Evolving the Playbook: Tech, AI, and Customer-Centric Lending

0:02 You are listening to Leaders in Lending from Upstart, a podcast dedicated to helping consumer lenders grow their programs and improve their product offerings. Each week, here, decision makers in the finance industry offer insights into the future of the lending industry, best practices around digital transformation, and more. Let's get into the show. Welcome to another episode of Leaders in Lending. I'm your host this episode, Matt Snow, joined by HTT Robert, CEO and co founder of loan pro Rett Thanks for joining. Me, Matt, Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, good to catch up and I know we're in similar industries. A lot we could cover here. I'm really curious knowing that you were just at Money twenty twenty and maybe give a little bit of an update on what you came away learning from there. What were the topics, what did people care about, and kind of questions you got there.

0:54 Yeah, it's great event. So last week in Las Vegas was another year of Money twenty time and it was wild as always, right, there's just so many people in town, very very efficient. I brought a little bit of an army of my team down and we held hundreds, plural hundreds of meetings and they were with a lot of great individuals and helped progress many deals and opportunities. So we love that it's a very efficient time to go through and meet with folks, and I think others of view it the same way. There's a couple of themes that came out. Had the opportunity one of the sessions that I was speaking on stage with, and there was other things kind of going around the halls and talking to different people and seeing different themes.

1:39 But there was a few things. Obviously, there was some talk of AI, and that's to be expected. It was one of the themes of conversation about What was interesting is there was sort of two camps, right There was a camp that AI is under hyped, in a different camp that it's being overhyped. So it's very interesting to see both of that and see what's going to happen with AI. And generally there's consensus on the strategies of employing AI within an organization of how do you do that right? Take over repeatable tasks, so lots of things around regulation, lots of things around some optimization and then sort of move up the value stream.

2:24 And so we're seeing that there was talk a lot about like evolution of payments. Payments was a big topic as well, in particular as payments have got faster and faster, lots of things around fraud, and the two that we might not expect is there was a considerable amount of conversation about winning the customer. And so in the panel or the discussion that I led, we had a couple of folks come up on stage. We talked about the lending and financial services, the history of how a financial institution gauges and what's the hook to catch the customer. And we've seen a few hooks over the years. They could be like if you get the deposit account, that turns into the relationship builder, and then that brings over the accounts that the various lending products, and that's how it used to be looked at in the past, but it's sort of flipped on its head that now the hooks are looking to be much more bespoke and custom lending products are the hook to get to win the customer, and there's lots of studies that show once you capture them on a unique lending product, then you can increase deposits.

3:40 So that works for our friends at the various depositories, and another topic about issuing innovation. So I think on a credit card, lots of stuff has happened over the last decade or so on. We could talk to quite a few of them actually on innovation on the acquiring side. Some pretty cool stuff really and one of the big conversation points that we bring to the table at Loan Pro but others we had conversations with as well. The focus that we're doing on issuing innovation and these something we call transaction level credit, this idea of these unique lending products within the credit card itself. So a couple of topics, but it was a great event. We're happy we went great.

4:25 Sounds like you had a very productive event. I know a lot can happen there. You covered a lot of topics there. I'm not even sure where to go to start from all of those. But you know, we don't usually get through a podcast without talking about AI. You may have been the earliest to mention it, maybe eighty seconds in. And I have heard a lot on the overhype side, But I'm curious on the under hype side, what's the camp there, Like, what's the viewpoint? Are there certain use cases or things where maybe we're not focused enough or not taking advantage of some of this Technology's what's the contrarian view on the underhepe. Yeah, it's a great. Question, you know. So there it's I think everybody's read the ecosystem in a fairly similar way, right, lots of excitement in the earliest days of well, I can't even call them the earliest days. There's been some vocabulary changes of what AI definition is over time as well. But let's go back just a couple of years. Lots of excitement about generative AI in particular, and then it's sort of like HM fizzled for a little bit of maybe it's a little early think of playing with chat, GPT or other tools that you played with. They call it hallucinating where it'll just like make stuff up basically, and so that's kind of dampered some of the excitement. But what I started to see this view and this conversation, multiple conversations I was part of, is think of playing with chat GPT, and it's generally correct on the structure, Like you asked, ask it whatever question, and it gives

5:57 you a very thoughtful structure back in the answer. Now we're just working on the actual content inside of that structure. But the structure by itself is extremely useful. So you know, give me a template form that blah blah blah, and it gives you one and now you know what should you should answer. And so as long as you're not in a world of like a copy and paste, but if you're operating in a world of like, oh, let me accelerate design. So we've done some really interesting things. Had some conversations about helping our customers using some different tools on writing rules within our platform around compliance, or in helping them build eachtmail templates or maybe even queries into the data sets, and this just speeds things up for them quite a bit. So on the under hyped, which is maybe what you were referring to as what's that talk track, it's usually coming from an organization who keeping some of the conversations anonymous. Yet it's an organization who's already employed it and it was much more successful than they thought. There's some costs takeout, but there's also just a huge amount of efficiencies within how fast they can get provide customer support or how consistent they can provide the right answers. Back to the folks that they're engaging with and we even see some folks using generative AI to start eroting what used to be viewed as

7:28 a very sticky product like a salesforce and other things. They're using generative AI to actually build some of those tools within their own orgs. So there's a bit of that conversation as well. So it is interesting how it's a barbell, right. It's like, hey, it's way over hyped, like, don't worry about it, it's just a new label for machine learning. And then there's the opposite end of like, no, this is like a game changer and we're not giving it enough attention. I like the way decompose that in the structure and the contents helped me frame where I've seen the successes too, and I think, like I said, the automation efficiencies, those things can be huge wins. I saw maybe it was in Google's earnings or a press release recently they said twenty five or thirty percent of their code is now AI generated or enabled. So those things that speed up the monotonous, more mundane task. I think huge opportunities exist there.

8:24 And it's particularly interesting and financial services. Financial services have a reputation to be slow to adopt to new technologies, in part because of the increased scrutiny of regulation, and we'll call them layers of regulation for the audience. When I was in elementary school, it's probably for most of us, the way they did classes, the way that they were presented with an overhead projector. Did you have those, Matt, Yeah? Did I remember the marketing though. I actually bought an overhead projector like two years ago at a garage cell for one dollar, and my kids like, what is this thing? I was like, Oh, let's get there at any rate. I like this visual of an overhead projector and then you put the paper on and if you do multiple layers there you get some version of a Venn diagram being projected up on the wall.

9:14 And I like that visual because we see a lot of the regulations changing, right, and a regulator has they have a consistent objective whether they're trying to achieve, but depending on a whole bunch of factors, including who is the human, is the strategy working or not? Both a proactive and a reactive strategies to what's happening in the marketplaces, the tactics of how they go about and trying to achieve the consistent objective changes, and so that means rules change and they adjust and so forth. And so if you think of the each one, each rule as a different layer of this overhead projector this then gives you like a tapestry of the climate that we're oper reading in.

10:00 And one of the reasons that financial services have been a little bit slow to adapt of using new technology is because it's sort of like a checkerboard of compliance. There's like all over the place, if that's a geography checkerboard, if it's where your license is at, and so forth, and so it gets complicated. And what we're finding is some opportunities with the generative AI is it can help make sure there's more consistency in how engagements work. And that's a lot of the things that get audited. Think of when an examiner comes into a depository for their annual examination, they want to get a sample set of show me so many of these kinds of things, right, show many loans and deposits, these kinds of transactions, and to show me basically that you're coloring within the lines of the sample set that they select, and having a tool that will always color within the lines is proving to be exceptionally valuable from a compliance side of things, but also from a consistency side. Think of like a favorite fast food restaurant, go to McDonald's, right, one of their keys of success is consistency, and so getting some financial services regularly have a consistency, and that these tools are helping unlock.

11:20 That, Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I know we could go pretty deep on that side as well. I think you spoke recently with our chief risk officer, Andy Delgado at a conference recently, and I don't know when this will air, but you know we talked earlier. It's it's election day here in the US, so that regulatory environment could get a lot more complex in we don't know in which direction yet still, so maybe we can do a follow up afterwards and see what happens, but it'll be fascinating. Rights. So, I've got a lot of friends, know a ton of folks in the regulatory space, and I think it's important to highlight that the objectives of the regulators seem to be very consistent. They're trying to achieve, but achieve like you know, if it's a certain inflation or to manage what the inflation rate is soundness that safety and soundness like there's like consistency in the objective, but the strategy about how to achieve that objective seems like it's there's a high probability it will change based off of what this regulation or excuse me, based off what happens with the election, because there's two fairly opposing perspectives.

12:37 If that's going to be things around how a partner make model works, if that's things around like the concentration in big banks versus community banks, if you know, and you can go on and on, but there seems to be some strategy differences about how do you go about achieving an agreed upon objective? Yeah, and I want to use this maybe to pivot back to one of your money twenty twenty topics because with the open banking regulation and perspectives that are coming out now, it's really changed the way I've thought about, you know, winning the customer as you said it, or like what what does it take to win a customer? Especially in financial services? So maybe I don't know, you can use open banking if you want to jump into that, or were there other things when you think about winning the customer, like who differentiates, how do financial services companies win or who's going to be the succeed or twenty thirty forty years now.

13:31 Is a great question. So Open Banking has done something that's pretty interesting. Obviously, the recent rule final rules, they always call them final, but there seems to be multiple versions of final. So Final Rules of ten thirty three about basically unlocking who owns the consumer data and how portable is that consumer data. And with this portability, it has a timeline based off of the size of the organize of how fast they need to comply with how porous the data will be outside of their system so that it makes the easiest easier to port So I think back years and years and years ago when it became clear that you owned your cell phone number and if you wanted to change who your carrier was, it used to be like cancel your phone, get a new phone number from the other carrier. And so they made so it was you know, functionally, it wasn't not practical, but it was like high levels of irritating to change your phone number. And so their pricing models at that time were like, look, rhett'spent on this phone carrier. For a while I'm just going to jack up his prices because he's not got change. It's pretty sticky, right, it's just too annoying to him for him to change his phone number. Well, ten thirty three, that's the analogy I think of. It opens up this opportunity where a consum involved in financial services will now have much increased portability

15:07 of where they want a bank, where they want to get a loan, where they want to do financial services. So there's a bunch of companies who have built their whole business model off of I know it's an oversimplification, but they've built their business model off of the concept of the portability of the consumer. And so that's data visibility and making it convenient to port from company A to company B and to move over if it's a loan or a bank account or a debit card or whatever the product might be, making it simpler to do so, and especially where that's being delivered via a virtual experience on an app or your phone. And so what we're seeing with all of that background of like the underlying pieces of portability that simplifies it doesn't actually encapsulate everything of ten thirty three, but it's a major piece ten thirty three. We're seeing winning the customer is an absolutely important theme.

16:06 Right. You can't force somebody to be your customer. And if you thought they were sticky, maybe they're not quite as sticky as you thought. Right. And if they're going to be your customer today, does that mean they're going to be your customer tomorrow? And we're seeing this thing that I feel personally, I feel it's really good for consumers is they need to be continually to be one over. So how do you win that customer when it's fairly simple and there's low switching costs for them to move to somebody else? Well, it's sort of obvious on some pieces and not so obvious on others. So the obvious ones, you got to have better products. You need to communicate better. You need to remove things that are high friction and high irritation. Andrews and Horowitz did a study. Angela Strange's authored an article some years ago about more briage servicing. When you service, if you get a loan for your home, get a mortgage, and then you call in for service, how delightful is your experience? Right? And they did the sample set of a number of engagements and there are things like it takes you nine phone calls to figure out an adjustment to an escrow it takes you two phone calls because the first one you got hung up on in order to make it like these like terrible customer experience things.

17:27 So there's obviously a great room of improvement that can be achieved. I think you just got to fix that kind of stuff in order to continually to win the customer. And that's a big playbook that my company is going off of. We're saying, if we provide the right tools and the right technology to folks that give loans to provide a customer delight, that will result in them winning the customer and winning every engagement with the customer. So I think that's a big theme not only of just money twenty twenty, but we're seeing that trend be sort of nudged by the regulations that are being changed, but we're also seeing that trend be adopted by financial institutions.

18:10 Right everybody is trying to look to modernize their tech stag. It's not just their modernizing for the sake of modernizing. One of the objectives is so they can continue to win that customer, provide a delightful experience, do it in a cost effective way, and so forth. So it's kind of a long thing, but we feel like there's a lot of opportunity on winning the customer. Hey there, former host Jeff kalviner here to let you know about an exciting opportunity to strengthen your understanding of artificial intelligence and financial services. If you want to better understand the fundamentals of how AI models work and how they will impact a financial services industry, your luck. Upstart is launched an online course and certification designed to do just that. This course will give you the knowledge you need to lead the conversation about how your organization can best leverage and manage this revolutionary technology. But that sounds interesting out the course as it's currently free for a limited time. You can learn more at upstart dot com slash AI Certification. Again, that's upstart dot com slash AI Certification.

19:10 Thanks, and now back. To the show. Maybe we can dig into servicing a little bit because I was thinking about this in preparation for our conversation and we spend, you know, on the lending side a lot of time talking about the acquisition, the user experience, the verification, underwriting all those things obviously critically important, but lead into a decision that then has to live, you know, three five thirty years through the life of the loan. And so maybe let's you know, talk about servicing a little bit. And I was thinking about it in relation to insurance. Right, So you know a lot of times maybe you're comparing on price or perception or brand or some other tangible characteristics. But that's servicing that you know, you're filing a claim, like that's when you need that the most, and it's maybe not something you can experience or understand until until it's that that time.

20:01 It's a great point. It's you think of the insurance example. Right there's before you you choose a company to be your insurance carrier, you can go look to see like their claim rates, and you can go look to see I don't know a lot of people do, but you can, right like, you can see those things. And it's also interesting the way that loans work is that, especially mortgages, the originator rarely is the long tail servicer. Right. Usually they sell those loans and somebody else does it. And so the incentive structure, in part because of Fanny and Freddy and how the standardization and homogenizing the loans.

20:44 So in part because of that, the incentive structure is to divide the value chain of a mortgage into pieces that misalign the interests. And so you sort of like just you know, do your part during the origination journey and process, and then it moves down down down through the value stream, and after the loan has originated in funds and proceeds are distributed, that usually the loan gets sold and someone that you didn't necessarily agree to do business with is now the party you're with, and they don't generally get raving reviews for the amount of customer service that they provide, and so that's a challenge right our software we focus on really everything but mortgage. We have some mortgage on the platform, but a significant portion of the mortgages in the United States are ran by four big players, and so that hasn't been the area we focused. But we've taken sort of the contrarian view of saying, hey, why don't we focus, Why don't we provide the right technology to our customers so that they can win every interaction, do proactive servicing, and so instead of spending all of this money to go acquire a new customer, or have one business line of one company acquire pay a bunch of money to acquire the customer who's already in the other business line of the same company.

22:07 Why don't we just treat them with a high level for customer to light and so all of the cool stuff and people do some really cool things on the origination side, why don't we support all of that through the journey and the experience to win every interaction. One example is there was a study done years ago related to this. The CFPB publishes every single year like the reasons people call in and what their complaints are, and then they theme or group them and almost always be on a credit card. The number one complaint is something to do with their rewards. Right, I thought I was going to get ten thousand points for this and I didn't for whatever reasons. Is some like confusion around rewards or or accusations around rewards. Well, one of the things is on the list. Years ago was a study that was done about this concept where if you have a life event as a consumer, if you have a life event that occurs fill in the blank, whatever weird stuff happens, right, you call in your company that you have alone with and you say, life event happened, how can you help me?

23:17 Two thirds two thirds of the servicing companies this might be an auto loan or personal loan, right, two thirds of their answers were call back after you've missed a payment. And think about that. That makes you chuckle a little bit. You're like, well, that doesn't even pass like the sniff test. That's not likely even like basically logical, because what did the consumer hear? They heard you're not going to help me, right, that's not what they said, but that's what they heard. And so what we've approached that with to say, why does it happen that way? Why does the person who answers the phone and they're happy, they're providing service, they're engaging with a customer, why did they give the answer of callback. And it's not that the person who answered the phone or the company's policies are wrong or anything like that. It's usually that the software that that servicer is using didn't tell them this is the available options of what can be done and how what you can offer.

24:22 So their software was missing a feature or a function of proactive servicing. Maybe their systems were only designed in a model of reactive servicing, and the platform loan pro provides is around all that. We really provide three experiences, right. The first one is akin to online banking, a customer portal, log in and manage your loan self service kind of thing. The second experience is the agent experience. That's the platform if you called or walked into a branch or virtually or physically engaged to say like, hey, what's up on my loan? What options do I have? Can I change a due date? Can I make a payment early? Whatever? Servicing even, that's the platform that the person who's helping you would pull up your account and do all of those activities. So if you call in and you say, hey, can I change my du date? I don't know? Can you?

25:12 Is it up to the person on the phone like it can you? Well, it turns out like there's a lot of rules around that. The government's got rules that the f FIEC like does your loan qualify? And what does qualify even mean? There's like all kinds of layers that overhead projector thing again, right, all these layers of can you color within the lines? That's exactly what our software platform does. So to your question about that piece the servicing, like, you can provide a delightful experience, but you need tools in order to do that. Then the third experience we provide is that back office. Where do you configure the tool with all of your guardrails and controls and proactive and reactive servicing things to make sure that one program might have bespoke rules, things tied to versus another program. So how do you configure it that way?

26:03 I think that's the future of finance is unlocking that kind of think that allows you if you have a book of loans, if you're a bank or credit union or a private credit if you have the right tools to provide servicing, that's how you win the customer again and again. Instead of paying all of the reacquisition cost of getting new customer, just treat your current customer in a way that they want to stay your customer. Yeah, I read. I like that proactive servicing. I want to come back to that, but I wanted to share a story because I had to laugh when you said, like call back when you've missed a payment, because I it's a slightly different analogy, but recently I went to buy some aftermarket football tickets for my son so he and his friend could go to an Ohio State game Buckeye.

26:47 I'm an alum, big fans, so I went to get a couple tickets, and we were doing some research and I found a decent deal on club seats and the section was C four club seats that showed a view of the field, you know, right at midfield field, good view, you know, not the cheapest tickets, but they were a good price, and I check out and I sent them, you know, the link, and he sent a text back to me, and I looked and they were actually in section C four, which if you've been to the Horseshoe is in the very top of the stadium in the corner. And you know, I went online, I called in and long story short, like the answer to me was I can't do anything about this because the game hasn't happened yet, and just and they admitted like it was a glitch in their system, it was a mapping issue, and they sold me their wrong tickets. But what I heard was I don't want to help you, just like you said, like it and it seemed to be something that like it made no sense, like you can't help me because I'm.

27:44 Going to wait till the window of opportunity is over, the game's done, then I can help you. You're like, well, that's not I. Wanted to watch the game. Yeah, and against all logic, like I'm willing to buy another set of tickets through this company. I'm not going to mention their name because I may never do business with them again after but you know, I'm willing to transact with you again if you just make this right now. But I think your point is super valid. So the Push ten thirty three is an artifact of what I believe will be a number of things that will make financial services more portable, or another way to say, switching costs will not be as expensive to move from A to B. And it means folks are going to have to provide financial products that have a hook in them that really wants you to stay and they encourage you to stay. And we're seeing something that's super interesting that I mentioned it before, but it's a complete one eighty from how it used to be back in the day.

28:46 So Carl Pascarella, he's the former CEU of Visa. He's on my board here at Loan Pro and he was heavily involved in the debit card, and so the whole process of a debit card, and one of the big things he's told me in a story is one of the reasons the debit card was really successful is it's an access point to a checking account or a deposit account. Well, the bank wants to increase deposits, but provide a bunch of tools, and this was a really nice new tool that encouraged to increase a deposit. So it used to be when the relationship meant they were bringing their deposits to you, and then you would expand into other cross sell products. If they had deposits with you, then they'll get an at alone from you and so forth. Well, what we're finding is technology has enabled that to flip on its head, where folks are now saying, hey, deposits are kind of a commodity. As long as they're insured deposits, they have online banking, that's good enough for me to engage with. I don't really care where it's at because the government's got a backstop on it for me. But what I really do care about is the lending products that are highly bespo to me and cover my particular situation.

30:03 And so what we're finding, and many of them are powered by the loan Pro platform, But what we're finding in the ecosystem is these bespoke lending products are the hook of I won you as a customer and then oh, by the way, if you do your auto loan or your mortgage or your ATV or your whatever loan with me and you do your deposits, then there's like an incentive for that. So what we're finding is it's flipped full one eighty, which is just super interesting that technology has enabled that and the push of portability of a consumer is I believe going to accelerate that. Yeah, I think you're right, and I know you guys as well, as U said upstart our API enabled systems as well, and maybe a little bit ahead of the regulator allowing some of that. Do you see across you know, the financial services industry? Are our companies ready for this?

30:56 Like you know, I know government, I don't love when they get in the business of picking winners and losers. And sometimes these regulations, like he said, you've got the transparencies and they overlay and you know, by by proxy they're they're they're determining who's going to succeed in the new world, maybe proactively or not. But uh, are some of these smaller banks and credit unions, community banks, like are they going to be able to take advantage of this or is this going to put them at a disadvantage kind of requiring more of this portability? And is it only going to make those who have the tech capabilities today, you know, stronger. Yes, yes, and yes, like like it's just it's just a yes, right, Everyone's going to have to modernize their tech stack. Technology is not differentiator. I had a very wealthy founder of a tech company. I asked him, what's what's one of been the most surprising learnings you've had.

31:50 He's made a ton of money, wildly successful company, and he said, it was surprising to me that a technical moat was in as much of a moat as you think it is. And so there's been a lot of companies who have built out and they think that they're in like they have a technical moat, but it'll get eroded over time. Right, So if you by definition, that means you had like the first mover's advantage and it'll be a moat for a while, but eventually technology in the half life and half fastt moves, it will get eroded. You have to create some other kind of differentiator. And I think that we see everybody in financial services. You guys do a really interesting job with this as well.

32:33 You're providing a unique product, you're winning a certain customer set, You're providing opportunities to them they can't otherwise achieve in an easy way. So it's this great service that's being provided, but you have to continue to innovate winning. Yes, you know what's that saying. Yesterday's touchdowns don't win today's games. So, like, if you got a cool product good for you, you have to maintain a cool product going forward that meets that meets those needs out there. And I think that's one of the challenges the community banking smaller organizations that haven't invested in this. Almost everyone I speak to they know they need to and they're coming up with strategies about how do they continue to win that customer, how do they differentiate themselves. And it doesn't mean everybody looks the same. It doesn't mean that you can't have a physical, in person branch that knows a certain customer set super well like that will still resonate really well to a certain group of customers. But think of my kids. I've got four kids. My oldest is in high school now crazy, that's a lot of fun. But the experience they have with banking, it's different than certainly my parents. And his expectations, my oldest son, his expectations of why in the world would it not just be on my phone? And you're like, well,

34:03 I have a really good answer for that, that's right, And so like who he's who, he can do business. So we just probably set up a bank account for him. He's fifteen years old. He's starting a little business there that a couple buddies in him have created this trailer that attaches on the back of a bike and you can like think of like a hardshell trailer you can haul around to go like on a mountain bike in the middle of the woods, and then you can put your tent and all your stuff in your trailer, so you can still do mountain biking, but you can haul your gear with you without a backpack that gets in your way while you're actually riding your bike. So they're starting this business. We're taking them through this journey how do you do it? And trying to treade it as a good learning experience and part of that setting up a bank account. Right, he's a miner. There's only so many banks out there who have a delightful experience to set up a minor custodial bank account online. Most of them it's like, I don't know, bring your mom or dad into a branch, and there's only a handful at least that we found. We did like twenty minute Google search and engage there, and we actually created a relationship with a new institution that my wife and I don't bank with because the folks that we bank with did not have an easy or convenient way to set up a custodial account in an online experience. And so I think those are the kinds of things that they don't necessarily leave someone behind. But all of history is full

35:33 of you gotta modernight, you gotta update, and you gotta upskill, and the banks are no exceptions. They'll have that same opportunity as well. Yeah, that's funny, Right, went through a very similar experience. My oldest is an noown senior in high school. We voted this morning together, which was fun, but I still remember going through that experience. Like you said, maybe fifteen twenty minutes of googling. It led me down to two financial institutions, and I chose one that I had absolutely zero relationship with before. But I could open that account and put funds in his checking account immediately, and he could have an app on his phone and access to that, So it makes a huge difference. I really enjoyed the conversation.

36:15 Maybe we can end today with like, what would be advice you would give to some of those smaller lenders, you know, as they're thinking about like how do I differentiate or what should I even do to think about technology and catching up? Is it like some kind of an assessment. Yeah, I think that the way to look at it is to think about who you want to be right and this on a personal level, but also as a business, like what is your brand? What is the problem that you're solving? And if you're a small lender or medium or large lender out there, choose what your differentiators are and choose your group. So basically, think of the original definition of community banking. It used to be if you're, you know, a small bank in Chicago, and your community bank there, you built your products, you understood who you were serving and maybe it was all tied to the meat packing industry because of the geography of the time there. Well, now remove geography and still think of what is a shared experience and who is it you're going after, what problem are you solving, and just build the best products to support that person in that experience. And you need the right tools to do it. It includes a loan management system, a loan origination system, the right kind of partners and we're happy to help in that journey, but we just want to help accelerate and to see each of you be successful.

37:37 Awesome. Well, thanks again, Ritt, really appreciate the conversation and I hope you have a good Yeah, thank you, Matt. I'll start partners with banks and credit unions to grow households and expand consumer lending through its leading AI lending platform. I've Start powered banks and credit unions leverage AI to offer higher approval rates and experience lower loss rates while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital first lending experience that consumers demand. Whether you're looking to grow and enhance your existing personal and auto lending programs or you're just getting started, Upstart can help. Upstart offers an end to end solution that can help you find more credit worthy borrowers within your risk profile. With all digital underwriting, verification, loan closing and servicing, it's all possible with Upstart.

38:23 In your corner. Learn more about finding new borrowers, enhancing your credit decisioning process, and growing your business by visiting Upstart dot com slash Lenders. That's Upstart dot com slash Lenders