Breaking down the month of January

February 13, 2023

Ahead of our board meeting on Tuesday and the subsequent all-hands on Thursday, I thought it would be helpful to recap our results in January as the board is keen to track every single metric we're measuring ourselves against.

Breaking down our January financial results and it's a tale of two narratives. On the one hand, we missed on Borrower Platform Fees as deals from existing borrowers we underwrite were downsized more than we had anticipated and we also predicted we would be able to ramp up our new higher fee structure faster than we actually were able to. On the other hand, we exceeded our own expectations around how many underwriters we'd be able to sell the vision on for their inaugural deals, with four new underwriters all coming on deck with deals getting pushed through the pipeline.

For the Client Solutions team, it was all in all a good month as targets were exceeded for the KPIs that mattered most, including new borrowers, new underwriters, and ahead of schedule, the average underwriter contract value. The lone miss came from average borrower LTV but this was always a metric we would have to grow into as we charge higher rates.

For the Underwriting team, it was progress across the board and unfortunately sometimes things don't go our way when they're out of our control. The fact that we are shaving time down from signature to approval and from approval to launch is significant. We're starting at 6.4 days and 2.5 days respectively in January, we need to keep pushing to bring that number down. While we were only able to launch [ ] deals last month it wasn't for lack of trying as the 3rd deal was all but ready to go until the underwriter opted to back out.

For the IR and Syndication team, it highlights how much we need investor capital to support the growth of our platform and all the new deals coming to market. While the one deal that went out to market closed very successfully, the downstream impact was felt from the Underwriting team's situation with the underwriter backing out as we missed our target of [ ] deals in January. Even though we were able to clear above [ ] on average for the deals in January, the wallet size for both accredited investors and qualified purchasers will come back to haunt us if we don't find other avenues to grow wallet share.

Given everything we learned in just our first month of being this tactical and tracking our KPIs, we will be sharing many of the strategic changes we're going to be making for the rest of Q1 in this week's all-hands to ensure we can meet and exceed the targets we've set for ourselves 💪