Good day and welcome to the Upstart 1st Quarter 2023 earnings. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Jason Schmidt, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Upstart's 1st Quarter 2023 financial results. First of all, on today's call are Dave Gerard, Upstart's Chief Executive Officer and Sanjay Dota, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I want to remind you that shortly after the market closed today, Upstart issued a press release announcing its 1st quarter 2023 financial results and published an investor relations presentation. Both are available on our investor relations website, ir.upstart.com.
In the call, we will make four looking statements, such as guidance for the 2nd quarter of 2023, related to our business and plans to expand our platform in the future. These statements are based on our current expectations and information available as of today and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and assumptions. Actual results made different materially as the results of various risk factors that have been described in our file ends with the SEC. As a result, we caution you against placing undue reliance on these four looking statements. We assume no obligation to update any four looking statements as the result of new information or future events, except as required by law.
In addition, during today's call, unless otherwise stated, references to our results are provided as non-gap financial measures and are reconciled to our gap results which can be found in the earnings release and supplemental tables. To ensure that we can address as many analyst questions as possible during the call, we request the E-Please-Leave-Ear-Self-2-1 initial question and one follow-up.
Later this quarter, UPSTAR will be participating in the Barclays Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum on May 17th and the Bank of America Global Technology Conference June 7th. Now, we'd like to turn it over to Dave Gerard, CEO of UPSTAR.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our own news call covering our first quarter, 2023 results. I'm Dave Gerard, co-founder and CEO of UPSTAR. Despite the headwinds facing our industry in early 2023, I'm pleased with the progress we made against the objectives that I set out for you previously. I'm hopeful that as we move through the year, you will come to see Q1 as a transitional quarter for UPSTAR. While the economic environment remains turbulent, there are many reasons to be optimistic about our future.
After you, we aren't waiting around for the economy to improve. First, our development teams made giant leaps forward in each of our main product areas. Innovation in AI is the primary source of UPSTAR's competitive advantage. We continue to break new ground in this area. I'll share more about these wins shortly.
Second, we accomplished this while taking significant fixed costs out of our business. Last quarter, I told you that I'm committed to running an operationally and fiscally-tice ship. Given our concerted efforts in Q1 to reduce both payroll and operational expenses, I'm confident that UPSTAR is now a more streamlined and efficient company, setting us up to return to profitable growth soon. I'll share more about our cost reduction efforts later.
And finally, I'm pleased to tell you that we secured multiple long-term funding agreements together expected to deliver more than $2 billion to the UPSTAR platform over the next 12 months. This is a critical first step toward building resiliency and predictability into our business. Together, I believe these efforts put us in a stronger position, regardless of which direction the economy turns.
Our own analysis, which we launched publicly in March in the form of the UPSTAR macroindex or UMI, suggests that the financial help of the mainstream American consumer deteriorated rapidly through the first nine or so months of 2022, but it since stabilized if not improved for the last several months. The personal savings rate, which may be the most relevant predictor of UMI, bottomed out mid-last year at 2.7 percent and has increased to 5.1 percent since then.
In late 2022, loans on our platform have been priced conservatively relative to UMI. So, our bank and credit union partners can feel confident that recent ventages are today performing at or above expectations. And while banks are certainly trading carefully in the current environment, many lenders in institutional investors appreciate the combination of high yield and short duration that UPSTAR powered loans offer.
In retrospective of the environment, I push our team very hard to make sure UPSTAR improves constantly in four critical dimensions.
回顾环境的情况,我非常努力地推动我们的团队,确保UPSTAR在四个关键方面不断改进。
First, best rates for all. We found it up to dark to improve access to credit, so delivering the best rates possible to all consumers will always be our true north. Given the breadth and diversity of competition, we'll never 100 percent achieve this goal, but in a fierce effort to do so, we can become the market leader in a vitally important segment of our economy.
Better rates are unlocked first and foremost by a more accurate and predictive credit model, one that excels at separating good risk from bad, and AI is the key to this.
Our models are today trained on more than 100 billion cells of performance data. And now, with an average of 90,000 new loan repayments do each day across all our bank partners, the system is learning and adjusting in near real time to actual loan performance. We pushed 23 new and improved versions of our AI models into production during the first quarter alone, about one every three days. We're confident that our AI has never been as sophisticated or as accurate as it is today.
But in order to deliver the best rates for all, we also need a diversity of bank and credit union partners, each with different priorities, business objectives, and balance sheet issues to solve. Today, we have almost 100 such partners in order of magnitude more than the 10 we had when we went public in December 2020. We additionally need a strong presence and reputation in institutional and capital markets, because the limited risk appetite of bank balance sheets will never serve the needs of the entire US credit market. This quarter, we expanded our roster of institutional partners in ways that should help us deliver quality offers to consumers through all parts of the cycle.
Second, more efficient borrowing and lending. Every quarter, we aim to make our platform more efficient for consumers and bank partners. This improvement comes from better AI, which enables more sophisticated risk models, which in turn, enable a faster and more efficient experience for consumers and lenders.
In the first quarter, we achieved a record level of automation with 84% of upstart powered loans fully automated across all our bank partners. By this, I mean the loans were approved and verified instantly with zero human intervention from rate requests to loan funding. We know of no other lending marketplace with this level of automation.
This instant and automated process, which by the way 70% of consumers access by a mobile phone, creates an unparalleled while moment for the borrower, which is who is often surprised if not shocked to realize that there are no more steps in the approval process. With consumers rightfully value their time, this delightful moment is often more impactful than the specific rate our bank partners offer. Efficiency is obviously important for the lender as well.
Our bank partners upstart powered lending programs are open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to providing the modern, all digital experience their customers expect, banks can tailor their upstart lending programs to precisely target their business objectives, risk appetite, and balance sheet needs. When it comes to routine transactions like offering a loan, branch hours are inconvenient. Human intervention is costly and consumers just want what they want when they want it.
Third, more resilient. After all, we have experienced in the last year, I'm keenly aware that we need to build more resilience into upstart the business. Lending is inherently cyclical, but we aim to build a platform that largely mitigates that cyclicality, ensuring that credit continues to be available and flowing when it's needed, albeit accurately priced to prevailing conditions.
Central to this resilience is securing a baseline supply of long-term capital that we can depend on through the markets, ups, and downs. As I mentioned earlier, we've completed agreements with multiple strategic partners as of today, and will continue to explore additional partnerships. Our primary goal is to have loan funding capital committed at a level that allows us to remain cash flow positive to typical market cycles. Resilience also comes from a flexible business model, with lower fixed costs, proven pricing power, and durable unit economics.
We've always been a capital-efficient business, raising and spending a fraction of what peer companies spend, but there are always more ways to drive efficiency. Between Q4 and Q1, we took the necessary steps to reduce upstart headcount by almost 30 percent, while clearly a gut-wrenching decision will allow us to return to profitability at a significantly lower loan volume and has led us to be more focused and nimble in delivering our product roadmap.
We also identified opportunities to reduce our technical infrastructure costs by as much as $10 million annually and sublet some unnecessary office space, both of which will go directly to the bottom line. On the revenue side, we flexed up our cake rates, delivering a record contribution margin of 58 percent in Q1. Our prior record contribution margin was 54 percent in Q3 of 2020. Our strong and flexible unit economics are a byproduct of the competitive advantage provided by AI. All these together position as well to navigate whatever twists and turns lie ahead, while strengthening our position for the inevitable sunnier markets to come.
The last important lever on resiliency is our product offering itself, which I'll speak to now, a broader range of products. Moving beyond our core personal loan product is critically important to reaching our potential as a business. Offering a wider range of solutions makes us more relevant to more consumers and also more valuable to our bank and credit union partners. Product to Embarrow or diversification can also provide greater resilience to future market cycles.
We continue to make progress in our second big bet, the auto lending market. This market has had what may be the most tumultuous three years in its 100 plus years history. Despite this, we've made rapid progress with our products and couldn't be more excited about our potential. Since our last earnings call, we announced that both Accura and Mercedes-Benz approved upstart as a digital retail provider, becoming our eighth and ninth OEM partners. We recently launched a new and improved AI model for our auto retail lending product that builds off our existing auto refinance model. We now consider both of these models calibrated and performing on target. Our footprint of dealers piloting our lending product expanded to 39 since last I updated you and we expect this rollout to continue throughout the year. We also signed our first external funding agreement for auto retail, which is an important milestone for us. And lastly, we're making rapid improvements to our servicing and collections of auto loans, which accrues directly to model performance.
I'm also pleased to let you know that we expect to launch a home equity product later this year. This is a great fit for upstart for a few reasons. First, 95% of Helox are financed by banks and credit unions. So to asset our lending partners know and value. Second, Helox naturally serve a very prime consumer, namely homeowners. Respect upstart Helox to have animal loss rates less than 1%. And third, home equity products tend to be counter-sickical to refinance products. We know this because in Q4 2022, Helox volumes from a 32% year on year, even while mortgage refinance is plummeted. Importantly, there's a lot of opportunity to improve the process of originating Helox. The average Helox today takes 36 days to fund. While we're aiming for online approval in 10 minutes and funding within five days.
Lastly, I have to mention the incredible progress made they are a small dollar loan team. By way of context, banks feel pressure from regulators to eradicate overdraft fees and instead to provide affordable relief loans to consumers who have short-term cash needs. But they've struggled for years to do this both meaningfully and profitably. Short-term loans of a few hundred dollars to existing customers or even to random walk-up consumers at rates within the APR limits for nationally charted banks has seen beyond the reach of the banking industry. While we're building it for them, and we believe it has the potential to eradicate more than 70% of payday loans in the next five years, our small dollar product already has 90% automation rates, far beyond even our core personal loan product. In Q1, we launched a new AI model for this product that delivered the largest single accuracy improvement measured in our history. We've also expanded the offering to include loan terms as short as three months, which show a 37% increase in approval rates. I'm not sure we've ever delivered a product with as much impact and as much alignment with our mission as we're seeing from the small dollar team.
To wrap things up, I want to acknowledge that the financial industry is not out of the widget, but even in this challenging economy, I believe Upstart isn't positioned to grow reasonably through our typical run rate of model and technology improvements. And when the banking and credit markets eventually normalize, as surely they will, the two strength of our platform will become clear to all. Upstart success will continue to be built on excellence and leadership in AI. By this, I mean the speed with which we can develop, deploy and calibrate new and more accurate AI models. Together with the amazing quality of our team, it is this that makes me optimistic about Upstart's future.
Thank you. And I'd like now to turn it over to Sanjay, our chief financial officer, walk through our Q-R in 2023 financial results and guidance.
谢谢。现在我想把话题转给我们的首席财务官Sanjay,他将带领我们走过2023财年财务业绩和预测。
Sanjay. Thanks, Dave. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. At a headline level, over the past quarter, we've observed continuing stability and consumer repayment trends on the borrower side of our platform, counterbalanced by heightened volatility in the banking and institutional funding markets.
In US consumer personal finance, a couple of virtuous trends continue to unfold in the aggregate statistics. The percent of adults participating in the workforce continues to climb steadily as a population returns to work. And the average personal tax burden for each individual has fallen considerably since last year. Together leading to a rising level of real disposable income per adult.
On the expenditure side, real consumption per capita continues to moderate and creep back into line with disposable income. Rising disposable income and moderating consumption expenditures are resulting in a personal savings rate that has now risen in each of the past six months since bottoming out last September. This particular indicator has demonstrated a strong correlation to borrower repayment health since the pandemic. And we are seeing this reflected in our upstart macro index, which peaked last October and is showing signs of early recovery.
The ongoing improvement in the consumer fiscal condition, together with the recalibration of our own underwriting models, is resulting in loan performance that as of our Q4 advantages, we believe is on track to deliver unleveraged close returns of approximately 11 percent as a blended average across the banks, credit unions, and institutional buyers on our platform.
Conversely, the funding side of the ecosystem remains challenging in the current climate. Increased conservatism among existing lending partners in the wake of their recent bank failures has enhanced their headwinds, even as we have brought additional volume onto the platform for implementation of new bank partnerships. The banking sector turbulence has also contributed to wider market spreads on high yield debt after a brief period of moderation in January and February, which is in turn causing institutional investors who rely on functioning ABS markets to be increasingly cautious in their deployment of capital.
We have managed to more than offset these headwinds by securing multiple longer term funding agreements, which we expect to deliver more than $2 billion in capital over the coming 12 months. We believe that these deals, as well as others in the pipeline, will provide us with a stronger and more resilient capital supply over the coming quarters.
With these items of context, here are some financial highlights from the first quarter of 2023. New from fees was $117 million in Q1, coming in above our guided expectation as a result of some increased funding secured through our longer term capital arrangements, as well as ongoing take rate optimization.
Net interest income was slightly below guidance at negative $14 million, largely a result of unrealized fair value adjustments informed by the economics of a balance sheet transaction that was expected to close after the end of the quarter. Taken together, net revenue for Q1 came in at $103 million, slightly above guidance, and representing a 67% contraction year over year.
The volume of loan transactions across our platform in Q1 was approximately 84,000 loans, down 82% year over year, and representing over 53,000 new borrowers. Which loan size of $12,000 was up 22% versus the same period last year.
Our contribution margin, a non-gap 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 58% in Q1, up from 47% last year, and 3% points above our guided expectation for the quarter.
We continued expanding our margins in Q1 through higher rates of automation, which attained a peak of 84%, improved marketing efficiency, and increased take rates.
Operating expenses were $235 million in Q1, down 15% year over year, but up 14% sequentially due to one time restructuring costs incurred as part of our reduction in force, as well as a one-time non-cast charge resulting from the cancellation of a single executive performance based equity award, which accounted for approximately $40 million of the overall expense space in this past quarter. The majority of the year over year reduction was achieved through sales and marketing, which declined by 76% following the trend in volume. We continued to limit hiring to only a handful of key strategic positions.
Altogether, Q1 gap net loss was $129 million, and adjusted EBITDAW was negative $31.1 million, both comfortably above our guided numbers. Adjusted earnings per share was negative 47 cents based on a deleted weighted average share count of $81.9 million. We ended the quarter with loans on our balance sheet at $982 million, down sequentially from $1.01 billion to the prior quarter. Of that total, loans made for the purposes of R&D, principally within the auto segment, represented $493 million of that total. A corporate liquidity position remains strong, with $452 million of total cash on the balance sheet and approximately $632 million in net loan equity as fair value.
In our remarks of last quarter, we expressed optimism that the consumer trends impacting credit appeared positive to us, and that the worst was likely behind us. And this is indeed what we have perceived over the last 90 days. Consumers reducing expenditures indicates to us that they are overspending less relative to income. Decreasing numbers of job openings in the economy indicates to us that Americans are returning to work. Now both of these dynamics could be interpreted as a prelude to economic slowdown. It is clear to us that both have been beneficial for credit. This continues to be our perspective as we look to Q2.
We also expressed confidence last quarter that through a combination of margin expansion, workforce reduction, and expenditure control, we could create a path to return to EBITDA break even at our current lower scale. And indeed, we now anticipate achieving this in the second quarter. While painful, the workforce reduction was carried out with minimal impact to the velocity at which we are developing our newest round of bets in auto lending, small dollar loans, and HELOX, all areas in which we look forward to sharing more updates in the coming quarters.
With these specifics in mind, for Q2 of 2023, we expect total revenues of approximately $135 million, consisting of revenue from fees of $130 million, and net interest income of approximately $5 million. Contribution margin of approximately 60 percent, net income of approximately negative $40 million, adjusted net income of approximately negative $7 million, adjusted EBITDA of approximately 0, and a deleted weighted average share count of approximately 83.1 million shares. We are happy to be signaling a return to sequential growth and cash profitability in the current market environment.
Our improving guidance is clearly not deriving from obvious improvements to the macro economy just yet. It is flowing from a combination of tenacious execution, operating discipline, margin expansion, and deal making. As always, a huge note of gratitude to the various upstart teams who have been heads down and laser focused on getting us through the storm and will remain resolute over the past year in the face of such challenging external circumstances. While there may yet be a few more twists and turns along the way, we are optimistic that we have weathered the worst of it, and barring any reversal in consumer trends that we are back on an ascending flight path.
Any thought? Dave and I are happy to open up the call to any questions. Operator? Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please sign up by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speaker phone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, please press star 1 to ask a question. We will pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions.
Our first question comes from the line of Simon clinch with Atlantic equities. Please go ahead.
我们的第一个问题来自大西洋股份公司的Simon clinch,请提出你的问题。
Hi Dave, hi, Sanjay. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a pretty good call here. I was wondering, could you give us a little bit more detail around the long-term funding commitments and how we should think about how that might be applied or flow through for the remainder of the year? Are there any constraints, product categories that are focused on or anything like that that we need to know about? Thanks, Simon.
This is Sanjay. I would say up front, each agreement did it bespoke, so it's hard to broadly generalize. Maybe a couple of headline thoughts. First of all, these agreements, they more or less flow from the ability we've demonstrated over the past couple of quarters to be expensive with our margins and to improve our cake rate. Because we have expanded margins, we're able to think about these agreements that we're able to share some modest preferential economics with long-term committed investors.
This preferential economics could take the form of return premiums or take rate co-investment or modest discounting and this sharing. All investors have a slightly different set of preferences and objectives, so it tends to be a bit different by a counterparty. They're all currently focused on personal loans, so they're restricted to our poor business. On that, they tend to mirror our broader institutional programs.
Apart from some preferential economics that essentially flow from our unit economics, they tend to look very similar to what we would normally do through the capital markets. Great, that's really helpful. Maybe follow up questions about that. Just on your comments around take rate and I guess the very impressive contribution margins that you generated this quarter and anticipate to generate in the next quarter. How should we think about the sustainability of that as you go through perhaps an economic recovery and a loan acceleration at some point? We expect those contribution margins to decline and then what does that mean in terms of, I suppose, those funding commitments become less important in that regard, but just like to figure out how all that ties together.
Sure, yeah. I guess the punchline is there, I think they're probably sustainable for as long as we want them to be. There's really two underlying factors. That would point to one is the extent to which we are sort of investing for the short term versus the long term and the other is the general elasticity of the loan demand on the borrower side.
So currently, as an example, elasticity is quite high. Credit is in demand on the borrower side. So that creates a sort of pricing ability on our side. But maybe the more important thing is when we're sort of solving for the near term P&L, we are optimizing cake rates as much as possible against that elasticity and we are managing our marketing programs to deliver loans that are profitable in the near term.
I think that as the economy evolves, and certainly if it improves, what you would see is on the one hand, declining elasticity, so there will be more provision of credit on the supply side and so borrower as well have more choice. But the other factor would be, in our case, we would then start to rebalance how we trade off the short term for the long term. And so by reducing cake rates and by growing marketing campaigns, we can generate more volume, harvest more lifetime value of the customer, harvest more gains on the model learning side.
Things that won't necessarily show up in this quarter's P&L, but make provide value over time. And so when you put all of that together, you get an improving economy, I think you'd probably see cake rates that may not feel back to where they were before, but would probably moderate with the economy improving. Thanks. That's really helpful. Thank you.
Okay. My next question comes from the line of Ramsey, Alice Sal with Backlees. Please go ahead.
好的,下一个问题来自Ramsey, Alice Sal和Backlees。请提问。
Hi, this is John Coffey on For Ramsey. I had a question for you on your slide 18, really regarding your conversion rates. So it looks like your conversion rates had declined from about 21% last year to 8%. I was just trying to understand the drivers of this a little bit better. Is most of it just the supply of credit or is it sometimes that potential borrowers are hitting that ceiling for interest rates or they're deciding to defer some kind of purchases to later on when there may be a little bit more stable economic condition?
Yeah, hey, John. Yeah, it's got, it doesn't have much at all to do with the supply side. I think maybe the symbol most explanatory value variable would be what we call our upstart network index or UMI, which is also in our nested materials. And that basically reflects the fact that apples to apples, the same consumer is defaulting at a rate that is maybe sort of 2 to 3 times higher than they were in mid-2021.
And because of that consumer repayment pattern change, we are pricing loans very differently, including much higher default premiums in the loans. And then compounding that of course is the higher base interest rates, which are requiring investors to demand higher returns. When you add those two up, our likes for like price for a loan has gone up quite dramatically in some cases, 1500 to 2000 basis points.
And because of that change in pricing, two things are happening. One is a lot less borrowers are getting approved. So a lot of them are being pushed above the 36% at your threshold. And then even for those who are still getting approved, their prices are a lot higher and then maybe less predisposed to taking the loan. So those two things combined have resulted in the contracting conversion rate.
All right, great. Thank you. And just for a very short follow up, I noticed that your loans in your balance sheet actually declined a little bit at quarter to quarter. Should we think of last quarter, the fourth quarter is a bit of a high watermarker, is it still too early to say? Good question, John. I mean, I think that we, I think continue to think of the balance sheet along the lines of the parameters that expressed the market, which is, you know, there's a certain number we won't go above.
And that's probably roughly where we were at last quarter. We also sort of set in our remarks that there is a transaction that did not complete in Q1, but we expected to complete in Q2. And that will bring our balance sheet down next quarter. Now from there, we may sort of continue to use the balance sheet as a platform tool. But I think that you'll probably see us remain sort of in a volume where we are sort of, you know, peaking at the billion dollar range and then, you know, you know, having or flowing from there based on whether it's from backting or accumulating.
Great. Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Peter Christians and what's. Good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I just wanted to dig a little bit into the secure funding, the two billion. I just want to understand, is this, are these funds like securing minimums from existing partners or is it incremental from new funding partners? If you could just provide a little bit more color on that and how it is compared to the existing run rate, I guess, of business that you have.
非常好,谢谢。下一个问题来自Peter Christians and what's。下午好,感谢提问。我想深入了解一下安全资金的两亿美元。我只是想弄清楚,这些资金是来自现有合作伙伴的最低保证还是来自新的融资合作伙伴的增量?如果您可以提供一些更详细的信息,并说明与您现有业务的运行率相比如何,那就太感谢了。
Sure. Yeah, thanks, Pete. This is Sanjay. Yeah, I think a lot of it is coming from partners that are new to the platform that we've never worked with before. Some of it is coming from existing partners who would either sort of stepped away from funding during the turbulence of the past few quarters and are coming back to the platform or they're re-upping in significant size. I'm committing forward in exchange for a longer term agreement. So I think in almost every case you can view as sort of being additive to what we've been doing recently and sort of underpins both the, you know, the improving guide that we have in our two two numbers as well as a sort of more general optimism, we're signaling qualitatively.
So that's helpful. And then I guess in the past, you know, upstart has made a number of model changes to the AI platform and you've seen subsequent results change as well. I guess in the current, I guess assuming the status quo environment, like how do you think these model changes will influence results in the coming quarters? Thank you.
Hey Pete, this is Dave. I mean, generally speaking on the margin that upgrades to the AI tend to improve automation or improve accuracy of the models and those tend to be an aggregate positive to growth. So as I was kind of staying toward the end of my remarks, you know, we believe we can grow without the economy improving, but it will certainly, you know, be doing it against what is currently a pretty challenging economy with respect to funding markets, you know, base credit rates, interest rates, etc. So, but we do believe, I mean, the reason we've been able to grow and over time is predominantly because the technology and the models get better and those tend to lead to growth. And even in a difficult environment, we have today that still is still true.
I was curious in looking at how the mix of bank versus non-bank and institutional investors on the platform, I'd be curious if there's a sense of where that mix may have shifted discord or that might go going forward.
You're asking about the sort of mix of bank versus institutional investors. That's right, yes. Yeah, I mean, I guess at a headline level, I would say that obviously the events that we went through in March that particularly impacted the banking sector definitely had an impact. And so the dynamic there is we continue to bring new lending partner, bank credit union partners aboard, but existing ones are obviously becoming a little bit more conservative.
I think that impacted the capital markets less so. So you may have seen a bit of a shift towards the institutional dollars. How that plays out forward is a bit hard to tell. I mean, the banking sector is obviously right now in a bit of turbulence and that may increase or it may moderate. And I think depending on what that banking, what that sector experience is over the coming quarters, you look and pricey reflected in their ability to or they're appetite to lend and to take more balance. You risk. That makes sense.
And then kind of looking through some of the past disclosures, you've got to two banks that seem to be the primary neighbors of the loan sales or kind of the marketplace side of the platform. But if you add up the volumes of those two banks, it seems to imply that they're actually much more than the loans that are being sold to have the institutional investors and retain by offstri. I couldn't quite, you know, one or two of those banks accounts for 50 plus or getting close to 60% of all your kind of bank funding side of the platforms. I'm curious, you know, what little concentration there is on the banks side of the funding platform.
Have you seen any of those partners pull that in their buying activity recently? Yeah, there are really three banks in our platform that serve as conduits with the originate loans. In some cases, they hold some of them in other cases, they end up selling them to institutional partners. So there are three of those banks in our platform. And it's quite possible to move volumes between them. It's quite purposeful that we can do that. And we're only speaking the fees and the profits on the loans that end up in the institutional side are higher than they are on the bank, on the, what tend to be the primer loans that banks are originating and holding on their balance sheet. So that sort of creates the structure that you're seeing there.
But it's not really, you know, in a true sense of revenue concentration. These are, again, many, many institutional buyers behind those banks, but we do have multiple what we call market place lending partners on the platform. And I'm curious, you know, when you think about plotting constructions from sending partners, are there any partners that are kind of 10% and more of your overall funding, or 15% and more of your overall funding, or is it more diverse?
I think what you'll see in our revenue concentration disclosures when the financials come out, is that those concentrations are going down. And I think in terms of, you know, source capital dependency, I don't think anything is far greater than the ballpark that you just mentioned. Thank you very much. I'll jump back and you do. Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of James Fosette with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Thank you very much and thanks for the details today. I wanted to go back on the secured funding and I think you made the comment that there were some preferential terms that you were able to offer to them. I guess a couple of questions associated with that. Going forward, what would be the right level of mix or targeted mix for that group?
And it sounds like you're planning to add more to that, firstly, and secondly, how much should we expect that you may have to harmonize at least some of those terms into other sources of capital? Hey, James, this is Dave. Good question. So I would say, first of all, one of the comments I had made in my remarks earlier, we would like to have, in particular, among capital committed such that we can be cash flow positive as a business. So sort of a baseline of capital that we feel very good about being solid will be there.
And that would be a pretty dramatic reduction in cyclicality. So that's, I think, what we would try to do. I generally think we are benefiting from the fact that we have very strong margins and that we can share a bit of them with the preferred partner and a preferred partner is one that is making a longer term commitment to us. So I think that's a structure that we would expect to have for the long haul. And I think it makes sense that if they're going to commit to you, you're going to make some special plans to them. And there can, of course, also continue to be plenty of sort of at will participants in the marketplace, month in, month out.
And we don't expect that to go away with anything that's a good thing. But I do think we want a significant fraction of the funding to be more long term committed in getting a little bit of a preference for doing that. And lastly, as we've said, I think we feel comfortable giving our margin structure that we can afford to do that. The other thing I'll add is this is all as Sunji said earlier, entirely related to personal loans today. I think we will push for this kind of structure on other products as well.
I kind of believe that secured products are ones that are much primer like the HELOC product will have probably, I would just say, less of a need for it because they will just tend to be more normal familiar products in one set. So, lenders lean toward even in more difficult times. So that's how we're thinking about it. I don't know if I think it will always be kind of, we'll hopefully harmonize these types agreements into a consistent structure. Sunji said they're starting off a little bespoke by, you know, probably not hard to imagine that that would happen. But over time, I think we would really like to almost programatize it so it's a little more structured. But I do believe there'll be sort of longer term partners and there'll be at will partners coexisting in our platform.
Yep, yep. And then, on, on, I appreciate all that, David. And then, how do you feel about the state of your cost-based now on a run-right basis? I know that here in the, you know, June quarter you're expecting to roughly be adjusted to the top right, even now those programs have been fully implemented. But, you know, should we take that to mean that you're, you feel like you're at the right cost-based and that the kind of the first quarter would have been roughly the bottom from a revenue generation perspective and that you can grow, at least for, you know, the remainder of this calendar, you're on a sequential basis or are there incremental actions that may need to be taken just trying to think through kind of how you're seeing the business and its evolution from this point.
Yeah, hey, James, it's Sunji. Yeah, I think we're in very good shape, I think we've done a personal, from a personal perspective, I think we did what we needed to do in Q1 and we're past it. I think our workforce members are in very good shape now and, you know, barring any dramatic reversal in the business and the economy, I think we'll sort of grow from here. But, there's still more work to be done on the OPEC side as Dave mentioned, there's sort of programs to sort of reduce, you know, large consumers of, you know, compute, you know, machine learning models require a lot of sort of training resources and we want to get more efficient at that, our engineering footprint, you know, the resources we consume, you know, can get more efficient as well. So I think that, you know, this will be an ongoing set of initiatives, but I think by and large, your sort of, your model is right, which is, I think we're at a good place, we can tighten up a little bit more, but you know, we're sort of indicating that we think there's a nice path for growth from year on out and, you know, as we did, as we demonstrated before our cost base is going to scale very efficiently with the top line and it'll sort of provide the provided margin materialization as we grow.
That's great. Thanks for that, Simon. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Reggie Smith with JP Morgan. Good evening, gentlemen. Congrats on the quarter and on securing the $2 billion in funding. My question, I know in the past, you've been asked about, you know, becoming a bank and not wanting to do that, which I can totally appreciate. My question for you and I guess it kind of relates back to the funding as well. Would you consider like a warehouse type funding mechanism and does any of your $2 billion, is any of its structure in that kind of way where you pay a fixed rate and you hold more loans on ballot sheet? Of course, it's all that $2 billion that you talked about. Purely, you know, arms length, outside of balance sheet.
Yeah, Reggie, yeah. That's generally what we would term forward flow commitment. So loans that are purchased monthly by a third party and outside third party. So that's what that is. It's not on our balance sheet. There's no warehouse on our side. I'm using, you know, they could be leveraging on their side if they chose to, but that's separate from anything going on with us. So let me see what was the other part of the question. So would you consider warehouses that is that also something that you would add?
Yeah, we've had modest warehouse capacity for many years. So when the loans are on our balance sheet to some extent, we have, those are financing and it's more efficient use of our equity capital. But that's still, you know, that's under that umbrella of the loan total. So just so we, you know, say no more than a billion on our balance sheet and those tend to be warehouse. Or at least some of them are. So we do use that for a capital efficiency, but it's, it's not a primary funding mechanism. Just as our balance sheet ultimately is not a primary funding mechanism.
Yeah, no, I can't figure it out. The loans on our balance sheet, when we say we have a billion that assets on the balance sheet, but you know, less than half of that is the actual loan equity. A power is the rest of finance, but we still consider that to be our balance sheet. It's really what we're interested in with the long term arrangements is third parties as the, as the risk engine, you know, and they can, they can finance as it suits them.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. The, I guess the crux of the question was, would you consider the more, I guess, balance sheet intensive, but it sounds like you're comfortable with the billion, and that's kind of where you, where you, where you want to remain, we should have foreseeable future.
My second question, guidance, very strong numbers. In particular, I guess the, the interest, net interest, and kind of fair value. I guess that implies a pretty sharp sequential improvement there was curious what, what was driving that, and if you could talk a little bit about the performance you've seen of your loans that are held on balance sheet, loss rates and things of that nature.
Yeah, sure, I do this Sunday, and so as far as the guidance, I would say, you know, Q1 was the anomaly in a sense, which is normally to expect your balance sheet to have some modest positive income. We tend to hold our loans at fair value, so we mark to market, we don't use these real accounting. And so when interest rates are going up, which has happened with a lot in the last year, it's taken a, you know, a toll on evaluations. Q1 in particular, didn't necessarily have adverse sort of interest rate movements, but what it did have is we booked unrealized fair value marks that reflected a balance sheet transaction. Now, it was not a balance sheet transaction that completed Q1, so that's why it's unrealized. But because it was a balance sheet transaction that we were anticipating, we were expecting, and we expected to close, you know, early in Q2, we sort of reflected the economics of that transaction in Q1, and that will be in our disclosures. So I think you could think of that as as of Q2 going forward, we're not really anticipating any large significant transactions beyond the one we've already accounted for.
And therefore, I think what you're seeing now in our guidance for interest income just sort of reflects ongoing normality. It sort of like interest rates stability, no large transactions, and some modest income from our remaining down sheet. So that's why I would think about the guidance.
As for performance, I think the best way to think about it is in our investing materials, we generally display, you know, what we're intending to do as a blended average across our platform with respect to growth return delivery, and how we think each vintage is trending. And the simple summary is, you know, the advantages that are on our balance sheet from back in 2021, or 2022, are likely going to under-deliver. As they are across the broader platform, I think anything as is certainly Q4 forward, something from the last six to nine months are well on track to over deliver in our opinion. And so if you know that the performance of our balance sheet will just reflect the underlying vintage that you see on the broader platform.
And if I could sneak one more in on the take rate, you talked about, I guess, the strong economics. Curious is, is there a way to kind of parse the impact that a stronger pricing or origination fees that are paid by a bar versus maybe with your partners or paying you with any change there. So we talked about better pricing. I don't think there's anything necessarily more to parse there than fees primarily born by borrowers that are getting loans, you know, fun to do institutions tend to flex off at times like this. So that's really what you're seeing. I mean based, you know, yield requirements are going up, loss expectations going up and also the fees going up. All of which we certainly don't love, but just the reality of the economy we're sitting in that we have to plan. And we would really be happy to see all that reverses self over the next year if we're so fortunate.
No, I got it. That wasn't clear. I'm sorry. I got a couple calls going on. So I didn't catch that part that it was that was fun. Early bar. Okay. Thank you.
No worries. Our last question comes from the line of Simon clinch with Atlantic equities. Hi guys, I've got to jump back in the queue. Thanks for taking my question again. Just curious, going back to your the pace of your new model rollouts or updates through the quarter was pretty staggering. And I'll just, you know, someone who doesn't really know about these things, I was wanting to talk us through perhaps the risks and or challenges of of that kind of pace of rollout and. And what to I guess how to think about that in terms of the benefit going forward, because previously we haven't needed that many rollouts to create significant benefits for you guys.
Yeah, Simon, it's a good question. It's important. I would just say to state that we have different models and production for each product that we have. So this four products to auto products, a personal own product, small ball of product, each of whom have related, but different models that push the production. There's also models that are more focused on automation than the pricing. So things that deal with fraud and those kind of things.
So, you know, all across the, I don't know exactly how many AI models in the distinctive AI models we have, but it's quite a few. And those teams are working in parallel. So this isn't the same model being updated or retrained every three days. It's less than that. But, but there's a lot of them in each one of them, you know, generally are making some part of our product line that much better. So that's a pace which, you know, a couple years ago, we were probably maybe doing, you know, one a month or so. So it's quite a difference. That that sounds a lot more sensible. Thank you.
你知道,在我们拥有的数十个独特 AI 模型中,有多少个我并不确定,但数量相当可观。这些团队是并行工作的,因此并不是同一个模型每三天更新或重新训练一次。但每个模型都在优化我们产品系列的某个部分。所以我们现在的进展速度比几年前的每月一个模型要快得多。听起来更合理了。谢谢。
Thanks, Simon. This concludes today's question and answer session. I will turn the call back for any additional or closing remarks.
谢谢您,Simon。今天的问题与回答环节到此结束。如有其他需要或结束语,请继续通话。
Just want to thank everybody for listening today. And as we said, we're happy with what we've achieved in the first quarter. We're actually pretty optimistic about 2023. So thanks for sticking with us.