Figure (FIGR) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Date

Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET

Call participants

• Executive Chairman — Michael Cagney
• Chief Executive Officer — Michael Tannenbaum
• Chief Financial Officer — Minchung Kgil

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Takeaways

• Consumer loan marketplace volume -- $2.9 billion, reflecting 110% year-over-year growth.
• Adjusted net revenue -- $167 million, up 92% from the prior year quarter.
• Adjusted EBITDA -- $83 million, representing 190% year-over-year growth and a 50% margin.
• Rule of X metric -- Rule of 140 achieved, over triple the benchmark standard of 40.
• Monthly origination milestone -- First time surpassing $1.2 billion in a single month; March total equals 85% of entire Q1 2025 volume.
• Figure Connect share -- Accounted for 56% of marketplace volume, rising from 54% sequentially.
• New partners -- 80 added, including "the seventh largest lender in the country," highest quarterly addition reported.
• Business purpose/SMB channel -- Volume grew to nearly $60 million in the quarter.
• Residential transition/DSCR loans -- Both segments delivered 70% growth, with $100 billion cited as annual addressable origination market.
• First lien volume -- Rose to 20% of total, up from 14% previous year and 19% previous quarter.
• Take rate -- 3.8% for the quarter, within guided 3.5%-4% range; lower on first lien, but higher absolute profit contribution per loan.
• Democratized Prime balances -- Ended at $368 million in matched offers; YLDS at $598 million, reflecting 80% quarter-over-quarter growth for both.
• Third-party borrowers on Democratized Prime -- Three new added in the quarter, including a DSCR originator and Credibly for SMB assets.
• Loans held for sale -- $500 million at quarter-end, up $100 million since year-end.
• Cash and equivalents -- $1.5 billion at quarter-end.
• Securitizations -- Five priced with an aggregate notional value of nearly $1.9 billion since year start.
• Operations and processing expenses -- Declined to 74 basis points of volume vs. 93 basis points prior year, as volume more than doubled.
• Guidance: Consumer loan marketplace volume -- Q2 2026 projected in the $3.8 billion-$4.1 billion range; formal guidance issued for the first time.
• AI-driven efficiency -- Company reported a 25% increase in engineering productivity and a 70% uplift in customer chat containment.

Summary

Figure Technology Solutions (NASDAQ:FIGR) reported adjusted net revenue growth of 92%, with adjusted EBITDA increasing 190% and margins reaching 50%. Marketplace origination volumes crossed $2.9 billion, setting a new monthly record in March at $1.2 billion. Democratized Prime and YLDS balances both expanded by 80% quarter over quarter, reflecting rapid adoption of blockchain-based DeFi products in the capital markets. The company added 80 new partners, elevated its first lien loan exposure, and solidified institutional bank participation with onboarding of Flagstar Bank. Figure launched formal guidance for Q2 2026, projecting $3.8 billion-$4.1 billion in consumer loan marketplace origination volume.

• Management described "the $1 billion monthly marketplace origination," after surpassing $1 billion for the first time.
• Michael Tannenbaum stated, our economic level for Figure Connect and the consumer loan marketplace more broadly is take rate by volume.
• Bank originators and institutional depositories are increasing their activity on the Figure platform, with regulatory shifts cited as tailwinds.
• Deliberate retention of $350 million in loans on balance sheet supported the scaling of Democratized Prime DeFi marketplace, resulting in a higher near-term interest expense.
• OPEN, the on-chain public equity network, drew additional issuer interest, with a second public registration filing completed.
• AI automation notably reduced operations and processing costs, even as product enhancements expanded.

Industry glossary

• Figure Connect: The firm's blockchain-based marketplace infrastructure enabling high-volume, balance-sheet-light loan origination, trading, and securitization.
• Democratized Prime: Figure’s blockchain-native bilateral marketplace for digital asset financing, facilitating direct lending/borrowing and DeFi integration.
• YLDS: Figure’s yield-bearing digital security token, used as collateral within the DeFi ecosystem.
• OPEN: Figure’s on-chain network for public equities, offering self-custody, 24/7 trading, and integrated DeFi lending/borrowing features.
• DSCR loans: Debt Service Coverage Ratio loans, made for business purposes (e.g., real estate investment/rental), collateralized by property cash flow.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Michael Cagney: Thanks. So I want to thank everyone for taking the time to join us on the call today. We've got a lot to cover and a very strong quarter. Before we kick off, I know there were some questions about my absence from the earnings call last quarter, so I wanted to set expectations. And my role as Executive Chairman, I'm thrive to long-term strategy of Figure. I'll join these calls when we're spending time on that topic like today. You should expect to hear from me about every other call, but that will be -- that will vary based on what's happening with the business.

So I understand that for an investor looking at Figure for the first time, there's a lot to take in and often leads investors to take the easy path assuming Figure is a HELOC company, but Figure is not a HELOC company, Figure is a company building a capital market ecosystem native to blockchain, this is a total overhaul of the existing market. To kick off this call, I'd like to lay out the ecosystem we're building, how we plan to scale it and why it matters. So Figure's ecosystem has 3 verticals: debt and structured finance, equity and non-debt digital assets and capital and financing markets, YLDS acts as the currency that ties these verticals together.

With debt and structured finance, our first launch into that vertical was through our own retail HELOC production back in 2018. We quickly evolved that into a B2B business. And today, the vast majority of our mortgage production on the platform comes from our 380-plus third-party partners. Further, over half of that production trades on Connect our whole loan marketplace. With Connect, we pioneered what we believe to be the only liquid private credit capital PSCs, which only quasi-private. This capital market, not the originating technologies are moat in this business and our primary revenue driver for loans in our ecosystem.

Last year, we began to bring our digital assets over to DeFi for financing, introduced the problems remain to all real-world assets on blockchain. DeFi's asset-based lending, the premises that the collateral backing the loan is liquid. What are the collaterals a whole loan given LTV breach, how does a lender take a fractional position in the whole loan. And even if they could, where would they sell it. This is where our platform forge comes in. We built forwards to transform whole loans in the small single dollar liquid participation units. Loans get pledged or sold into a bankruptcy remote container that container issues participation units against the loans, these units have a natural market.

They get expensive, entities will buy loans on connect and pledge into the container than sell participation units in the market. They get cheap, bigger and others will buy them, swap in the loans and securitize them. This 2-way arbitrage supports the liquid marketplace. With liquidity, the unit's work as collateral in DeFi. Lenders can see market liquidity, volatility and advance rate to decide on whether to participate as they would with Bitcoin or other crypto assets. Forge acts as a critical intermediary between on chain loans and DeFi.

We were excited to announce Agora in Q1 is the first forge third-party partner and are building a pipeline of many other issuers across consumer mortgage receivables, SMB and other loan categories, with the goal of bringing these issuers onto blockchain into connect via forge to DeFi. Michael will talk more about the economic model to this and the other 2 verticals. But essentially, we make money running the marketplace, which is Connect, the bridge to DeFi, which is Forge and DART, DeFi itself, which today is Democratized Prime and the arbitrage from participating in the token market. For equity and nondigital assets in Q1, Figure launched the on-chain public equity network or OPEN.

With OPEN, we are capturing the blockchain value proposition, transactional efficiency, liquidity and DeFi through public equities native on-chain. On open stock is registered on the blockchain, not DTCC, stocks trade on our ATS, which functions like a decentralized exchange of self-custody self-clearing. The ATS supports Direct Wallet Connect eliminating the need for introducing brokers. And through self-custody stockholders can access DeFi for lend and borrow. OPEN delivers important value to companies and investors. First, companies can do proxy and other outreach and distributions directly to wallet holders eliminating the cost of these services from firms like DTCC.

Check the combination of 24/7 trading and Wallet Connect opens up access to trading to a global investor base, but a most important value proposition lies in DeFi. With OPEN, shareholders can put their stock up as collateral to borrow in DeFi markets at potentially better advance in interest rates that can cross collateralize combining stock with Bitcoin, for example, to borrow against both. But most importantly, they control stock loan rather than the prime broker sitting in between a stock lender and borrower at an opaque market, the shareholder can put their stock out or borrow directly on a limit order book. This redirects the money that primes make today to the shareholder.

It also creates an interesting mitigant to high short interest where the underlying stock is -- when the underlying stock is on special. With the shareholder getting this full stock loan benefit, the company creates a countervailing force to own a heavily shorted stock, high coupon from the stock loan. OPEN is unique and that the stock is native on chain, not a DTC copy or an SPV interest. Shareholders have full rights in the stock can trade in the limit order book. Competing efforts suffer from limited access as PVs are available to U.S. investors, for example, limited liquidity DTCC copies can't trade in the limit order book because of Reg NMS and best execution or limited utility.

So copies of assets generally won't work in DeFi protocols. In addition to OPEN, we also support marketplaces for other non-debt digital assets, including crypto, or we're not actively trying to grow these markets today, they provide an important laboratory for testing and product and technology ideas. Again, Michael will talk about the unit economics, but with OPEN, we earn in listing fees, trading fees, but the bulk of the economics come from DeFi. On capital and financing markets, the common threat across the debt and equity verticals and the biggest value from blockchain is the DeFi. Last year, Figure stood up a custody bilateral marketplace called Democratized Prime.

As the name implies, we weren't trying to hide our ambitions into the separate. We're building a compete venue for financing digital assets on blockchain. Democratized Prime currently supports markets across whole loans, loan participations, crypto and equity. Democratized Prime is native to the Provenance blockchain or primary layer 1 chain. Last year, the Provenance Foundation launched Hastra, a DeFi protocol that swaps wrapped yields for a prime token. The Hastra protocol unwraps the yield takes yield to Democratized Prime and passes on the interest less a feed to the prime token holder.

There are liquid markets for prime token and active DeFi protocols away from Provenance blockchain that provide leverage called looping for prime token holders boosting returns from mid-single-digit mid-teens. Hastra access middle from third-party Layer 1 blockchains to Democratized Prime. It launched on Solana in Q4 using Camino for financing and Radium for Liquidity. The Prime Token was the fastest-growing token in Camino's history and is the largest actively deployed real-world asset open for DeFiLlama in the entire DeFi ecosystem across any blockchain. Last week, Hastra announced its launch on the Morpho protocol on Ethereum, opening up an even water addressable DeFi market on blockchain today.

Again, Michael will talk in detail about the economics, but the primary driver here is the spread we earn between lenders and borrowers with some protocol fees from Hastra eventually paid back to Figure. In terms of what we're trying to do to scale these verticals, we're pursuing a set of discrete strategies to build out our blockchain native capital market ecosystem. First, we're working on growing the first lien market via HELOC on Connect. The first lien market is upwards of 25x larger than the second lien space.

We've been pushing an innovative solution of using HELOC and first lien position, dramatically lowering originating costs relative to traditional mortgages and are beginning to establish dominance in the sub-$300,000 first lien loan marketplace. Second, we're focused on bringing USDC, USDT utility yields. While yields per appear transferable as the security it still requires a transfer agent and then the name and address of each holder. We're advocating both to the SEC and via Clarity satisfied transfer agent requirements with wallet address. This would bring identical utility to yields afforded to any genius at coin, but with the added feature that yields pays interest. We see this as a significant unlock for applications from DeFi to payments.

Third, we're working to build a proof point of the -- we're going to improve a point of the borrow benefit to shareholders on OPEN. We've been working with some of our largest shareholders and migrate their stock positions from NASDAQ to OPEN. We believe this will cause a tipping point where borrow for shorts must happen on change. Once we've established this proof point, we'll make a concerted go-to-market push more listings. Fourth, we're bringing third-party borrow on to Democratized Prime. And in order for us to scale significantly, we need to make bolder bets in terms of the types of companies that we partner with and the structure in which we do.

The team has done a nice job of adding 380 partners in our tokenized mortgage marketplace, but we are exploring ways to add additional assets and change the capital markets in. In fact, we'll talk about adding SMB as part of Michael's comments. Fifth, to accommodate this expected increase in volume, we're working to bring TradFi capital on to Democratized Prime. The DeFi ecosystem is still nascent size relative to TradFi wholesale capital markets. To get DeFi scale, we need TradFi dollars from retail investors and institutional asset managers to begin to use protocols like Democratized Prime to earn yield.

We're working with multiple partners on this, including ensuring security perfection and collateral and helping third parties launch dedicated DeFi yield funds where they have guaranteed access to certain democratized prime pools. Finally, we're beginning to allocate resources into existential problems for blockchain a wallet-centric experience. Terms like coinbase, Robin Hood and so are building Super App. So one-stop shop where the firm controls the customer data, custody transactions and experience. Blockchain affords a different user-centric approach, notably with self-custody wallets and distributed applications and east can control the data, pick their own transaction venues and maintain a consistent user experience. Blockchain is a very small pond.

The only way to make it a lake in a notion is to deliver an experience that both retail and institutional TradFi customers can embrace. You'll hear more from us on this topic over the coming months. Our blockchain ecosystem is a multiyear endeavor with massive upside. I know public companies look quarter-to-quarter, but we want to set expectations on timing. It took us several years to drive means treatment option in HELOC and it wasn't an easy path. We expect the same as we build into additional credit equity and yields, but believe the payoff is worth the upward. To help explain the upside and to provide a recap of the quarter, I'm handing it off to Michael.

Michael Tannenbaum: Thanks, Mike. I'll kick it off by covering our strong performance this quarter. Q1 '26 continued our impressive financial performance with again over 110% consumer loan marketplace growth and roughly 50% adjusted EBITDA margins, putting us at a rule of 140 versus benchmark of 40. Revenue was up 92% and adjusted EBITDA margin at 50% as we continue to see the benefits of our capital light marketplace, Figure Connect in the financials. In fact, Figure Connect grew to 56% of volume, up from 54% last quarter. In terms of volume, we saw growth across all channels, most notably new partners, depository activity, business purpose and partner growth via Figure Connect. I'll walk through each now.

We added 80 new partners the most ever, and launched partners, including the seventh largest lender in the country. Our business purpose product highlighted by the SMB channel continued its very rapid expansion with volume in almost $60 million this quarter. We've also seen a significant acceleration of depository activity within our pipeline, reflecting a clear and growing demand for Figure's own products from this important market segment. Highlighting this is the recent onboarding of Flagstar Bank, a large regional depository and now the largest bank originator on our marketplace to date. This validates our platform's institutional grade and our ability to support complex, large-scale banking operations. We're currently in the final stages of implementation.

We believe this momentum will only be amplified by proposed regulatory shifts. Specifically, Fed guidance regarding reduced risk weightings for mortgage assets and home equity loans serves as a substantial tailwind further incentivizing depositories to leverage our platform and optimize their balance sheets. The business channel progress coincides with growth we are seeing in SCR and residential transition loans. These 2 products, often used by real estate investment businesses represent a roughly $100 billion addressable annual origination market. The SCR loans focus on rental housing and are one of the fastest-growing pockets of residential lending and residential transition loans are an attractive category for us on democratized Prime due to their short-term nature.

In Q1, we saw 70% growth from both of these products, and we expect this to be a focus going forward. Last quarter, I jumped 2026 the year of the first lien. Today, I'm pleased to share first lien volume now accounts for 20% of our total, up from 19% last quarter. We compete there primarily in the small balance loans where our $1,000 average cost to originate versus industry average of $11,500 is most differentiated because the cost savings makes the largest difference on smaller loans.

The standardization and liquidity that we are bringing to the mortgage industry is showing up in our strong results, our volume growth and our execution in the face of complex geopolitical and macroeconomic environments. In a recent meeting with a major potential partner and executive shared that their company sees 2 existential threats. The first I expected, AI disrupting the value chain such that their company's cost advantage erodes, but the second was that Figure becomes the default capital market and that they're late to partner with us. So that company is one we've called on for years and the posture ship was notable.

Macrina will cover take rate in more detail, but we achieved 3.8 this quarter, in line with the guidance we provided. Reminder that in connection with the airline Mike just gave our economic level for Figure Connect and the consumer loan marketplace more broadly is take rate by volume. On this quarter's take rate, we see this result as impressive, especially in light of the volatility and interest rate expectations experienced throughout one, as we indicated last quarter, while our take rate is lower on firs-lien volume, the total revenue contribution margin and EBITDA we earn on each first lien loan is higher as balances are significantly larger.

For example, we would rather earn a 2% take rate on a $300,000 first lien loan or $6,000, then a 4% take rate on a 60,000 second lien loan or $2,400, as the cost to originate are the same. Any decrease in take rate is not a reflection on our competitive differentiation or demand for our platform. Having just recently crossed the $1 billion monthly marketplace origination mark, we see a clear path to $2 billion. On the acquisition side, we benefit from what we refer to as Wales, which can do $50 million plus per month at scale. We've been adding at least one of these per quarter consistently.

One of the wells we added in late Q3, for example, did over $150 million this quarter. While smaller partners contribute less, we have also been adding conservatively around 50 per quarter and with the wide open TAMs and SMB and depositories, we see lots of opportunity. Then we go from existing partners, which continues to exceed expectations. This is fueled by improvements we make to the product as well as the incentives that drive volume on Figure Connect. Think of Figure Connect as the Baylin for these walls, it's the specialized infrastructure that allows them to swim through the capital market and efficiently ingest vast amounts of volume.

Just as been filters everything a well takes in, Connect standardizers and filters their originations into AAA quality assets for our capital markets. Three examples: one, product improvements we made in Q3, such as expanding the underwriting automation to business bank accounts now account for almost 10% of our monthly volume. Two, for Connect, on average, we see over 2x monthly volume on a same partner basis, 6 months after launching on Connect. And three, in Q1 saw offering 5x monthly volume growth for Mutual of Omaha, a Fortune 300 financial institution after upselling to Connect. Ultimately, we see a very clear path forward to continuing to double the business from here. Turning to the blockchain ecosystem.

We continue to see rapid growth with yields and democratized prime balances both growing roughly 80% quarter-over-quarter. With yields democratized prime participants are staking yield via the Hastra protocol as a way to earn yield. Growth also came via a measure milestone with an OCC chartered bank on yield on its balance sheet for treasury purposes. Lastly, we are working with a large region bank on a sweep arrangement that we expect to drive significant balances. The economic model of yields is a captured spread over SOFR, which is roughly 35 basis points multiplied by the yields balance outstanding. Democratized Prime saw the launch of Acura auto assets with $24 million borrowed as of the end of last month.

Third-party borrowers are the immediate focus of Democratized Prime and the quarter we have already added 3 more, including a DSCR originator and Credibly, a fintech lender for salt and medium-sized businesses. Credibly highlight the traction we've made in the SMB space as well as the opportunity to build new tokenized Capital Markets rails. In 2026, we planned to add a total of 8 to 10 third-party originators, although we are on our way to exceeding that goal. Adding third-party borrower volume on Democratized Prime is important because, one, it's currently the bottleneck to growth; and two, because our revenue model earns economics from the borrower.

50 basis points has been the baseline but with the value of Forge, as Mike mentioned earlier, we see upside to that number. On the lend side of the marketplace, the state yields prime token is now the #1 by TBL on the Camino marketplace, and we recently announced an extension into Ethereum. Even though third-party borrow is the current limiter on growth in the marketplace, we maintain robust efforts to diversify our lender mix as well. I mentioned this because to echo Mike earlier, figure has ambitions for Democratized Prime to be much larger, and we are seeking to bring entire asset classes on chain.

While the take rate Democratized Prime is lower than our consumer loan marketplace, the TAM is much larger and the inbound interest we have from borrowers joining the platform is significant. We see a medium-term world where Democratized Prime balances are measured in the tens to hundreds of billions. In terms of open, our on-chain public equity network we maintain a robust pipeline of issuers with OpenWorld being the second issuer to publicly file a registration statement with the SEC with the intent to use OPEN. Mike outlined a lot of the why with OPEN, but from an economic perspective, we see a number of fee opportunities here.

Listing fees and trading fees are endemic to the equity capital markets, the broader prime brokerage activity with the same monetization model we see for debt and Democratized Prime is the largest opportunity by total addressable market. Before turning it over to Macrina, I want to quickly cover private credit before ending on AI. In terms of the capital markets, our platform was resilient despite the industry's concerns around retail investor-driven redemptions from private credit bonds. In March '26 alone, when private credit concerns were heightened, over $1.15 billion of whole loan sales were executed on Biggest Marketplace.

In April 2026 a BWIC bid wanted in competition or a loan auction was completed on Figure's platform that resulted in a record low spread to the applicable risk-free rate, reflecting strong institutional investor demand for our assets. In fact, we're seeing increased interest in Figure assets as investors rotate out of leveraged loans where there are more concerns and into the high-quality, diversified consumer assets on our marketplace. As a reminder, the credit performance of loans in our marketplace reflects a borrower base with strong fundamentals.

Turning to AI and building off our discussion from last quarter, we believe rapid AI adoption represent a massive tailwind for blockchain native coding like figure, and I'll continue to detail our efforts here regularly. Capital markets are undergoing a simultaneous shift from blockchain and AI and Figure is building the system that connects them. Here, we say AI is the brain, blockchain as the nervous system. Our custom AI platform operates on a structured, time-stamped on-chain financial data set that is directly tied to actual transactions, trained on real outcomes and helps with execution within our marketplace. This is a key point of differentiation and I can't emphasize enough.

Many organizations today are building AI-enabled features or experimenting with agents, but moving capital markets requires an underlying system that is optimized for reliability, control compliance. As I repeatedly say, you can't AI your way into AAA. To lead this next phase of execution, we recently welcomed back Rod Albuyeh as our Head of AI. Under his leadership, we're developing agenetic workflow systems on top of our platform that handle tasks like data onboarding, document validation, underwriting checks and exception handling. Everything we do is in systematically reduced friction in areas where automation complemented by human oversight when necessary, delivers the most value.

Three specific examples I'll cover are: one, our use of AI and building product; two, our use of AI and customer support; and three, our use of AI in adapting Agora's third-party auto assets to Democratized Prime. In the last year, we've seen a 25% increase year-over-year in what we call story completion, which is essentially engineering projects delivered on flat headcount. In chat containment, we've seen 70% and are now implementing voice AI and most significantly, with Agora and now other third-party Democratized Prime assets, we introduced an AI-enabled validation workflow that compares third-party assets against the underwriting criteria those assets were intended to satisfy at origin.

The initial results have been encouraging and are helping us build a more scalable workflow and control framework for honoring third-party assets. And now I'll turn it over to Macrina for financials.

Minchung Kgil: Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. As Michael highlighted, the first quarter of 2026 was a period of both significant growth and strategic diversification of our partner network and product offerings for Figure. We are operating at a rule of 140, a best-in-class standard we've achieved through 92% year-over-year adjusted net revenue growth, combined with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 50%. To put that in perspective, we are performing at more than triple the traditional rule of 40 industry benchmarks. Our consumer loan marketplace volume grew over 110% year-over-year. This brings our Q1 '26 volume to approximately $2.9 billion compared to $1.4 billion in Q1 of 2025.

As momentum accelerated coming out of the winter months this quarter, in March, for the first time as a company, we crossed above $1 billion of CLM volume at $1.2 billion. To highlight the scale, March volume alone represented 85% of all of Q1 2025. This momentum has continued into Q2 with our published April volumes continuing to accelerate both sequentially and year-over-year. Our volume on Figure Connect accounted for 56% overall Q1 volume suggesting enhanced capital efficiency given the balance sheet light dynamic of Figure Connect.

Democratized Prime ended the quarter with matched offer balances of $368 million when YLDS ended at $598 million, reflecting continued adoption following the Prime token expansion on to Solana and our broader real-world assets consortium initiatives, adding distribution for these products. Our adjusted net revenue for Q1 '26 was $167 million, an increase of 92% over the prior year quarter. Adjusted net revenue benefited from higher consumer loan marketplace volume alongside servicing and interest income, which are asset balance based revenue lines. Adjusted net revenue directly correlated to consumer loan marketplace volume grew 109% year-over-year while servicing and interest income combined grew by 42%.

Our net take rate for the quarter was 3.8%, which is in line with our previous guidance between 3.5% to 4%. We continue to see more first lien volume, which reached 20% of our total volume this quarter up from 14% in Q1 of '25. As we've mentioned, there are a number of inputs to take rate, which is why we do not really view it as the core North Star metric for the business. Mix shift is one factor. And over time, you should expect some of our key growth areas, including first non-Figure Connect impact towards lower take rates than junior lean volume.

That said, these businesses are attractive because they are less capital intensive, operating much larger markets and generate strong contribution margins and profitability for the company. So when we evaluate performance, we are much more focused on contribution profit, EBITDA and the absolute dollar economics of the business and just take rate. In this quarter specifically, some of the inputs to take rate were net positive based on normal market variability, including interest rate-related dynamics in some of the higher take rate portions of the business.

More broadly, as we continue leaning into larger opportunities like first lien, which is roughly 25x the size of the junior lien market, we believe that is the right trade-off for long-term growth and profitability. To touch on loan sale execution on Interconnect, it has held quite steady in Q1 '26 and into April of 2026 despite the macro and geopolitical environment. Since the beginning of the year, we have priced 5 securitizations with an aggregate notional value of nearly $1.9 billion and are continuing to see our pools priced competitively in new issue markets, reflecting a strong market consensus on the quality and resilience of the underlying credit on our marketplace.

One further point to add in this revenue discussion section is that we are strategically retaining a portion of our loans as reflected by the approximately $350 million on our balance sheet at quarter end. Longer than we normally do, which was a deliberate decision to support the buildout of our Democratized Prime DeFi marketplace, as I had indicated during the Q4 earnings call. During our IPO roadshow and recent earnings calls, we have highlighted the importance of using our own inventory to build this marketplace. Lenders on blockchain are showing significant appetite as we see continued interest and growth in lender supply coming into Democratized Prime and Figure originated loans are supporting the supply to match offers.

This translated to higher interest expense of approximately $2 million quarter-over-quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was impacted as a result by approximately 1.4% with a larger revenue denominator for lower margin interest revenue with more lenders and asset classes coming online into Democratized Prime over the next quarters, as Michael announced today, we expect this interest income expense and loan balance trends to diminish. As Mike Cagney noted in his remarks and also have noted a number of times in past remarks, building out marketplaces requires upfront investments. With that, the scale comes quickly and handsomely as with Democratized Prime, where we are already seeing scale benefits into prevailing lending rates which will flatter margins going forward.

I will cover this further in the balance sheet and liquidity section. Moving to profitability and adjusted EBITDA. Our GAAP net income for this quarter was $45 million including a tax benefit of $7 million. Following the post-IPO lockup expiration, we saw a onetime tax benefit from option exercises. While equity activity can continue to create periodic tax benefits, we view the magnitude of the Q1 benefit is elevated and not indicative of the full year expected tax rate. Assuming no additional material tax benefits from option exercises, we currently expect the full year effective tax rate to be closer to the 20% range.

Adjusted EBITDA was $83 million, up approximately 190% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA margin was 50% compared to 33% in the prior year period. In addition to the interest income and interest expense impact to our margin, as I discussed earlier from a variable cost efficiency perspective, we are making further investments to utilize AI and automate our operations. Our technology platform has proved to be extensible. And even as we have been adding a number of enhancements to the mortgage products such as support for new income types and property ownership models, there has not been a material increase in these costs.

Operations and processing income declined 20% from 93 basis points to 74 basis points as a percent of volume as our CLL volume more than doubled from Q1 '25 to Q1 '26. This is the power of our AI-driven efficiency road map. Near term, we expect operations and processing costs to remain relatively flat as a percent of volume as we continue these initiatives with AI-driven improvements expected to impact further in the second half of 2026. Moving to our balance sheet and liquidity. We ended the quarter with approximately $1.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

Loans held for sale was approximately $500 million at quarter end, an increase of $100 million since year-end and on par with a year ago. Our loans held for sale balance typically reflect the periodic timing of loan sale and securitization programs as we generally only hold these for a few weeks. As I mentioned earlier, as we scale Democratized Prime and utilize figure loans for collateral to meet lender supply, we extended the time we hold certain loans on our balance sheet for this quarter. Available lender supply was 0.9x borrower demand at the end of the year. This is now 1.2x at the end of this quarter.

As more third-party borrower demand comes on to the platform such as Agora data as well as Credibly, which we announced this May, we expect these balances to normalize back to historical trends. In addition, as more lender supply comes in from East network, we expect to add more lender supply and also bring down cost to borrowers on Democratized Prime marketplace. I wanted to provide some color on changes to adjusted net revenue as YLDS in circulation continues to grow, we are updating our definition of adjusted net revenue to deduct YLDS related interest expense. Bondholders of yields earned, which today is still for minus 35 basis points.

This better reflects the true spread take rate on YLDS as part of adjusted net revenue. In addition, as our CLM volume continues to grow, we are holding more marketable securities on our balance sheet as a regulatory requirement to hold at least 5% of figure sponsored securitization. We are adjusting net revenue and adjusted EBITDA for unrealized P&L volatility from these securities. Note that securitizations issued by our guarantor do not have a risk retention requirement. Finally, starting this quarter, we are introducing quarterly guidance for our consumer loan marketplace volume. Looking ahead, we are establishing our Q2 '26 CLM volume guidance in the range of $3.8 billion to $4.1 billion.

This marks the first quarter in which we are providing formal volume guidance. We believe this is the appropriate inflection point to do so as the increased data transparency from our blockchain integration, combined with more predictable scaling patterns provides us with requisite visibility to forecast with a high degree of confidence. Our outlook is supported by a robust start to the year. Following a strong Q1, April delivered another record-breaking volume month. That momentum has carried into May where we continue to see strong activity levels ahead of normal holiday-related trends later in the quarter. As Michael noted earlier, our strategy remains focused on onboarding high-volume Wale partners.

In our guidance, we have been intentionally conservative regarding the ramp-up of larger accounts onboarded in Q4 and Q using a 3 to 6 months' time line. While we have seen partners integrate faster, we believe it is prudent to provide a range that accommodates a more measured ramp up. This approach ensures our guidance remains grounded as we continue to scale these enterprise-level relationships. Thank you, and we will now open up the queue for questions.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Dan Dolev with Mizuho.

Dan Dolev: Guys, excellent results out there, very, very strong. I just had a question about DSCR. Can you talk about -- it looks like -- it looks really promising. Can you talk about the market opportunity compared to traditional HELOCs and how we think about it into the future?

Michael Tannenbaum: Thanks, Dan. We talked both about residential transition loans and DSCR, which is debt service covenant ratio. And both of those are targeted towards traditionally investment orientation in the business case, so people using a loan for business purposes, often renovation or fix and flip. And you're seeing product traction there in markets that have historically been pretty manual, fragmented, operationally intensive. These capital markets have also been really slow with legacy processes and loan by loan sales. And so we think this creates an opportunity for modernization on name. These greenfield opportunities come in that broader business market that I was mentioning, which we see as another avenue to attack that $35 trillion of home equity outstanding.

And I mentioned this in the prepared remarks, but for residential transition loans, in particular, we see that as a really nice fit with Democratized Prime because the loans are relatively high rate they're collateralized by a home, but they're also short term. So it's almost a perfect set there.

Dan Dolev: And congrats again.

Operator: Our next question from James Yaro with Goldman Sachs.

James Yaro: Michael, I wanted to touch on your comments on potentially lower bank risk weights for mortgages. I guess I would think that those could make banks more incentivized to hold assets on balance sheet, but you talked about how you expect this to support volumes. I just want to get a little bit more from you, just how you think that, that could drive even more activity on Figure?

Michael Tannenbaum: There's 2 ways. There's the origination and there's the capital market. from an origination perspective, if banks are looking to have the flexibility and reenter the mortgage space, as you likely know, it's generally a nonbank market today. Then Figure is the easiest way for them to get up and running. And it also provides the most flexibility from a capital market perspective because they can make and hold some portion and they can also even hold just for CRA eligible, for example. So we've seen a lot of interest from banks and depositories in doing so.

And then more broadly, in the event that bank balance sheets actually become a strong long-term opportunity for holding mortgages, which today is not the case, right? Many banks participate in Fannie Mae securitizations even though they have the balance sheet, but if that were to change, then we think Figure Connect would be the ultimate rails and pipeline to help those banks aggregate mortgages because they're not going to overnight become large originators of this asset class.

James Yaro: That's super clear. Can I just ask one follow-up here. I'd love to just get your sense or your aspirations in the first lien purchase mortgage market. I guess, is this a goal for you to add to the platform? And what do you think you need to build before you could start to tap that obviously, very sizable TAM?

Michael Tannenbaum: It's a medium-term goal for sure. We think that it's obviously a large addressable market. We have great relationships across partners, and we think as we look to ultimately take the entire capital market on chain, purchase mortgage as a part of that. For us, we are currently contemplating with some of our larger partners, some of those whales we've mentioned, who have actually come inbound and asked for that. So we're currently developing that in connection with some of those partners.

Operator: We'll take our next question from Patrick Moley with Piper Sandler.

Unknown Analyst: This is Will [indiscernible] on for Patrick Moley. Earlier in the call, you mentioned upselling Mutual Omaha to Figure Connect. Can you talk a little bit more about the upselling process to connect some of the sticking points, if any, and the pace at which you expect nonconnect volume to switch to connect over time?

Michael Tannenbaum: Thanks for the question. Process generally is a volume-based one. The incentives are naturally aligned. As a reminder, when people move to connect, they ultimately earn more of the economics and then Figure goes to be increasingly balance sheet light and earns a higher EBITDA margin as a result. And so generally, around $5 million to $10 million of monthly volume is when conversations start regarding Figure Connect. And we've made it as easy as possible by building a large ecosystem of products, including Democratized Prime, which is a way that people can finance assets as they aggregate to then ultimately securitize.

So everything that we do, Figure Forge, as Mike was mentioning, all of these -- all this tooling that we provide in this broader ecosystem ultimately greases the wheels of Figure Connect and that's why you're seeing 60% of volume and why folks like Mutual of Omaha are flocking to this and also increasing their volume by such amounts when they do so.

Operator: We'll take our next question from Ryan Tomasello with ABW.

Ryan Tomasello: Nice to see the addition of Five Star. I know you've already given some prepared remarks on it, but I wanted to double click on the traction you're seeing with traditional depositories, particularly for Flagstar, what drove that win? And then in general, how that sales motion differed versus going to your traditional more common IMB and fintech partners beyond some of these regulatory dynamics? Michael, what's driving the unlock of those conversations?

Michael Tannenbaum: The drive towards depositories is personal for me, I was an investment banker covering regional banks right out of school. So I've been really focused on the space since I got here and Mike Cagney is also as a way with regional banks. So for both of us, it's been a big focus, and we have yet until recently to make really significant traction. And I think the turning point has been one, just the scale of what we're doing at some point now in the past quarter, we crossed over $1 billion a month of volume, which is really significant. I think us being a profitable public company, makes banks more likely to work with us.

And I think the years in business, frankly, is another thing I hear and of all those years being really careful not to cross sell and not to cross market, which is really important to banks who spend, in many cases, centuries protecting our brand. I'd also add that banks, in particular, are not as well equipped to the boom and bust cycles that the rate environment has brought more recently. And so as people look to outsource with a simpler, faster on-chain solution like Figure, we're a natural choice.

And then furthermore, as people look to the smaller balance first lien loans, in particular, those we make profitable, which are historically unprofitable and banks, unlike others, can't turn their existing customers down. They support all their depositors or at least try to. So these are all reasons why banks are increasingly interested. Flagstar, in particular, has been a partner and Mike feel free to elaborate because it's been a partnership dating back to when it was New York Community Bank.

And we have known them and we have been a deposit customer, but it was only until recently that we were able to turn that long-standing relationship into an origination one, and we think that is going to be a major deal as we go and seek to get the rest of those 5,000 banks and 5,000 credit unions that currently aren't working with Figure.

Michael Cagney: Yes. I think just to build on that and to reemphasize the ability for us to offer competitive product in the sub-300,000 first lien category, is an enormous opportunity. But I think all 3 of us have commented on the fact that first thing's a 25x larger market in the second lien space, where [indiscernible] traditionally been used. And we see the banks, in particular, as wanting to lean in. But going back to what Michael said earlier and reemphasizing our big partners have been coming to us proactively asking for first lien, asking for first lien, not just refi, but purchase. And I think it's an estimate to how effective the technology is.

And in particular, the benefit of the marketplace that those loans can go into.

Ryan Tomasello: Great. I appreciate that. And then just a quick follow-up for Macrina. Can you just talk about the near-term outlook for expenses? You're obviously reiterating the midterm EBITDA target of 60%, which is nice to see, but any color on the expense trajectory coming out of 1Q as we think about modeling for the rest of '26 would be helpful.

Minchung Kgil: Sure, Ryan, thanks for joining the call. And we've talked about how our expenses are bifurcated into fixed expenses and variable expenses. As you know, variable expenses will grow as a percentage of volume. So sales and marketing, option processing, those you'll tend to see they are going to be larger compared to where we were in the past because volumes are just growing naturally as well. Fixed expenses, we do anticipate them to be pretty stable. I think we were pretty stable versus Q1 for both of those accounts, which is tech and product and G&A.

We expect that trend to continue into the following quarters as well and interest expense as we bring down our own loans on Democratized Prime over the coming quarters, we do expect that to come down as well.

Operator: We'll take our next question from Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research.

Robert Wildhack: Just on the volume outlook for the second quarter, you've got the $4 billion roughly at the midpoint, and I think you called out $1.3 billion in April. So that kind of suggests May and June on average will be about the same as April. And that's a little bit different from the more -- the pattern of sequential growth we've seen through this year. So is there anything to read into there because my instincts would have been for more sequential growth given the huge opportunity to seasonally strong spring months in home lending and all the new products you've been highlighting?

Minchung Kgil: Sure. I've also mentioned in my prepared remarks, we want to make sure that we look at our whales that have been coming through for Q4 and Q1, and they tend to ramp in a 3 to 6 months' time line. So when we're providing guidance and where we think we're going to end up for Q2, we really want to take a balanced approach as we think about where it could come out. We could be a little bit on the conservative side, just looking at trends, but I do think we need to be looking at this on the right pace, and that's where we think we're going to end up.

Robert Wildhack: Okay. And then just one on the take rate. Mike Cagney, you called out some interest rate volatility in the quarter, you have that. give the faster growth in some of the lower take rate products. I would think both of those would be negative from a take rate perspective. So is there any specific offset that led to the flat take rate sequentially? Just any other color you have there would be great.

Michael Tannenbaum: Take rate is an output of lots of inputs. So we have, for example, mix shift to Figure Connect, we have mix shift to first lien. We have shifts from DTC to B2B. And then you have the annual take rates that are coming partner by partner as people expand volume tiers, for example. And you also have take rates that are coming from the overall execution and gain on sale. So all of those things collectively create the take rate for the quarter. And that take rate is ultimately, as we've said, it's an output metric.

And our view is that the activity for this quarter, the puts and takes of all that ended up at $3.8 billion which we -- which is something that we think is strong and as you noted, and particularly in light of the volatility that happened towards the end of the quarter. That said, that broader range that we provided, we maintain because of all the variability in these inputs. But I'll just restate the example that I gave in the prepared remarks, which is the focus on first lien and on product diversification are ultimately strengths of the platform in terms of both EBITDA and contribution margin, and that's where we're focused in terms of our execution.

Operator: We'll take our next question from Randy Binner with Texas Capital.

Randy Binner: So obviously, the overall volume trend is good for the guide. But for HELOC, just the HELOC market in particular, are you -- do you feel that you're gaining share there's more banks because of the lock-in effect who are offering it products so far had an announcement that got some investor reaction. So just can you give us a sense of kind of almost halfway through a year, do you think you're gaining share? Where are you fitting in, and then the overall kind of HELOC competitive market in the U.S.?

Michael Tannenbaum: Thanks for the question. We've said this before, which is that we don't actually consider the HELOC market to be relevant to what we do. One, because so much of what we do is greenfield and two, because so many of our partners don't consider themselves mortgage companies or participants in the HELOC market; and three, because of so much of what we do is first lien, which would have historically been the per view of a traditional mortgage. And so for us, HELOC is a way to approach not only that $35 trillion of home equity, but also that $2 trillion of annual mortgage origination.

So kind of the announcements of SoFi and others, right, those are welcome to kind of emphasize the value of the space. But ultimately, those are not part of our consideration set when we look at the addressable market for Figure.

Randy Binner: Okay. I guess then I would maybe shift the question to say, for your addressable set do you -- how will you characterize your share gain?

Michael Tannenbaum: I'd characterize our share gain as a combination of new partner growth, and we see the opportunities there as not only the existing first lien origination market, right, so call it people like banks, credit unions and independent mortgage banks that originate mortgages, but also fintechs and home improvement companies that historically don't consider themselves in this space, but look to tap home equity as places where we're gaining share both in terms of net new customers, but also very importantly, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, as gaining share versus ultimately Fannie and Freddie's market, right?

So if you look at Mutual Omaha, something cited in the quarter, that 5x quarter-over-quarter growth that we saw didn't just come from an overall 5x growth at Mutual Omaha, right, that came at the expense of Fannie and Freddie market share, and that's where we see ultimately our competition, that combination of call it, the Ellie Mae, Ice and Fannie and Freddie Mac complex.

Michael Cagney: Just to build on that, I think it's important to emphasize that, that sub-$300,000 first lien category is a loan that wasn't done before. So it's not that we're taking the share from anybody. I said no one was originating that asset. I think Anthony Stratis talked about this in his earnings remarks at Loan Depot last week, and references partnership with Figure's opening up this market for them in a market that couldn't address before. So a lot of what we're doing isn't competing amongst an existing pie, it's greenfield. We're making bigger pies.

Operator: We'll take our next question from Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

Daniel Fannon: I was hoping you could expand upon your comments on the outlook for new partners. Obviously, a lot of momentum in that in the numbers we saw this quarter. But how does that compare to, say, at the beginning of the year? And then also the 3 to 6 months of ramping that you highlighted for your larger customers, I would also just be curious about how that compared to, say, a year ago. Is that 3 to 6 months shorter than maybe what you saw previous as customers have become more comfortable with the platform or you've grown in your size and scale?

Michael Tannenbaum: Dan, the future is bright. We see the pipeline the same day as it has been. And in fact, I feel Mike has said to me, we can't double forever, but so far, we are doubling forever. So we feel really good about where we are. And we also feel that, if anything, the implementations that we're doing in terms of AI and onboarding and examples, like I gave a Mutual of Omaha are being helped by tooling technology and the more visibility that we have being a public company. And so we don't see any extension of time lines for partner onboarding nor do we see any reduction in pipeline.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Kyle Peterson with Needham.

Kyle Peterson: Nice results. I wanted to touch on the funding partner mix. Really helpful how you guys kind of split that out in the slides, but I wanted to follow up a little bit more on the asset measure place. Maybe if you guys could give some direction and color even qualitatively on kind of what of that is backed by kind of longer duration institutional capital versus kind of some of these more semi-liquid retail products like BDCs or interval funds? Any color or direction there would be great.

Michael Tannenbaum: We broke that out in terms of the types of funds in particular. And as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have seen somewhat of a rotation into the figure and the consumer loan space, given some of the weakness in the software and overall private credit. So from our standpoint, we -- and I mentioned some of those executions we saw both in late March as well as early April. And I think that reflects the rotation that I'm sharing about.

Kyle Peterson: Okay. And then maybe just a follow-up, taking the take rate and mix and kind of what you guys are seeing in April. It seems like at least the macro has gotten a little less favorable for first lien, more favorable for HELOC and probably some other products, but I know you guys are scaling this off of kind of really small bases as Mike referred to, like creating new buys. So I guess how should we think about the mix? Like have you guys seen any change in April that reflects rates kind of spiking back up?

Michael Tannenbaum: Our platform is strong because it is able to be successful and create bigger pies regardless of the rate environment. So when we have rates moving up like they have been in the near term, you have that $35 trillion of home equity opportunity we talk about, and I'd also point out that from our marketplace, about 20% of loans are used to pay off higher interest rate debt. So credit cards, student loans, auto loans and the like. And as a result, that opportunity goes up as those rates tend to go up more than the prevailing mortgage and home equity rates.

And then separately, as you know, we're creating just larger pies to greenfield nature of what we do. And given borrowing against your home tends to be the lowest cost option for anyone who has home equity, which includes that $35 trillion and the 40% of homeowners who own their home free and clear, it creates a really nice opportunity and a tailwind for us. And I think what you've seen in the SMB space, in particular, where people are partners are using our ability to access home equity to fuel their business -- their business lending franchise is a great example.

Michael Cagney: And just to build on that again, I think you don't have the same price elasticity in the sub-300,000 first lien products because, again, they just weren't offered before. And so the fact that we're unlocking that market there's less rate sensitivity there and more just being able to access the credit. And so while we are a barbelled in the sense that higher rates push us towards second lien, lower rates pushes towards first lien, we have those products. This first lien space is so greenfield. It just doesn't have the same rate elasticity that you'd expect in normal mortgage.

Operator: There are no additional questions at this time. This will conclude today's Figure Technology Solutions First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.

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