Better Home & Finance Holding Company

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator. Today's conference is scheduled to begin momentarily. Until that time, your lines again will be placed on a music hold. Thank you for your patience. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Better Homes and Finance Holding Company fourth quarter and full year 2025 results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, Simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tariq Afifi, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Welcome to Better Home and Finance Holdings Company's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Tariq Afifi on Better's Corporate Finance team. Joining me on today's call are Vishal Garg, founder and chief executive officer of Better, and Levine Advani, chief financial officer of Better. In addition to this conference call, please direct your attention to our fourth quarter and full year earnings release, which is available on our investor relations website. Also available on our website is an investor presentation. Certain statements we make today may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws that are based on current expectations and assumptions. These expectations and assumptions are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors as discussed further in our FCC filings that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our historical results. We assume no responsibility to update forward-looking statements other than as required by law. During today's discussion, management will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe are relevant in assessing the company's financial performance. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered replacements for and should be read together with our GAAP results. These non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled to GAAP financial measures in today's earnings release and investor presentation, both of which are available on the investor relations section of Better's website and when filed in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. More information as of and for the period ended December 31st, 2025 will be provided upon filing our annual report on Form 10-K with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Vishal.

Thank you, Tarek. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. Before I begin, I'd like to give a warm welcome to our new Chief Financial Officer, Levine Advani. Levine is a seasoned strategic and operational finance leader with a strong track record of guiding companies through growth and transformation. He has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to align strategy, capital allocation, and execution. His experience and leadership style will be instrumental as we execute our strategic and financial priorities in our next chapter of anticipated growth. What's more, I love him because he gets his hands dirty and his hands on keyboard. When I first met him, he sent me over a model and we started spending time on it one-on-one late at night. That is the kind of CFO that this company needs for the next stage of its blitz scale growth. And we are so, so happy to have Levine on board with us. Better is a vertical AI platform fundamentally reshaping and revolutionizing the home finance industry. We are building the AI native frontier of consumer finance, and in doing so, enabling players with massive customer bases to provide mortgages and HELOCs in an AI-first way to their customers, while empowering the established network of local retail mortgage originators. Adoption across the ecosystem confirms this shift is real and accelerating. This is the power of the Tin Man AI platform. Over the past decade, we have built a first of its kind AI-driven matching engine that connects consumer credit data, income data, asset data, and property data with the preferences of roughly 40 different investors on our platform, allowing us to approve mortgages and home equity loans nearly instantly. The result is a process that is faster, cheaper, easier, and just plain better. We are in the middle of a genuine transformation from what was once a direct-to-consumer mortgage business serving consumers who came to Better.com to an AI-native mortgage platform serving the entire mortgage industry. Over the past decade, we've built the technology, the infrastructure, and the investor relationships to manufacture mortgages faster and cheaper than anyone else. Today, we're taking that foundation and extending it across the entire ecosystem, powering partners with massive customer bases and enabling local retail brokers and originators to scale in ways that simply were not possible before. That shift is now showing in our results and in the momentum we are building with our enterprise partners. These are large, complex partnerships with longer sales and setup cycles than anything we managed in our DDC business. And growing them is not something we do alone. It requires deep collaboration with our partners at every step, from integration and onboarding to conversion optimization and product expansion. The pace of RAMP is a shared journey, and we are working hand in hand with each of our partners to get things scaling. The progress we are seeing is real. The early data is highly encouraging, and we are more excited than ever about what lies ahead. Let me walk you through what we are seeing across each of our key partnerships. As you know, we launched the largest platform partnership in Betters history with Intuit Credit Karma, a leading personal financial services company serving more than 40 million monthly active users. Last year alone, Intuit Credit Karma processed 47 million tax returns and reached over 140 million members. In fact, more than 80% of Americans who took out a mortgage last year are members on the Intuit Credit Karma platform. Through this partnership, we are integrating the breadth and depth of Credit Karma's member data, including credit, income, and home attributes, such as full credit bureaus, tax returns, and detailed home valuations directly into the Tin Man AI platform. As you might remember from our public announcement, Credit Karma's goal is to save its members $1 trillion in interest savings on their mortgages. This is no small task, and it implies that our collective partnership which is saving consumers about $25,000 of lifetime interest on average since we launched in October 2025, needs to fund 40 million mortgages to achieve Credit Karma's goal. In October 2025, after over nine months of working together, we went live on the Credit Karma app and since have rapidly ramped and have only penetrated less than 1% of their monthly user base that we believe is eligible for the product. The opportunity is massive, and our primary focus is deepening integration of the Tin Man AI platform across the various Credit Karma consumer touchpoints to better serve the full needs of its entire member base. Also, through our Tin Man AI platform, we continue to make great progress extending our platform to our local retail mortgage lenders, providing them with the infrastructure to build and scale their businesses on top of our technology. We continue to scale NIO with their local loan officer teams across the United States experiencing rapid growth. Here, Better enables retail mortgage lenders to build their business on the Tin Man platform with near zero customer acquisition cost on this channel. It's been incredible to see the NIO team grow their business from the billion and a half run rate they had when they joined to the 2.4 billion run rate they ended 2025 with on the Tin Man AI platform. It's proven that the Tin Man AI platform eliminates friction, giving originators the opportunity to scale responsibly, with 28 new loan officer teams onboarded onto the platform in 2025. Within six months of fully rolling out, NEO increased funded loans per mortgage advisor by 91%, per processor by 17%, and per underwriter by nearly 50%. Retail mortgage teams around the country are taking notice of these enhancements and are leaving their existing platforms to join the better platform and to embark on our shared journey of making retail home lending cheaper, faster, easier, and just plain better. Next, our top five U.S. non-bank mortgage loan originator partner went live this February with just 2% of its loan officers on the Tin Man AI platform. And in the coming months, we are working towards expanding to all 3000 plus loan officers. Early reports indicate superior loan officer experience for users of Tin Man versus the prior implementation on their legacy software stack. As this rollout scales to their full loan officer base, we expect this partnership to be transformative for both organizations, adding a significant platform volume opportunity for better while giving one of the largest mortgage originators in the country a competitive advantage in how they serve their customers. In addition, Finance of America, which is an industry-leading reverse mortgage lender with access to millions of customers who are typically home equity rich but cash flow disadvantaged, is in its early stages of ramping. Together, we are launching the first HELOC and HELON product offerings to their customers, powered by our Tin Man AI. We have high hopes of being able to reach a population that better has traditionally not reached the senior market with our partnership with Finance of America and expect to see significant results from that partnership in the coming quarters at. And finally, we announced a major milestone, the launch of the first conversational credit decision engine for mortgages and home equity loans integrated directly into ChatGPT through our Tin Man AI app. Loan officers, banks, and fintechs can now receive decision-ready credit outputs in as little as 47 seconds, reducing origination timelines by an average of 21 days. Better is the only application authorized to display credit decisions within ChatGPT, powered by a proprietary MCP technology built on top of Tin Man. Tin Man can instantly underwrite approximately 95% of mortgage and home equity loan types, and any institution with a Chatsy PC enterprise license can deploy it. No traditional aggregators, no markups. This opens a significant new distribution channel and a clear path to expanding into a direct-to-consumer channel over time. As you might remember, OpenAI and ChatGPT have over 800 million users globally and over 80 million users in the United States, with that number growing rapidly. We believe this is the third version of the Internet, and we are first to market with a clear differentiated offering from the other folks that have launched apps on OpenAI and ChatGPT, and with the ability to not provide a marketplace or provide a solution which then requires consumers to leave the platform, but actually to provide a solution that enables consumers to fulfill the entire transaction directly within their ChatGPT interface. Since our OpenAI announcement, we have seen a massive immediate response from across the financial services industry. Within days of releasing a short demonstration video last week, we've received inbound interest from over 40 financial institutions, mortgage companies, banks, fintechs, all reaching out at the most senior levels to request a demo and work with us on deploying our ChatGPT application. As an example, a bank CEO in the South reached out after seeing the announcement. They want to grow their mortgage business, but not the way they tried before through hiring large teams, building out fixed infrastructure, and taking on the operational burden that comes with it. What resonated with them was the simplicity of the ChatGPT app and the idea that any loan officer in any branch can instantly qualify a consumer for a mortgage through a conversational interface. Minimal setup time, minimal training, maximum reach. This is exactly the problem we set out to solve. The mortgage industry has long been trapped in a cyclical model, scaling up headcount in good markets and cutting in bad ones with fixed costs that punish originators when volumes decline. Tin Man fundamentally changes that dynamic. The infrastructure we have built and proven with our current partners can be deployed for any bank, fintech, or local originator team. We are giving institutions the flexibility to grow their mortgage business without the operational burden that has historically made that growth so difficult to sustain. We have two strategies when it comes to go to market on the Tin Man AI platform. The first is to own the future. With partnerships like the ones we have done with Credit Karma and OpenAI, where we are developing new ways to reach tens of millions of consumers, that are substantially easier and faster for consumers to use, and leveraging our technology to create a customer experience and value proposition moat that no one else in the industry can match. The second is to bring the past forward, which is what we have done with NIO and Finance of America and the top five mortgage originators. Better is the mechanism by which these local market experts and large existing mortgage originators with deep relationships can continue to serve both their customers and referral partners. With Better's partnership, NEO is becoming one of the fastest growing retail lenders in the country. The people didn't change. The relationships didn't change. Only the tech platform did. I'll now touch on our financial highlights and Levine will provide greater detail shortly. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we generated $1.5 billion in funded loan volume and $44 million in revenue, representing year-over-year increases of 56% in loan volume and 77% in revenue, respectively. This growth spanned all three of our core product categories, refinance, purchase, and HELOC. Our Tin Man AI platform generated 646 million in volume in the fourth quarter, representing over 40% of total volume and surpassing our prior guidance of 600 million. This outperformance reflects the demand and growing confidence of our partners in our platform. While the fourth quarter is always seasonally thoughtful, our growth year over year outperformed that of the industry average, which was relatively stagnant. According to MBA data, in the fourth quarter, total residential funded loan volume increased by 4% year on year, compared to better funded loan volume, which grew 56% over the same period. For the full year 2025, we delivered $4.7 billion in funded loan volume and $165 million in revenue, up 32% and 52% year over year, respectively. We achieved this growth despite an approximately $1 billion headwind from the conclusion of our ally partnership, a testament to the resilience of our model. We remain on track to reach $1 billion in monthly volume by May 2026 and to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of the third quarter 2026. To win in a commoditized market, you have to win on three things, customer acquisition costs, operational costs, and cost of capital. what we call the three pillars of competitive advantage. On customer acquisition, our model inverts the traditional origination dynamic. Rather than paying for customers in an open market, our partnerships are structured so that customers are brought directly to us. Credit Karma's over 140 million members, NEO's 70 local branches, and 140 mortgage advisors, and our top five non-bank originator, partnering with over 3,000 local mortgage advisors, represent embedded distribution at scale, a structural CAC advantage that competitors find extraordinarily difficult to replicate, and one that is not easy to sustain without a technological moat. On operational costs, Tin Man automates up to 80% of the repetitive loan production tasks, and our Betsy tool resolves underwriting issues instantly by pulling loan facts, guidelines, and crafting communications in seconds. The result is a platform that scales production through AI efficiency and growth without additional overhead. Our cost to process underwrite and close a loan, and this we're talking about mortgage loans and HELOCs, combined together is about $800 alone, which is far less than anyone else in the industry. We believe that the initial launch, our home token, will allow us to book an extra $500 per funded loan in revenue. And as we scale that, we believe long-term we're going to be able to achieve significant gains in loan revenue as well as funding cost to the consumer and interest rate to the consumer, which we believe will translate into a significant competitive advantage and moat as a result of the efforts that we have put in. On CASA capital, we continue to improve our warehouse terms while working to expand capacity to support partnership volume growth. In parallel, we are working towards a secure tokenized credit facility via stablecoin ecosystem that we estimate could lower funding costs by up to 100 basis points once implemented, a structural funding advantage that would be difficult for any traditional mortgage originator to match. Over the past three years, we have built the foundation for this moment. I can tell you honestly, the last time I felt this excited about Better's future was in March 2021. And we have line of sight once again into growing into the largest mortgage company in America. This is truly a turnaround that we have worked for years to bring to light and one that has been able to be built on the implementation of AI across our entire business and leveraging the Tin Man platform that we started working on back in 2014. This is why we think that the moat that we have is more sustainable than the traditional AI native firm versus the traditional incumbent. We built an end-to-end system that takes eight different systems in the mortgage industry and pulls them all together into one system so that it's not just the rules that are captured, but all of the context around the human decisions on the data and the rules. And that learning data across 110 billion of loans is what allows us to continue to push forward and lower our cost to produce, improve our conversion rate, and build for our partners that are building the future. And we believe that we can continue to do this because the competitive advantage of richer learning data only compounds over time the more transactions and the more partners you bring into the ecosystem. We are now firmly in our next phase of growth with momentum scale and a clear path to adjusted EBITDA break-even. Partnerships that are expanding, adoption is rising, our platform is proven, and our AI capabilities are best in class. And we are just getting started. With that, I'll turn it over to Levine to provide a detailed walkthrough of our financials.