Upstart Holdings, Inc. (UPST) September 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. We are going to get going with our next fireside. We are very excited to have Paul Gu here, co-founder of Upstart, long-time chief technology officer, and more recently, assuming the role of CEO. So, Paul, thanks for being here. Yeah, excited to be here. Before we kick it off, I'm just going to read a quick disclaimer, and then we can get into it. So today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that relate to future results and events, which are based on upstart information available as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. The discussion may also include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP results. Please refer to the company's filings with the SEC and its IR website for additional information, including GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations, along with other disclosures.

All right.

The exciting legalese out of the way. Paul, let's kick it off. Thanks for being here. I wanted to start with what feels kind of like the defining strategic message of your first couple of quarters as CEO. you've been very direct that the core personal loan product is really the superpower of the business it's the highest margin most differentiated and that your first priority was simply to do a lot more of it so how are you doing against that goal so far and how do you think about the remaining opportunity to continue to deliver growth in that core product yeah i i think hopefully we showed in q2 that you know we're well on our way um in q2 i think we did something like three and a half times as much growth in this core personal loan segment as we did in the prior three quarters combined.

So a real trajectory change in what's growing in the business and what's not. And yeah, like I said, core personal loans is what we're really, really good at doing. I think we're world-class at being able to do risk separation in this product. And as a result of that, we can identify a lot of really good borrowers that we can underwrite uniquely in the market. Therefore, we have a lot of pricing power in. So this is a high margin product, we're very differentiated, and we can achieve the combination of high growth, high profitability, and good credit performance in the segment. So naturally, we want to do more of it.

Yeah, that makes sense. So what does it actually look like to change the strategy internally and get the team focused on core personal loans?

Yeah, it's a good question. Really, it is a cross-company effort to grow any particular business, and something that we've been doing as long as core personal loans it's never like any one or two like really simple obvious things it's like every team needs to orient its goals around doing this as opposed to something else and there's always trade-offs and what people focus on so for us it's like you can think of like the steps of the funnels like there's targeting and marketing right and so there's like these questions of like okay you have like a team that's working on building targeting models for different channels like do you want them to like figure out this problem like how do you get like three percent more core personal loan borrowers or do you want them to find something else and you know I think we were prioritizing the something else in earlier quarters and we switched the priority back to this core segment this quarter and the same is basically true of every team as you go sort of each step down the funnel and you can just imagine there's there's a bunch of different teams like at each step you know there's like the the people who then care about okay once some eyeballs show up at the website you know how do you convert them to applications how do you convert those into approvals how do you convert those into what we call rate accepts, how do you get those people through verification, the problems of, like, what kind of verification problems or what kinds of automation problems a core personal user has versus different segments or different types of loan users have are just different. And so we just put more emphasis for every team to focus on this as their number one thing, and you can see, you know, step function change in results.

And just before we move on, just to be clear about, you know, the stance on the newer products some of the secured products that you've launched. Obviously, growing the core personal, I think it's been very clear that that's the main strategic objective. Have your views changed in any way about the market opportunity or the growth in some of the newer products over time?

Yeah, we definitely made some changes, and I think maybe the meta thing is I really believe in having consolidated focus and really having crisp alignment across the whole company on what are our top priorities, and you just can't have too many of them. So among other things, one example is we paused on our auto refi product. That's a product that we've been working on for a few years. You know, it was a good product. I think it was something that in some version of the company, you know, we would still be working on. I think it certainly could have had a role. And there's all these sort of different advantages that that product offered. But it wasn't as high potential, high growth, high momentum as some of our other product bets. So we consolidated that one away. And so today, like every single bet that we've got left at the company is one I'm really excited about. I think all of them share the characteristics that they have extremely large addressable markets. They're adjacent to something that the company is already really good at. And they have high momentum that we're capitalizing on and doubling down in.

Okay, let's maybe pivot a little bit, talk about the macro backdrop. We, of course, have the Upstart Macro Index, which is kind of your view of macro as it relates to your segment of the consumer. As of September 3rd, that was relatively stable month over month at around 1.5. It's drifted up a little bit year to date. So maybe if you could talk a little bit about that metric, how should investors interpret it? I know you made some changes to kind of definitions and phraseology around it. And then maybe talk a little bit about what it's telling you today about the state of the consumer and then how that translates to the business?

Yeah, the simplest way to think about what UMI is, it's just sort of linearly interpretable index of how likely a consumer is to default on sort of unsecured consumer credit relative to pre-COVID levels. So a 1.0 reflects sort of the years right before COVID. So you think of this as 2018, 2019, early 2020 type stuff. And the fact that UMI is at 1.5 today is really just, It's just a way of saying the same exact consumer holding constant all the sort of borrower level characteristics and loan type characteristics is 50 percent more likely to default than they were pre-COVID. So it's actually a pretty big number. And to your point about the migration this year, we've seen this number drift up 12 points since, you know, this spring. And that's quite a lot. I mean, 12 points in our business, it's a pretty significant change. I think if we had been standing still on all of the investments we make into, you know, marketing and automation and approval and underwriting and risk separation, I mean, the business would just be like a fair bit smaller. And, of course, it isn't because we have made so much progress and had so much focus on those things. But, yeah, I think, you know, the consumer has been under some amount of pressure this year. I think it's not surprising when you look at the fact that we kind of reverse back into the space of having more inflation than we have wage growth. And that's been true probably for the last six months, mapping almost perfectly to the duration of time when UMI has been drifting up. I think you see it in credit card utilization rates. You see it in credit card delinquency rates. So I think, you know, you're looking at sort of whether you're looking at the metrics inside, upstart, or outside. I think at this point it's been pretty clear that the consumer has been, or at least the consumer is always sort of a slightly weird word for us because sometimes we care about the opposite thing as companies that want more consumption to care about. But we would say that the American borrower is under more stress today than they were six months ago. And I think UMI has done a nice job of picking that up early and early and clearly.

Yeah. And then maybe if you take that conversation more forward looking and perspective, there's there's a lot of cross currents out there. You know, gas price shocks, which have been lingering. You know, you've got fading fiscal support from tax refunds. labor market that is, you know, stable, maybe cooling on the margin. You know, I think you've said the business is fine with a stable consumer, even if it's not an improving one. How do you think about, you know, how the consumer could play out over the next 12 months and then just range of outcomes for the business?

Yeah. Maybe I'll start by saying that one thing I think investors get too focused on is the action of UMI in the short term. And we have said UMI is really, really important in the short term. It's really impactful. That's actually one reason that we somewhat stubbornly refuse to give near-term guidance on results is that we want to be able to take credit seriously as a first priority, and that basically means we want to be fastest and most precise in responding to UMI changes. And if we're going to do that, then, of course, it's really hard to tell you one month from now what exactly we're going to be doing, because in some sense, in the very near term, it's somewhat outside our control. But I think investors get a little too focused on this when they think about, you know, if you're here to invest not for like the next three months, but you're here to invest for the next three years, then like the rate at which you're compounding sort of durable wins in the business across marketing and automation and underwriting suddenly matter a whole lot more than, you know, whether like the macro is up or down a few points in any given month. And I think it's really that that contrast becomes really clear when you look at where the business is today versus, say, where it was back in 2021. In 2021, we probably had the most supportive macroeconomic climate you could possibly imagine. You know, you had UMI as well under 1.0. You know, you had stimulus checks. You had near zero interest rates. And yet, in spite of the comparison being against that world, in today's world of much higher interest rates, much higher UMI, much more consumer stress, you know, we're doing more contribution profits now than we were back then. And how is that possible? It's possible because, you know, we've had three years of compounding a sort of technology wins across the sort of like real durable parts of the business. And so I think in any kind of medium to long term like that just ends up mattering much, much more. And so, you know, when you talk about like, you know, where I think the outlook is 12 months from now, I think the answer on the macro is like, I have no idea. And I sort of think of it as like really not my job to worry about, you know, is there going to be like another war in the Middle East or what's going to happen to the Strait of Hormuz and energy prices? I don't know. I have my guesses, but so does everybody in this room. And I don't know that my guesses necessarily are any better than anybody else's. But I think the things that are within my control are about how fast can I move the technology frontier on lending. And I know that as a company, we have a tremendous ability to execute on that. And so compounded over any reasonable timeframe, I have a lot of confidence that the business is going to do really well. And so that's how we've started to think about where we can give confident guidance in the business and, you know, where we don't really want to overstretch in sort of what we can tell investors to expect. Yeah, makes sense.

I want to hit on one more macro question and then we'll pivot away. But I wanted to talk about the supply of credit. I think that's one thing that can impact the market, but really supply of credit from other people in the market. I think Upstart is one of the more disciplined. You just talked about, you know, very disciplined culture, wanting to be responsive to what you're seeing in the macro environment. But I also think like funding markets have been, you know, less discriminant in providing funding to anyone out there in the market. And so I think when everyone competes in the same channels for the same leads, you run the risk that underwriting could move to least common denominator.

How do you think about competitive dynamics in the market that you play in and how to think about, you know, new entrants, less disciplined investors benefiting from a really supportive funding market? yeah mostly we don't think about competitors that much um and i think that's a privilege we have because of the spaces where we're really strong you know we talked about this core personal and superpower i think we're just so differentiated there that we just don't have the luxury of not having to think too much about competitors or what they're doing um i think in some spaces you know there's quite a bit of competition i think we tend to all else equal shy away from those spaces i think in some of our newer products of course being the new guy on the block we have to think about, you know, who the sort of existing players are and who we think we're going to take market share from over time. But by and large, I would say in the core business, you know, it's not sort of a first priority. I also want to respond to this sort of maybe this point about the capital kind of just flowing indiscriminately. I mean, I do think, of course, that like happens sometimes. But when I look at the sort of capital markets today, you know, I don't necessarily think that there's something fundamentally broken with how they're providing capital to the space. I actually think that over the course of the last maybe five, six years, I think a lot of things equilibrated in the sense that you look at what happened in unsecured personal loans. I think most of the players that did high volumes of kind of internet distribution of large dollar loans to lower FICO score borrowers stopped doing it. It was just too hard to do. And I think maybe they were somewhat affected by the relatively better selection we could do in the market and kind of got pushed out. I think there's just a lot less happening there, and so therefore a lot less capital flowing there. In our case, we've had 100% retention of all of our capital partners in recent years. We've re-upped all of the deals. They've gotten longer and larger and generally at better terms. And I think that's happened because the capital recognizes where the good risk-adjusted returns are. And so I think the capital sort of markets are working pretty efficiently. And I think even if you think it's not perfect, I think there's pretty good evidence that over a couple of years they tend to get pretty efficient just because, you know, they can just look at how the credit performs.

Right, you get the numbers back, yeah. If that were happening, how would it show up in your business? Will we see, you know, it wouldn't show up in UMI. It's not directly a borrower, you know, statistic. Is that just lower conversion rates, people being more aggressive and people not taking the upstart loan on the margin?

Yeah, I mean, I think it can show up in one of two places. I think one is, like, there can be more noise around sort of top-of-funnel marketing. And so if you will put too much money into top-of-funnel marketing, then it just gets harder to get eyeballs and get attention, and borrowers, you know, don't really know who's who before they check. And then the other would be, yeah, if you get lower conversion. But, you know, in both these cases, I think it's theoretical. We don't see any evidence of that happening in our business. And, you know, again, despite the fact that we've seen, you know, and we've seen this higher UMI in our business, I think we've still actually held up remarkably well in our ability to originate good loans.

Let's talk about contribution margins and where they go from here. I think the guidance assumes a pretty meaningful step up in the back half of the year. We started to see it in Q2, margins improved nicely quarter-over-quarter. In your eyes, what still needs to happen to get to that full-year target, and how do you split that between continued acceleration and core personal versus the margin profile of some of the new products stepping up and kind of reaching scale?

Yeah, I at least think a lot more in terms of contribution profit dollars than the margin number, which I kind of just think of as like, I don't know, it just is what it is. But of course, yes, the contribution profit dollars have to keep going up. It's as simple as that. If you look at any reasonable full-year model for, like, how you get to the full-year guide. Like, we have to have more contribution profits. And then we've been pretty clear, you know, again, short list of priorities, everyone really focused. It's just, like, kind of like two simple things for us. It's, like, keep focusing on that core personal loan segment, which is, like, already very high margin. We would love to just do more of it. And then the second is get the unit economics of the new products, specifically the secured products, in a good place. Get them from negative to positive. And, of course, you get a bunch of leverage from flipping that around. So it's as simple as that, those two things. And, you know, if we're right about that, you'll see it in more contribution profit dollars.

So maybe can you talk about that second point in a little bit more detail? So you saw a nice move in the contribution margin on the secured products. I think you've talked about being break-even by the end of the year. And I think, you know, there's kind of a running list of levers that you've talked about to improve the margins. Can you talk mechanically on how that happens and your visibility into the continued improvements in the back half of the year?

Yeah, we have really high visibility, really high confidence in what needs to get done to move the secured products from unprofitable to profitable. I mean, in some sense, it's almost just like the standard playbook for how you build a new business and a new product, which is like the first thing you have to do is you have to prove people want this thing. And you do that before you worry about how dialed in the margins are. You do that before you try to optimize your operations. You do that before you try to, like, optimize your take rates. And so that's what we did. And I think it's become exceedingly clear that people really want these products, both in car dealerships and in the case of the HELOC product, you know, the combination of process and rates that we deliver there we think are best in market. And so we've got the sort of step one done. And then we were focused on, okay, we've got to start onboarding capital providers because we're very committed to funding these businesses in a really capital-efficient manner, having primarily third-party capital funding. And so that was kind of the second step that we had to prove out along with credit performance in these products. And then really the last thing we worry about is unit economics. And so that's the step we're on now, and we are rapidly improving the margins of these products. we'll get them to a break-even before the end of this year. And then once we do that, then we'll turn our attention back to really scaling these products up. And where do you think they can go over time?

Obviously, I'm sure break-even is not the destination. How do you think about continued improvements over a multi-year period?

So the long-term margin, for now, I'll just refrain from speculating on just because I think when you're like negative 40% or something, it's just irresponsible to speculate about how positive it can be. You've got to get positive first to earn that right. But I don't really theoretically think there's any reason that they can't be as good as what our core business has today. I mean, they're really very similar kind of businesses, similar dynamics. And we think the size of the technology advantage can be just as large over time. I think the actual value capture is going to happen a little more incrementally because we're not going to sort of like prioritize getting that all the way up at first. I think that would be over monetizing. I think we need to capture value as a function of how much we create. And the value we create is just a function of the level of technology differentiation, which today is not as high as in core personal loans, but it's going up. And so I think over the course of a few years, it'll get quite a bit higher. All right.

I wanted to maybe talk to the other driver in the back half of the year, which is, you know, continue to model improvements on the core product. And I think one of the things that's harder to understand from the outside as a follower the company is just how you actually drive more volume growth. You talked about the technology wins that have been able to offset a lot of the macro pressure so far this year. Q2 alone, I think you mentioned three new personal models, a lot more variables in the model. What does that process look like from start to finish? Is there an internal roadmap of known potential enhancement opportunities that require engineering staffing? Is it more of a continuous brainstorming and testing process, and then, you know, how do you get confidence to compound that process over a 12-day, 18-month period?

Yeah, we've been making our models better for a really long time. I mean, essentially since we started the company back in 2012, like, we've just every month, every quarter worked to make the models better, and for all of those 14 years, we've never run out of things to do. I think, you know, to the question, yes, there absolutely is a whole backlog of things that we would do. But, of course, you know, what we actually work on 12 months from now will a little bit be path dependent, you know, what works and doesn't work today. In some sense, I think it's not that different than, you know, what any kind of research roadmap would look like at any model company. Like, I think if you were going to go ask OpenAI, you know, what the roadmap looks like, I think, you know, there's just a lot of different ideas for making models better. And we benefit from a lot of the same fundamental research that goes into, you know, new types of neural networks or new types of chips for training. These kinds of things help us, and we look at a lot of the papers that come out on new kinds of learning algorithms, new kinds of cost functions, and we develop a lot of our own. And so the search space is really pretty large. It gets even larger sort of longitudinally when you think about what the constraints to better models are, where one of those constraints is our kind of engineering input. And so, you know, that's a constraint that sort of is a factor in sort of the function of, like, how much model improvement output we get. But there's other ones that are kind of, like, time-bound for us, which is, like, you need to have more training data. You can't, like, increase the levels of complexity of your model without having sufficiently more training data. At some point, you just kind of exhausted all of the signal you can get from the amount of training data that you've got. But the good news is, like, the training data is increasing, and it's increasing sort of exponentially. And so, you know, we've got, I don't know, 140-some million training data points now, a lot more than we had a couple years ago. And so as that number goes up, it kind of just naturally unlocks more sophisticated models. Then there's this other piece of it, which is really about compute speed and cost. And this is where I say, you know, sometimes, like, you know, you get these kind of outside things going on in chips or kind of like usage of or algorithmic efficiency. They become pretty important. And I mean, it's like I think if you're in the world of sort of traditional finance, like this is irrelevant, your compute costs are irrelevant. But in our business, you know, it's much more like a model business and compute costs can be quite substantial and kind of become a limiting factor. Like if your model gets too complex relative to the speed of, you know, the speed that they can be processed on, then you've got a customer who's like waiting there for like three minutes while you're like trying to like figure out the math. And that's a pretty bad user experience. And so you've got to like have teams that are optimizing model speed. You've got teams that are optimizing model costs. You've got teams that are doing actual sort of fundamental research on the algorithms. And then you're just like over here just like waiting for more data to show up. And all of these things are kind of happening in concert, and that's what makes for such sort of a powerful data flywheel.

Yeah, that's super helpful. Maybe we'll just talk about the broader market opportunity. I think the process very bottoms up, like how do we get the model to respond to kind of the opportunity that's in front of us right now. How do you think about more of a top-down framework? I mean, it's kind of difficult to get market share data in this space, but, you know, I think I have to imagine Upstart's the largest game in town for near-prime personal loans. So just how do you frame the addressable market, where your current penetration is, and then, you know, how do you think about market share versus kind of market share creation, you know, expanding the TAM to borrowers who simply just aren't in, you know, the borrowing activity that we see today and outstanding consumer credit?

Yeah. I think the good news in our business is that, I think unlike a lot of others, it's kind of just like the market is extremely large. I mean, I think the simplest way to think about it is always just you look at the amount of credit card debt. It's like $1.2 trillion or something, and about half the consumers in market are sort of not considered super prime. They're south of 720, and so it ends up being an extremely large market. And now the vast, vast majority of these people are not, don't even know what personal loans are. And, but the good news is that it's not like, it's not sort of like for us, just say like, you've got to kind of convince them on sort of subjective experiential factors that, you know, they should prefer one thing over the other. Like in our case, it's just like, we just, we're just here to save people money. And if because of that better ability to separate risk, if we can get people lower rates than they would get elsewhere, I mean, it's sort of an objective good. Now, that doesn't mean you automatically win the consumer. They still have to find out about you and all the things that actually have to happen to get them to become a user of a product that they're not so familiar with. But I do think the fundamentals are very, very good. Very large market, objective sort of money savings for people, and who doesn't want to save money, right? So I think it's a very winnable battle. And the way that we've been going after it, even if you don't believe in any kind of step function changes in brand recognition or, you know, the sort of number of customers we have relationships with. The thing that is really mechanical is just, like, basically all we do every month is we just say, like, how good are our conversion rates? And this is really, you know, it should be, like, a kind of population-adjusted conversion rate. How good is our conversion rate? That dictates, like, how many people we can afford to reach based on various marketing channels. You know, the most direct is, like, you look at a direct-to-mail kind of marginal cat curve, and it's just like, well, we send out every piece of mail that has a positive return on kind of the marginal send, and if your conversion rates get better, you can send a little bit more. And so there is a really mechanical way to just reach more and more people, and that is probably the most direct way you can think of the business as growing. It's like, we make better models, better models allow us to reach more people, and boom, now you have both more people and higher conversion. Yeah.

So let's talk about risk separation then. You talk about the inaccuracy gap, 87% of default risks still not being captured by your models, which I think is significantly better than what we see in sort of incumbent models. Hopefully I got that definition of the 87% right. So you can either read that as enormous runway, or you can read it as something about credit risk is very structural and maybe just isn't knowable at the time of underwriting. How do you get comfortable with the former, not the latter? And how do you think about when you hit the point of diminishing returns on that statistic?

I mean, just look at what AI has done in other fields. I think at this point, it should not be controversial that with better models, you can get dramatically higher levels of intelligence. I think that's pretty self-evident in 2026. and uh and i think in some sense that's like the founding belief of the company is that we've we've always believed that if you had better models you could get dramatic dramatically better uh risk separation and for 14 years we've been continuously right about that that you know the next sort of step of model improvement unlocks more um accuracy in the models that hasn't slowed down in any way which i think is probably contrary to what almost anyone would have predicted that you know maybe like we would just chew off some low-hanging fruit in the first three years of the company and then it would level off after that. But that's not how the graph looks at all. It's just kind of almost like, almost shockingly sort of a straight line of improvements to model accuracy. And, you know, if we look at our backlog, it's a long backlog. We've been doing this a long time. It keeps going this direction. So I think kind of Occam's razor, the simplest thing to project out is that you think it'll keep improving.

And when you think about the pace of improvement, I think, you know, You know, Upstart's already a kind of deeply AI-enabled company, has been for a really long time since before kind of ChatGPT hit the world. You know, you talked about some customer support type use cases. But when you think about that kind of core operational, like we're going after model improvements today, you know, what types of improvements in efficiency are you seeing in terms of the ability to iterate on the product and ship faster some of the different buckets that you talked about of kind of known potential ways to improve the model?

Yeah, I think we're doing pretty well in this department. I was looking at some of that ramp data about how much sort of tokens different companies use. And, you know, I think we're probably, as a technology company, something like a top 5% adopter of this technology, not like top 1%, but, you know, definitely up there. And I think we're seeing pretty good results in terms of the amount of, you know, the amount of code that's getting written, the sort of time to close tickets. And ultimately, you know, I think that should show up as just, like, more revenue and more revenue growth per employee. Of course, you know, it's always a little hard to, like, perfectly attribute causality to these things. And so I don't know, like, the precise answer to this question, but I do think if you look either bottoms up or tops down, the numbers are pretty good on what we're getting out of this, and we'll just have to keep making it better over time.

We've got a couple of minutes left. I want to jump around a little bit, but I want to talk about the bank charter. So you've got conditional OCC approval to launch in early 2027. Can you talk about just the investment that was required to do that? What sort of drag was it on just the focus of the organization, investments required, and then just how do you frame the biggest benefits that you expect to realize once that occurs?

Yeah, huge investment. It's definitely the largest discrete single project that the company has done and is doing in 2026, and, of course, that makes it a cost center with no benefit in 2026, so hopefully that will reverse once the bank is open and launched in early 2027. By the way, I think that level of investment is totally justified. It's a big deal to open a national bank, and I think we want to make sure to do it right and to do it in a way that's compliant and is going to take care of the public interest and safety and soundness. So I think we're putting a lot of effort into this. I think we're going to do it right, and hopefully we're going to get great benefits next year when we're live.

And just for the avoidance of doubt, the casual observer may look at what's happening in fintech more broadly and say everyone's becoming a bank. What are the specific use cases for the bank for Upstart? I think you've been pretty clear that this is not signaling a change and the balance sheet strategy or the funding strategy of the business.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, for us, there's just a bunch of operational benefits that have to do with, like, simplifying so we can, like, reach more borrowers more easily. Today we have, like, almost 100 originating partners. They all have kind of slightly different regulators, slightly different rules, slightly different disclosures, slightly different states where they can offer products and which products. And all of that simplifies a way we can reach more people and without a lot of that operational complexity that we deal with every single day. On the sort of funding side of it, I would say it's not like we're totally just not going to use the sort of enormous benefit that is deposit funding, but it's more like today we have about a billion dollars of loans on our balance sheet. Most of that is not levered, and so it's just a very inefficient way to use equity capital. And if you tell me, hey, now you have a way to lever that stuff at a really low cost of funds, Like, of course, you know, we're going to use some of that. And that'll actually be really efficient from an equity capital perspective. So maybe, like, contrary to, I think sometimes people worry, like, oh, well, in order to open a bank, you're going to need a whole bunch more equity capital. It's like, no, no, today we have a billion dollars of loan assets that are mostly unlevered. Like, that, you know, sort of just going back and levering that actually, like, creates net new equity or net new sort of, you know, cash. So it's actually quite equity efficient to do this.

Yeah, makes sense. Apologize for the CFO-type question, but you mentioned it was a big investment in the year. Fixed expenses this year were up around 30% year-to-date, pretty meaningful step up. How do you think about a more normalized level of expense growth, particularly once you're through sort of this initial investment on the bank side?

Yeah, we've said that, you know, OPEX growth is going to normalize a lot in the back half of this year and go down to low single-digit type sort of quarter-on-quarter growth, And I think that that's a much more normalized level for the business. I think coming back to, you know, this AI and productivity stuff, I think we are starting to see it show up in really nice ways. And I think that maybe, like the bank thing, like some of our new products, there's just like a whole bunch of different things hitting all at once that made it so in the first half of this year, we're really in this place where we have one really profitable contributing thing, which is core personal loans. It's paying for, like, everything else that we're doing, all of which are unprofitable, you know, even at a contribution level. So this is like our new products in auto and HELOC, this bank effort. And, of course, some of the ways in which you ramp, like, the AI for internal productivity spend is kind of very, like, at first you're just very experimental about it, let everybody sort of do their own thing. And then you start to worry about, you know, making it efficient later. And I think we're starting to turn the corner on a lot of these things, you know, from a margin perspective, from harvesting more benefits than cost. The bank thing, of course, is, you know, we're saying early next year. So I think a lot of the timelines are such that our expectation is, you know, we're just going to be able to get a lot more operating leverage out of the business compared to what we did earlier this year.

Got it. Makes sense. Well, I think that just takes us the time. But thanks for being here. Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate the conversation.

Fantastic.

Thank you.