productive foundation-building quarter with a number of technology improvements that will power our next phase of growth. I’ll start with personal loans. First, we took another leap forward in our evergreen engineering quest to lower latency in pricing loans. By parallelizing another major portion of loan pricing, we reduced end-to-end latency by as much as 30% and are now rolling it out platform-wide. Reduced latency unlocks the ability to build larger and more complex models, as well as make use of the ever-growing data set of 98 million repayment events that Dave mentioned. Next, we launched a true machine learning model to optimize take rates.

It is our intention to capture value in relation to the value that we create for our borrowers. We expect that this framework over time will unlock a significant improvement in our ability to monetize model wins that benefit borrowers we’re already best for, as well as increase our competitiveness in new segments where we’re still establishing our edge. In the domain of customer acquisition, our ability to utilize digital partnership channels that relied on cloud environments or APIs to target offers was historically limited by the complexity of our underwriting models. This quarter, we built a programming language-agnostic framework for data transformation that makes it much faster to translate our models to work with any partner ecosystem. We also worked with a key partner to enable larger model sizes in their cloud environment, allowing more of Upstart’s unique underwriting algorithms to be used in targeting.

On our direct marketing channels, we developed a proprietary technique to target marketing spend based on causal impact to conversion. Compared to our prior, more textbook technique, early results show a 50% uplift in incremental originations from the same level of spend. Advanced AI in underwriting ultimately needs equally advanced AI in acquisition, and the successes this quarter were a big step towards that. I’ll wrap up my remarks with a few technological highlights that are driving growth in newer products. We’ve made rapid progress automating the process of getting a HELOC. When we launched instant property valuations back in June, we automatically approved less than 1% of home loans. Since then, automatic home loan approvals have grown to 10% in September and about 20% in October.

While we’d love to simply automate away almost all the documents like we have in personal loans, the world of home loans is just less digital, less standardized, and there are more requirements. So for the next leg of improving the HELOC funnel, we’ve begun using multimodal AI to do the work of human document reviewers in real time. A rapid pace of process improvements makes me optimistic that we’re on a path to an industry-leading home equity product. Additionally, our small-dollar relief loans continue to make rapid progress. In September, we launched instant funding for the first time. Most borrowers who qualify for instant funding see funds in their bank account within around 90 seconds of approval. While small installment loans at bank-friendly APRs is a wonderful innovation, you should expect to see a lot more from Upstart in this area in the coming months.

Thanks to the team’s work this quarter, I’m more excited than ever about our upcoming pipeline of technology wins. With that, I’ll turn it over to Sanjay. Sanjay?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Thanks, Paul, and thanks to all of our participants for sharing some of your time with us today. I’ll now spend a bit of time reviewing our Q3 numbers. At a headline level, we were pleased to finish the quarter with healthy annual and sequential revenue growth, as well as extend our run back to profitability. Within that, our transaction revenue this past quarter was marginally short of expectation as our models expressed some temporary conservatism in piloting the current environmental dynamics, but this was largely offset by growth in interest income from the strong return performance of our balance sheet. Margins and take rates have remained steady, and credit performance continues to land right on target.

We are carrying a larger-than-normal loan balance on our books as we work towards closing a number of deals across all of our new product areas, which will both reduce R&D carrying balances and flow new volume directly to our lenders and investors. We remain pleased with the progress of those various conversations and expect to have tangible outcomes on this front by end of year. More broadly, third-party capital in our core unsecured lending segment remains readily accessible, handily outstripping our borrower supply, and is currently not in any way an impediment to growth. Spreads on our third-party capital continue to compress, partially a result of the competitive funding environment and partially as an expression of investor confidence in the steadfast performance of our credit.

With respect to borrower approvability, our model has exhibited some recent caution in response to a UMI run-up of almost 0.2 points that happened over the course of the past quarter before more recently subsiding, as well as to a rising trend in repayment speeds, which is generally an encouraging longer-term signal for credit, but in the near term limits interest income from current loans and requires higher coupons to compensate. In all of this, we, as always, care first and foremost about getting credit performance right, which will always result in the best long-term outcome for our business. We have an inherent belief that AI models are better suited to navigating a complex and changing environment than human intuition, and we have demonstrated the discipline to heed them, even when they express a bias toward moderation as now.

If the currently observed higher repayment speeds and easing consumption growth are indeed indicators of imminent credit improvement, these could represent a long-anticipated tailwind that could accelerate growth prospects heading into next year. In the meantime, we continue to be guided by the North Star of prudence in the underwriting of risk on behalf of our lenders and investors. With this as context, here are some of the financial highlights from Q3 of 2025. Total revenue for Q3 came in at roughly $277 million, up 71% year-on-year and 8% sequentially. This overall number included revenue from fees of approximately $259 million, which was up 54% year-on-year, but short of our internal expectations by roughly 6%, mainly for the model-related reasons previously mentioned. Within fee revenues, our servicing revenue stream continued its steady growth clip at a 10% sequential rate.

Much of the shortfall in expected fees was counterbalanced by higher-than-expected net interest income of approximately $19 million, resulting from continuing strong return performance on a loan balance that remains temporarily elevated. To reiterate, we are aiming to enter into a phase of reducing our R&D-related balance sheet holdings, which we anticipate will gain steam in Q4 and continue into 2026, and would expect this revenue item to moderate as we are successful. The volume of loan transactions across our platform was approximately 428,000, up 128% from the prior year and 15% sequentially, and representing approximately 300,000 new borrowers. Average loan size of approximately $6,670 was 12% lower than the prior quarter from a combination of borrowers requesting lower loan amounts, a model exercising increased caution in approving loan sizes, and a mix shift towards smaller loan products and risk grades.

Our contribution margin, a non-GAAP metric, which we define as revenue from fees minus variable costs for borrower acquisition, verification, and servicing as a percentage of revenue from fees, came in at 57% in Q3, down approximately one percentage point from the prior quarter and versus guidance, as lower conversion rates created some mild upward pressure on both acquisition and onboarding unit costs. In total, GAAP operating expenses were around $253 million in Q3, roughly flat to Q2. Expenses that are considered variable relating to borrower acquisition, verification, and servicing were up 11% sequentially relative to the 15% increase in volume of loan transactions. Fixed expenses were actually down 7% quarter on quarter, largely due to a reduction in compensation-related accruals. Q3 GAAP net income was approximately positive $32 million.

Well ahead of expectation and reflecting outperformance on net interest income, reduced fixed costs, and a $7.2 million gain on our convertible debt repurchase. GAAP earnings per share was $0.23 based on a diluted weighted average share count of 110 million. Adjusted EBITDA was roughly $71 million, also correspondingly ahead of expectation. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.52 based on a diluted weighted average share count of 125 million. We ended Q3 with approximately $1.2 billion of loans held directly on our balance sheet, up from just over a billion dollars in Q2. As shared last quarter, we have multiple new products simultaneously exiting R&D status and entering into the scale-up phase.

And our business development efforts this past quarter have been aimed at putting in place the third-party capital arrangements that will enable us to shift away from balance sheet funding on these emergent products and release back our invested capital. We are very pleased with the progress of these efforts and believe that we are on a path to putting multiple agreements in place across all of these new product lines, which will set them up to further scale in 2026. Exact deal timing is, of course, not perfectly predictable, and it is important for us to do the right deals with the right partners. So we will take the necessary time to ensure we are well set up on this front for next year.

In the meantime, returns from our balance sheet holdings continue to be strong, delivering healthy spreads above market base rates, as can be seen in the data on page 23 of our earnings presentation. As we look to Q4, the broader economic backdrop for credit remains favorable in our estimation. Decelerating personal consumption growth is a signal of improving credit health, if perhaps counterintuitively so. Against this, we perceive a labor market that has remained at full employment since lockdown, meaning there are as many open jobs as job seekers in the economy, as well as a muted impact of the recent tariff policies on inflation and a gradual easing of the monetary climate. In this scenario, we once again assume a stable UMI, as well as holiday seasonality typical of Q4, which tends to serve as a mild headwind.

We expect the impact of any further rate cuts this year to both improve consumer financial health and lower investor return requirements, but at this stage, any such effects would not be felt until the new year. In this environment, we will continue to produce model and targeting accuracy gains as well as automation wins to grow our top line. Our net interest income will start to benefit from the returns on our committed capital investments that were made in prior years. Now that our P&L is once again back to profitability, we will plan to begin dialing up our forward investment into customer lifetime value by slightly moderating take rates in exchange for higher origination volumes and higher repeat transactions in the future. And as usual, we will expect to continue our fixed expense discipline in how we manage the cost side of our business.

With this context, for Q4 of 2025, we are expecting total revenues of approximately $288 million, consisting of revenue from fees of approximately $262 million and total net interest income of approximately $26 million. Contribution margin of approximately 53%. GAAP net income of approximately $17 million. Adjusted net income of approximately $52 million, adjusted EBITDA of approximately $63 million, with a basic weighted average share count of approximately 98 million shares and a diluted weighted average share count of approximately 111 million shares. For the full year of 2025, we now expect total revenues of approximately $1.035 billion, consisting of revenue from fees of approximately $946 million and net interest income of approximately $89 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 22%, and we expect GAAP net income of approximately $50 million.

Before we move to Q&A, I will take the opportunity to thank all of the various teams across Upstart for their hard work and continuing dedication to our mission. And with that, Operator, over to you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing Star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you’re using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press Star 1 to ask a question. We’ll pause for just a moment to allow everyone the opportunity to signal for a question. Our first question comes from Dan Doleav with Mizuho.

Hey, guys. Good evening. Thank you so much for taking my question. Really appreciate it. Just wanted to ask a quick question on the application demand. It seems very strong, quarter over quarter. Maybe Sanjay, if you can comment on sort of the strong demand in the third quarter and then maybe just kind of tie it all into the guidance, which was a little bit below what we were expecting and below the guidance in Tokyo. So how do you square these two things together? Thank you.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Hey, Dan, this is Dave. Yeah, as we said in the remarks, we grew applications about 30% quarter on quarter, which was ahead of the origination, the transaction volume quarter on quarter. And really, a lot of things came together in terms of just marketing programs and cross-selling and all these things. So the application growth is certainly great to see. I think what it really highlights is our model took a step towards conservatism during the third quarter just based on seeing macro factors. And I think that is just sort of a natural thing we might expect. As we said, it’s kind of since reverted, but it was a period of time where it saw signals it was moving quickly. And I think sort of maybe overreacting. I think in some sense, having a model that overreacts is better than having ones that underreact because it did revert.

But I think it is useful to point out that the application volume was quite strong, our strongest in three years, and grew quite a lot. And I think that’s a very healthy statement for the business, even if it didn’t in Q3 translate into as much volume as we expected.

Great. Thank you all. Nice results overall. Appreciate it.

Conference Operator: If you find that your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing Star 2. We’ll go to our next question from Kyle Peterson with Needham.

Great. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask if specifically in auto, obviously, there’s been some high-profile kind of bankruptcies and kind of negative credit events in the spaces. Has any of the headlines or news impacted your expansion plans or how conversations with customers are going? Or I guess just how has the recent news and events impacted how you guys are viewing things and progressing in auto right now?

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Yeah. None of that has had direct impact on us, for sure. We have not seen that type of the couple of examples that were out there of fraudulent activity, so I don’t think it’s anything that we would describe as widespread. It’s not something from our perspective that is widespread. I think when you have examples like that, it does create a little bit of caution in the market, so banks or others providing senior financing probably doing a bit more diligence, et cetera. But I don’t think there’s any kind of wholesale change in the market, but that is the sort of nature of it.

A couple of the larger banks got bit on that particular auto lender, but we’ve been pretty rigorous about building processes to make sure we’re effectively underwriting the dealership themselves and mitigating risks against dealer activity that’s not what we want, so this is an area that I think we’re handling well. We have not seen any major issues, but again, I think whenever you read headlines of that, it does cause a little caution in terms of increasing amounts of diligence or questions that need to be asked, et cetera, but that’s sort of par for the course.

Okay. Appreciate the color, and that’s helpful. I guess as a follow-up, I wanted to specifically ask about kind of what you guys are seeing in the superprime segment. I guess looking at the originations, it was down a little bit sequentially. So I guess, was that where the model tightness that you guys called out? Did you see a little more in that 720-plus FICO score there versus the core product? Or is there more competition there? I guess just what are you guys seeing? And is any of that concentrated more in the superprime? Just trying to think how we should square that with some of the positive commentary on demand and funding capacity from your bank partners.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. Hey, Kyle. This is Sanjay. I think it’s a combination of things. I mean, the thing you pointed out is definitely a factor, meaning our models reacted in a general way to some macro signals, as Dave described. I think that was true of the primary segments as well. In fact, if you look at segmentation of our UMI. The subprime near-prime consumer is actually at a relatively low UMI, probably somewhere around 1.2, 1.3. And if you start to look into the segments in the sort of low to mid 700s, it’s quite a bit higher. So there was definitely a model impact. I think it’s fair to say that it’s also a very competitive segment. And we see other growth numbers in that segment, and they’re healthy. So there’s probably some impact or aspect of competition as well.

Okay. Thank you for taking my questions.

Conference Operator: And once again, if you’d like to ask a question, please press Star 1. We’ll take our next question from Pete Christiansen with City.

Good evening, Dave, Paul, Sanjay. Thanks for the question here. Kind of want to follow up on some of the earlier questions as it relates to the improvements that you made with your marketing channels, which sounds pretty exciting and obviously illustrated by the higher amount of applications. Is there a way, at least your sense for the quality of these leads? I know the AI system was a bit conservative this quarter, so kind of taking that into account, do you think that the quality of applications has remained the same or maybe improved or what have you with some of these new capabilities? Thank you.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Hey, Peter. This is Paul. Yeah. So I spoke in my prepared remarks. Nice wins we had in applying AI to customer acquisition. And the way you can think about those wins is ultimately, at the point of customer acquisition, we are somewhat indifferent between selecting for people who have a high propensity to apply and people who have a high propensity to convert or be approved. And ultimately, it’s the product of those two things that we’re solving for, of course. And so the improvements we make can help one, both, or ultimately just the product of those things. And so obviously, we did have a larger increase in applications relative to where the final kind of originations count ended up. So I think mechanically you can infer from that a change in the likelihood to convert through the funnel. Of course, the conversion rates are lower.

Now, that’s in large part, as we already said, because we were knowingly making a choice with our model to be a little bit more conservative on the credit side in earlier parts of the quarter. So relative to that model, of course, we did end up marketing to people who were a little less likely to be approved or a little less likely to convert. But that’s not necessarily a sort of chosen strategy.

That’s helpful, Paul. Thank you. And my second question. Non-prime auto has had elevated delinquencies even before some of the more noticeable news events that’s been happening in this space for a couple of months now. Dave, I’m just curious, if we were to see an improvement in that specific category, would that be a needle mover for Upstart’s auto originations? Thanks.

Yeah. We’ve seen very good credit performance in auto, so we do feel good that our models are working, that they’ve been calibrated. To the extent others are having issues or what have you, maybe some are withdrawing from the market, those can be good things. Maybe it suggests a transition or an inflection point in the market, so for us, it is just really important we get calibration, we get more separation, we bring partners on, we keep refining the processes, and I think it’s going really well on all fronts there, so I think 2026, we do feel very optimistic that the auto business as a whole is going to be a contributor. Again, a little disruption or a little noise in the market when you’re new like us to it can be a good thing. It means there’s an opportunity when things are shifting.

Absolutely. Thanks for the color. Very helpful.

Conference Operator: We’ll move to our next question from Simon Clinch with Rothschild and Company, Redburn.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to just jump back to the first question, really, about the application volume growth that you saw. And just, Sanjay, if you could just remind us what you said about what’s implied in the fourth quarter, because it sounds like you’re assuming that the conservatism in the model is going to continue in the fourth quarter despite your comments around the UMI actually starting to show some signs of improvement. Is that correct?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Hey, Simon. I guess I would note that the improvements in UMIs are materializing. As usual, we are sort of conservative and wanting to watch them bake, and we’re already past the month of October, so some amount of Q4 was impacted by that UMI rise as well. Even though it is now subsiding, we will, of course, follow it with some lag, so I think that what we described is the model impact in Q3, even though it appears to be abating, will impact Q4 as well.

Understood. Okay. Thanks. And just as a follow-up then. When we look at the broad demand for personal loan growth, I mean, the kind of view I’ve had through most of this year, and I think it’s consensus view, is that there’s a lot of demand for just refinancing credit card debt. Is that still very much the case that’s really sort of driving that personal loan demand? Or are we seeing that kind of demand broaden out into other drivers?

I think refinancing debt really continues to be the dominant use case for personal loans, but it is very much the duct tape of credit. It is useful for so many things, and so there’s a very long tail of ways that people use personal loans. I think in some cases, because the process is so much simpler and the rates can be quite competitive, that it does compete at some places with secured loans, whether that would be to buy a used car off of a website or what have you, places where you might otherwise or a home improvement where you don’t want to get a HELOC, so I think an unsecured loan, if it’s fast, easy, and the rate’s competitive, will always just sort of be very, very broadly useful to the consumer.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Conference Operator: We’ll go next to Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler.

Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I just have one on the balance sheet expansion you saw in the quarter. Just wondering how conversations with some of the potential funding partners of the R&D products have trended recently. And then you touched earlier on the auto, some of the credit issues we’ve seen recently in auto and how that’s impacted the consumer. But has there been any contraction in demand from any of your private credit partners there? And then I understand that they’re kind of waiting to see how the portfolios see it in some of those R&D products. Is there anything you can share with us there on how they’re feeling about that and how those conversations have gone? Thanks.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. Hey, Patrick. This is Sanjay. Yeah. As we said in the remarks, we’re very pleased with the direction of all of those conversations. We’re obviously having them across a number of different new product areas right now. I think appetite is good. These are large deals, multi-year timeframe and large check size. So there’s a lot of diligence in these conversations and these processes. And they are not perfectly predictable in terms of timeline. But with respect to progress, I think it’s all going well. We’re excited about all of it. On the auto side in particular, I don’t think there’s any concerns about credit, to be honest, at least in the loans that we’re producing. I think the credit performance is pretty clear. As Dave mentioned, there’s some broader noise about fraud in the space.

And I do believe that has probably lengthened timelines in terms of these processes. Everyone’s diligence lists have sort of doubled and tripled in size. And so that’s sort of a component with respect to timing. But I don’t think it’s really changed the motivation or the appetite at all with respect to the specific conversations we’re having. And I do believe we have enough seasoning now in our portfolio for people to look at our loan tapes and get a really good sense for calibration and for how the credit is performing. So it’s really just deal processes, legal processes, getting in place, financing, bank relationships, etc. So they’re heavy lifts, but I think we’re very happy with how they’re going. We’re very excited about the partners we’re talking with. And as we said, we hope to have some tangible outcomes for you guys to digest pretty soon.

Okay. That’s great, color. Thanks for that. That’s it for me.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Mahir Bhatia with Bank of America.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to start with the conversion rate. You talked a little bit about the conversion rate being impacted by higher UMI. Is that the primary factor? Are there other factors that maybe we aren’t seeing or you aren’t seeing from the outside inside the models that’s driving it? And then just on conversion rate, Paul, I think, mentioned. Touched on limiting variability in the metric going forward. Can you talk about that some more? And if there’s a particular level that should stabilize that, like is this 2020 low 20% the right level? Yeah. Thanks.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Dave, I’ll cover the first half of the question, then Paul can answer the second. No, really, the conservatism in the model is, from our point of view, pretty much the dominant driver of the change in conversion rate. So it comes in the form of a small fraction, fewer people approved. The rates they’re approved at being a little bit higher, which means just marginally less likely to take that loan. And then sometimes the approved loan size being a little smaller. So that is the basics of a slightly more conservative twist in the model. So again, we don’t believe this is anything sustainable, and we do think that we’ll get to a model that’s a little less responsive, honestly. It may be over-responsive in this particular case. But no, there’s no other factor going on.

As you kind of saw, the application volume is quite strong, and then on the second part of the question about the reduction in kind of volatility around conversion rates and specifically around the sort of macro calibration contribution to conversion rates. So a few things to understand about this. The first is, as Dave said, one of the single largest contributors almost every quarter to the overall conversion rate is the state of macro conditions. If borrowers are generally financially healthy, that’s going to be helpful. If borrowers are struggling, that’s going to be unhelpful, and that’s just because, of course, approvability is such a big kind of immutable part of conversion. I want to point out that there is a second component of conversion, which is also not necessarily normative. It’s not good or bad, and that’s the mix of applicants.

We talked a little about this earlier in the question about targeting and what kinds of people come in the door. And there’s always some trade-off between propensity to apply and propensity to be approved or convert, and so there’s always an optimization going on there. And I think that’s neither good nor bad. It’s just we do what’s optimal for the business, and so that can cause it to move a little bit. But the thing that I was referencing earlier in my prepared remarks about what happened this quarter and the sort of improvements we’ve made that we expect to be durable and lasting with respect to reducing variance on this metric specifically has to do with managing how the model responds to the latest signals in macro.

So over the last few years, one of the things that we invested the most heavily in was building our models in such a way that we think they are the fastest, most precise at responding to the sort of latest patterns in borrower repayment, including at the macro level. So if it’s like federal employees or if it’s like service sector workers or if it’s. High sort of primeness borrowers or low primeness borrowers that are being impacted, or it’s everybody being impacted by a sort of big macro event, we want our models to be the very fastest at responding and respond as precisely as the data allows. And so we’ve made a ton of progress towards that. We’re very proud of the sort of system we’ve designed and built.

But one of the side effects of that system is that it can be a little overly responsive to the latest changes. And that in addition to being responsive, there’s always some kind of sampling and measurement error. You can think about we have, of course, a large amount of data, but relative to all people in the U.S. or the whole economy, it’s still a relatively small sample. And so there’s a natural kind of statistical sampling error that comes about from that. And we were doing a lot of work this quarter on understanding how much sort of natural error there is in the match between the sample and the actual levels of calibration. And then we devised some techniques to be able to shrink that measurement error by about half so that we don’t have as much what I call unwanted sort of variance in this metric.

We really just want the model to respond to real changes as opposed to changes that are just measurement error. And we were able to reduce that measurement error by a very significant amount this quarter, which means that in future periods, we expect that all else equal, we will see less volatility in our conversion rates as affected by macro. So that’s good.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Got it. That’s super helpful, Paul. Thank you. And Sanjay, I think you also called out repayments have increased. In the script. Any theories on what is driving that? Is that folks refinancing loans away from you at a lower rate? Is that borrower financial health just improving so the people are repaying their loans faster? Can you just talk a little bit about what’s going on there and just the credit implications of that? Have you seen delinquency rates already move because of that? Thank you.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. Hey, Mahir. I mean, as we said, it’s sort of an empirical observation that repayment speeds have increased. It seems pretty broad. I mean, I think there’s a lot of theories as to what’s behind it, but we don’t know for sure, obviously. It seems to be broader than just one specific use case, meaning I don’t think it’s just a refi boom. It seems to be happening across both partial and full repayments, which would imply that it’s something broader than just sort of a spike in refinancing, and as we said, in the broader scheme of things, this is typically a good thing, right? When repayments are happening faster, you’d expect that it’s on some level a reflection of improving underlying consumer health. You’d expect it to be inversely correlated to defaults over time, so that’s what we would like to see.

But in isolation, if with all else constant repayment happens faster, in the immediate term it means there’s a little bit less interest to be earned on the loans to offset the defaults, and so in the immediate term your model becomes a little bit more conservative on pricing. It puts a bit more coupon into the loans so that it sort of compensates for the fact that the duration of the loan has become shorter in a sense, so there’s a bit of an immediate conservatism by the model. I think in the broader scheme of things we’re pretty excited to see it because it means that on some level personal fiscal situations are probably a little bit more stable.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Got it. Thank you for taking my questions.

Conference Operator: We’ll move next to Reggie Smith with JP Morgan.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: I’m asking the same question. That leads into the origination number again. But I guess my question is. Thinking about. Obviously, there’s two components to the conversion rate. There’s what you guys are approving and then the consumer acceptance. I was curious if either had. An outsized impact on the conversion rate. And then I was also curious, as you look at your application flow, much of it, do you have a sense of is. Shown, I guess, comparison pricing with other. Loan products? So I don’t know if your loans are shown against. LendingClub or SoFi or something like that. If you had a sense of that mix. And the reason I ask both of these questions is that, obviously, those two companies had very strong origination trends this last quarter.

And I’m just trying to figure out if there was a share shift, if you guys were fighting with one hand tied behind your back because of your model. Just trying to sort through all that stuff. So anything you can provide there would be helpful. I had one follow-up.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. Hey, this is Paul. Yeah. The conversion changes were predominantly related to our model’s level of conservatism, so reflected in approvals primarily. And that tends to be the single most sensitive metric. When you flip someone from approved to denied, you have a 100% decline in their relative conversion rate. So that’s the thing that’s most sensitive and tends to dominate changes in the metric. And that was what happened in this particular time period.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Got it. And so I guess you were declining superprime applicants? Because I think you talked about there being some sensitivity in that area. Is that the right way to think about it?

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: No.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: No, declines don’t happen at the superprime area. The rates just move up a little bit. For somebody that would be in sort of that end of the spectrum. It’s at the other end of the spectrum where there’s a lot of declines. So the combination of those two things are what really amount to a lower conversion. Okay. And then if I could ask one more, just thinking about the HELOC product, and I know it’s early days, but how should we think about the, I guess, kind of day-one economics or take rate for that product relative to, I guess, your base corporate average?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Hey, Reggie. Let’s see. I mean, I think in the past, we’ve alluded to the fact that take rates will be healthy but a little bit more modest than in PL, but on much larger loan sizes. So without sort of quite knowing exact numbers yet, maybe you could think about a take rate that’s maybe roughly half the amount, but a loan size that’s certainly far more than double.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: And then last one, I guess nothing to call out from a credit performance in your book, despite what you guys were seeing in the UMI, just to be clear.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: That’s correct. We’ve seen exceptional credit performance, and that’s kind of the whole reason for UMI is to make proper adjustments. Also, Reggie, your question that we sort of didn’t get to, what others are doing in the market and if they’re growing at higher rates at this particular period of time, we obviously don’t know what’s behind their rates. We don’t know what their models look like, how quickly they respond to signals they see. There’s no question if you just look at the nature of lending. There’s always a way to grow, and in our view, the model is always right. The model is going to tell us what to approve and at what price, and we don’t overrule the model, so I think that’s probably our way of looking at it.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: It sounds like, if I’m hearing you right, that the model may have given you guys a false negative and a blip, and things are better than what may have been showing up a couple of months ago in the model.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: I mean, we don’t know that it’s a false negative. It may be something that’s helpful to us down the road that it saw what it saw, and it priced what it priced. So. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was in any sense a false negative. It’s a constantly learning system.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Got it. Okay. No, that’s helpful. Sanjay, you were going to say something?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Nope. Nothing to add. Thanks, Reggie.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Thank you.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from James Fawcett with Morgan Stanley.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Thank you very much. Just a couple of quick follow-ups for me. Can you give any specificity to what elements of the model kind of you saw weaken and then subsequently improve or other indications? Just trying to get a sense of where your systems may have been looking versus the broader market.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. I think, first of all, we definitely wouldn’t describe the model as weakening. The model, as a reminder, our primary performance metric for the model is model separation. And our separation accuracy metrics are our highest ever. The other metric that we track very closely is what we call model calibration. And that’s about how, really, the question of credit performance. And as has been said several times, credit performance really has been exceptionally strong for us in this time period. And so what was weaker in this period was the model’s ability to approve as many people or convert as many people. And that certainly was less. That was a direct result of the sort of increased conservatism that resulted from the model observing a couple of months of elevated sort of risk signals in various pockets of borrowers.

And so that you can think of as sort of more of what we call a macro change that the model was responding to. I think you could, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, you could call that a bit of a false negative, I suppose. But of course, I think in the moment, there is a correctness to reacting to the signals that you’re seeing. And I think we directionally think that is the right thing to do. That’s what we’d like our model to continue doing. I did say that. Some of that reaction we think was due to a certain natural noise in what I call sampling or measurement error. And we did come up with some really good ways to reduce that. And so that noise going forward will be a whole lot less, which is a really, really great technical win for us.

But ultimately, there is some level of directional responsiveness that we always want the model to have to the latest changes and what’s going on in the world. And if that means that for a month or two, the model gets more conservative, we think that’s just the right thing to do.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Very good. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification there. And then as you look forward to December quarter and as you’re forecasting, how are you thinking about kind of exit rates? You made it pretty clear that you think that there’ll be a little bit of lagging or continuing effect as we go into the fourth quarter. But are you expecting that by the time we get to the end of the quarter, you’ll be kind of back? And how are you feeling about the right way that we should be thinking about the run rates as we go into 2026? Thanks.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: I think we’re quite optimistic on the quarter. I mean, I think we have good growth rates. We are taking an appropriate level of conservatism. We have a very, very good pipeline of model improvements that very typically will drive conversion rates up. So in our view, actually, a lot of things are working really well, and it’s really important from our perspective to say that. The model taking a bit of a conservative breather is a feature, not a bug, and if others aren’t doing the same, maybe we’ll figure out why over time, but it’s a strength of the model, not a weakness, that it’s making different decisions or taking a different take on the market, but in the grander scheme of things, we think that consumer health is good. We think our models are getting better. The new products are breaking out.

So we think we’re in for a very strong 2026 and feel very good about the fourth quarter as well.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: That’s great. Thank you so much.

Conference Operator: We’ll move next to.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Thanks, James.

Conference Operator: Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Hi, guys. One more question on this subprime/superprime point. I mean, Sanjay, I think you mentioned that the UMI is lower for subprime, higher for some of the higher FICOs. If we zoom way out, we all see and hear a lot of headlines around this K-shaped economy where superprime is doing quite well. And subprime is struggling. So why do you think there’s that difference between what the UMI suggests but what we’re seeing and hearing more broadly?

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Hey, Rob. It’s a good question. I mean, we see directly, obviously, the data we have at our disposal. I think maybe it’s important to be precise with labels. So just to be very precise, if you think about the sub-660 population as measured through the traditional credit score lens, that is a population that, in our estimation, is in reasonably, I would say, actually quite good shape with respect to what their same default trends were pre-COVID. And so consequently, the UMI is relatively modest. If you go into the primary end of unsecured lending, so now let’s talk about a 720 to 750 sort of segment. Those default rates are quite elevated compared to those same default rates pre-COVID, and their UMIs are consequently quite a bit higher. And of course, we would talk about that segment as being a prime segment in the context of unsecured lending.

Now, if you go to an even higher FICO segment than that, let’s talk about the 800-plus segment. That is a population that I think is actually doing very well. They probably don’t do a lot of unsecured borrowing, though. So they’re not maybe in our label set or in our data set. And so I think you have this U-shaped thing in the economy. Where at the very sort of low end or maybe sort of the low end of the unsecured lending spectrum, let’s call it mid-600s, things are very good. And at the very high end, maybe even beyond the unsecured borrowing population, things are quite good. And then there’s a peak in the middle.

And so I think we all use different labels to refer to different parts of that spectrum, whether one part is prime or subprime or superprime or even not even in your data set. But I mean, very specifically, I think that’s what we see.

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Okay. Thanks. And then just quickly, a couple of the OpEx lines caught our attention. Engineering and G&A were both lower sequentially, better than what we were all expecting, again, better than what was implied by the guidance. Can you give some colors on the drivers there?

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Sure. Yeah. I mean, some of this is our ongoing sort of fixed expense discipline, which we’ve been focused on for some time. Some of that is, frankly, mechanical. As we reduce our outlook as a business for this year, we will reduce our expectation for things like bonus payouts and other comp accruals. And so there’s a bit of a mechanical adjustment to a lower outlook that sort of reduces the fixed cost base as well, which is working as designed.

Dave Girouard, Co-Founder and CEO, Upstart: Yep. Thank you.

Conference Operator: We’ll go next to John Hect with Jefferies.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Yeah. First question is, you talked about the use case for the broader. Unsecured loans. It looks like your HELOC loans are $55,000-$60,000 on average. Can you give us the use case there?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Home equity loans are general-purpose loans. So people tap them for lots of reasons. We don’t have a breakout today of what the use case is for ours in particular. But of course, people know the most obvious thing is oftentimes used for home improvement, but quite often can be used for other types of debt retirement or anything. So we think of HELOCs and personal loans as having, in some sense, being trade-offs for each other with respect to a general-purpose set of funds. A little bit different rates, different process. But in some sense, they are substitutes for each other.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Okay. And then I know this might sound a little bit like beating a dead horse, but just on this concept of the UMI and the tightening or conservatism. And the dichotomy just from what we’ve seen some auto finance companies, some unsecured lenders, subprime, prime. And virtually everybody we’ve covered this quarter has experienced good volumes, but not only good volumes, but really positive credit trends. You guys talk about this concept of calibration over and over. I guess maybe what I’m seeking is, so does your engine not disclose to you what it’s seeing that’s causing the difference between it and the market? Or are you able to see why it’s doing things different? You mentioned pockets of weaknesses in certain populations. Again, what population or what demographic was that? Or geography or something?

I mean, is there something you can point to so we get an understanding of what is this black box doing to some degree?

Sanjay Datta, CFO, Upstart: Yeah. I think the principal way that you should think about this is we’ve intentionally built our system so that it can respond faster than traditional credit metrics would. So, in our experience, when other players talk about their credit performance, it’s a very backwards-looking metric in the sense that you’re typically looking at a somewhat mature cohort of loans that is, and you’re measuring something like the actual charge-off rates. If you think about charge-offs in a lot of something like auto, you’re often talking about something that could go 180 days since it was first delinquent. And then there’s mixed effects, and then there’s sort of effects from new populations getting originated and mixed in there.

And the confounding variables that come with all of those things generally create a pretty substantial obscuring effect to being able to tell what’s really going on in credit performance in real time. And so we’ve built a system that is much better at precisely being able to, in real time, tell you what actually is going on when you control for all of those variables. So think of it as a system where holding constant all of the changes in your borrower population across, in our case, the thousands of variables that we use to actually underwrite and understand the risk of loans. When you control for all of those things, you control for the timing, the cohorts, the vintages, then what are you actually seeing and how does that interact with any of these thousands of variables so that you can actually see the sort of underlying patterns?

And that, I would say, one possibility is that you could see something that’s very segment-specific. I don’t think that’s the kind of story we have in this particular period. The other thing that it very simply lets you see is if there is an across-the-board move that would have been either detected three or six months later by traditional credit metrics or wouldn’t have been detected at all because it would have gotten obscured by the sort of changing mixes or new originations getting blended in. And in our case, we’re able to see that. Now, again, as I said earlier, I think it’s possible to be overreactive to sort of that precise, that fast-moving of a signal. And I think we optimize the balance a little bit better through some of our work this particular quarter.

But ultimately, our goal is to be faster and more precise than anybody else in market can be. And so we don’t find it necessarily surprising that there are periods of time where others are saying one thing and we’re saying totally the opposite.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: Okay. Thanks.

Conference Operator: It appears there are no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the conference back to Dave Girouard for any additional or closing remarks.

Paul Gu, Co-Founder and CTO, Upstart: All righty. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. We’re excited to finish the year with a flurry of activity and progress when setting ourselves up for an amazing 2026, Upstart, and our shareholders. Thanks for joining us today.

Conference Operator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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