Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Better 2.0 shareholder conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Participants can type and submit their questions via the Q&A box on the webcast. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Tuesday, October 6th, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Vishal Garg. Please go ahead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Better 2.0. This is our first all shareholders welcome call ever in our history as a public company. It's in thanks to our regular common shareholders that we are here today. We want to recognize the craziness that has transpired over the last two months with the company. We want to thank you for your patience as we work to make a Better Better. We want to thank you for your confidence and support in bringing myself and a new team onto the board to help right the ship, and get Better back on a path to profitable growth. With that, we've got a couple of slides for a presentation that we want to just share with you. Then from there, I want to spend a lot of time answering your direct questions unfiltered. Let's just go to where we're at. 52% of all the voting shareholders voted to put us back in. When we started this proxy consent process, our lawyers told us that 1.7% of proxy contests seeking to replace the number of board members we were seeking to replace are actually successful over the last 10 years. So it gave us 60 to 1 odds. I said, "Well, the percentage of startups that make it to getting to $100 million of revenue is about 10 basis points." So that's 1,000 to 1 odds. The number that make it to over $1 billion in revenue and have ever gone public is 0.01%. So that's 10,000 to 1 odds. So why not? Let's do 60 to 1 odds. Let's do it. Then they told me that I'd have to fight it with my own money against a team that was funding it with the cash that the company had. They told me that it might take a year. But thank you to all of you who enabled us to win this clean fight through the will of stockholders submitting green consent forms that they received in the mail from us and sending them back via UPS or the regular mail to us, and honestly, to do it in such a record time in two months instead of what people said would typically happen, 12 months or more. I have learned so much in the eight weeks that I was away. I had a chance to really think about the things that I am good at, that our company is good at, and what we both need to get better at. You are going to see those learnings manifest themselves in how we run Better 2.0 to realizing what we have long said, that there is a $100 billion market cap company hiding in here. In this business, there is a capacity to make the American dream of homeownership cheaper, faster, easier, and Better, and make Better into a household name. That is what the next couple of years is going to be all about for us, to focus on creating shareholder value by creating value for customers, value for our business partners, and value for our employees. With that, move to the next slide, please. We published a plan outlining our 90-day priorities. What I heard from many of you over the last eight weeks was that you were happy that we were sharing what we were going to do and that we were going to be reporting back to you on a report card basis through sessions like this and publicly how we are doing. The first item on our 90-day plan was reconstituting the board, which we have done. Watch for more and Better board members to come. But the ones we have already are very, very impressive, and I think a substantial upgrade. Two, appoint an Interim CEO. We have a candidate identified, and we are finalizing our engagement with them. There were many of you and many detractors who felt that I would come back and I would not appoint an Interim CEO. I want to let you know that we intend to prove you wrong. We will be appointing an Interim CEO in short order. Three, improving operating efficiency. We talked about improving operations efficiency, and we have done so. I think you all might remember the deck that I uploaded where we grew volume from $600 million a quarter to $1.6 billion a quarter while keeping operating expenses the same. We are going to increase up revenue and volume while bringing them down going forward, because we were just really getting to the inflection point of AI making a difference in this business, and having tried to do all the things that I had to get done over the last eight weeks, pretty much with myself and my legal team and the AI, I think we are more AI-pilled than we ever have been before. Three, four, grow Team Member and our HELOC business. HELOC is a no-brainer in a market where it is 7%+ mortgage rates. We have $21 trillion of home equity that American consumers have, $18 trillion of debts that they have, of which $8 trillion+ has been put on since the pandemic ended. We need to use that home equity to pay down the other more expensive sets of debts that consumers have, and to enable them to improve the houses that they have because they are living in them longer. We plan to be the best place for anyone to get a home equity line of credit in the country. You are going to continue to see us focus on growing that. I want to remind you that we have a unique solution in the market compared to both mortgage companies that offer partnerships, like UWM, Rocket, and others, and HELOC companies like Figure that offer partnerships. We are the only platform that does HELOCs and mortgages with the best solution for a customer, a mortgage broker, or a partner, a fintech or brand partner, than any of those people. The consumer can move seamlessly between products and can be upsold or downsold any number of products. We think that that is one of our core value propositions as we seek to grow our partnerships in this channel to continue to drive growth. Five, sell the U.K. bank. Before August, when I had to depart, we had lined up a buyer. We got in here, and we have finalized terms with that buyer. We have had that buyer now deposit EUR 10 million in escrow. We are rushing to get PRA approval for the sale of the bank that we believe will release between 65 million or so of cash to Better, maybe more, maybe less, depending on the bank's loan book and what happens with the bank's operations in the coming months ahead. That should enable us to have a total combined cash balance, as we disclosed, of over $140 million, and a very long runway to fund the business, considering the tangible net worth covenants on our warehouse line's around 35 million. Which basically means there's 105 million of cash to power operations, and almost two years plus of runway to do that, assuming no improvements whatsoever in our burn, which as you know, we're not going to let happen. The last is with that liquidity that we have to focus on bringing the company back into a place where it was prior to August 3rd for shareholders. That was $27 a share. Then to fair value. Because as you all know, AI mortgage platforms in the private markets trade for anywhere between 10 times to 40 times revenue. Here we are today trading at less than one time revenue for the only proven AI mortgage platform in the entire mortgage industry end to end. I think the company's shares, and so do our board, are unbelievably cheap, and we plan to pursue a repurchase plan as soon as practical. Now on to the next. The two new Directors that we've brought on board, Steve Sarracino. His fund, Activant, has invested about $100 million in Better. He has real skin in the game, and he is delighted to be back on the board and be Activant's representative on the board. Steve was with us for five years during our go-go years in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, when we grew the business 100x. He's delighted to be back to help us grow 100x again. Bing Gordon, one of the co-creators of Amazon Prime, head chief product advisor to Jeff Bezos, Silicon Valley legend, co-founder of Electronic Arts, creator of many of the video games that we grew up playing and remember fondly. Amazing at consumer and user interfaces that will delight not only our customers, but also our business partners' customers across a variety of utility functions. A well-known public company board member. Go to the next slide, please. Our permanent CEO search is kicked off already. We are getting proposals from search firms. We expect to hire a search firm and get this kicked off ASAP to bring a rockstar CEO with the appropriate background in credit, AI, and fintech into the business to support and manage the growth of this business, particularly a lot of the components of running a company that I do not think I am particularly well-suited to do. I joke that I have been the Interim CEO actually for the last 12 years. Because honestly, I did not set out to be the CEO. I was running an incubator. I was having a perfectly nice time. We got involved and got it started Better. I was like, "Okay, we are going to get a CEO." Then the series A investors were like, "You need to be the CEO." I think here I am. I was drafted into the plan, and I am looking forward to drafting someone else into the plan. Page 14, please. Here are the goals. We are going to launch HELOCs on Credit Karma, and we are gunning at it. We are so pumped to do it. There is such a broad cross-section of American consumers. That $21 trillion of home equity wealth, so much of it, 60%+ more of it, resides with the Credit Karma users. We want to go after that in a programmatic way, in a way that has never been done before on Credit Karma. We are super pumped to make that happen. We signed that deal just before my departure in August. We signed it in late July, and we are pumped to get that going. We have five additional household name partners that we were in late-stage to middle-stage conversations with. Those stalled under the last regime. We are going to work to try and close as many of them as we possibly can. Some may have moved on, some may get delayed, but we are going to work real hard to do that. Each of them is going to be pretty significant. We are focused on optimizing our workforce to do the work that AI cannot do. We are an AI-native, AI-first company. Our first job is to not have humans do the task and then have the AI do the tasks that the humans cannot do. Our first job is to have AI do the task, and then humans do the task that the AI cannot do. We really need to have that right ethos in order to continue to drive the lowest cost of production in the industry, the fastest response time in the industry, and the usage of human empathy and sympathy and understanding in the areas that it is most powerful. That comes with the idea that we need to focus our people on doing things that are valuable, not rote, and pay them for that. Our lock to fund conversion. We have an amazing funnel. To date, we have not been able to fully monetize that funnel because we have traditionally, in the past, served a self-serve customer. The people who are getting mortgages or taking HELOCs today are not all self-serve. We have one of the widest credit boxes in the industry that is created by the marketplace that we have built, and now over 65 institutional partners bidding on a loan-by-loan basis, NASDAQ for loans, something that is completely underappreciated about this company. On a loan-by-loan basis, we have them, but we need to make sure that the consumer is guided and worked with through that entire pathway. To go from a volume-based mentality to a no customer left behind mentality in our Mortgage Factory. Lastly, our partner, Coinbase, launched about a month and a half ago. That launch went really well. We need to increase the surface area of assets that Coinbase customers have that they can pledge to be able to buy a home. The higher interest rates go up, the lower affordability becomes, and the more consumers need their cash surplus or cash reserves to pay their monthly mortgage rather than use for their down payment. Actually, the attractiveness of the token-backed mortgage increases as equities, bonds, tokenized assets increase in value and rates go up. We think this is a unique method for us to continue to grow the business while others struggle. Go to the next slide, please. That is the final slide. Okay. I've just talked for a little while. I'm going to now open it up to questions. First question is from Owen Rickert at Northland Capital Markets. Is there a specific cost structure or run rate you're targeting under the new cuts? What's the realistic range of outcomes for hitting breakeven in 2026 versus slipping into early 2027? That's a great question. I think you can tell from my talk track earlier, with the sale of the bank, we have plenty of runway. We have two ways to get there. The first way is continue to lower the cost point of the company, which is the operating expenses of the company. We need to get that down from $65 million a quarter down to something in the range of $50 million a quarter. From there, despite the environment, we can make some money. Or we need to get the revenue up from the 50s a quarter up t o the 65+ a quarter. Those are the two pathways. We're going to try to do both of them, and if we get halfway to our goals in either direction, we're at breakeven. I think that's the path that you're going to see us get there. Next question. Loveen, do you want to pick the question? Actually, let's just try and answer as many as we can. Great. You want me to read them or you want me to read it? Will you disclose the unit economics of the partnerships? Will you disclose the rough expected timelines of the partnership ramps? What's the targeted timeline to achieving breakeven, $50 million EBITDA, $100 million EBITDA? JH from Amazon. We will not break out the partnerships on a partnership by partnership basis for unit economics. I can tell you that we always have, and for the last, I think six quarters, disclosed unit economics for the business as a whole. You should expect to see that and continue to see that and be able to judge that. Two, the pathway to $50 million of EBITDA and $100 million of EBITDA. I can tell you, I have a very specific pathway to $50 million of EBITDA. That pathway requires us to improve the conversion rate across our funnel from lead to lock and lock to fund through superior management of our workforce and superior targeting of their work efforts just to industry standards. If we were to get them to industry standards of what it is from a lock to fund perspective, we would improve lock to fund by 50%. If we got it to industry standards on a lead to lock perspective, which is what happens once they start talking to a loan officer, we would increase it by another 50%. That would almost double our revenue while keeping our cost structure the same. That, I think, is the fastest path to $50 million of EBITDA and $100 million of EBITDA, because then the surplus would allow us to invest more in marketing. I think that that is a unique lever. We can continue to grow the top line by signing more partners and doing more business and having the best possible product funnel out there. We do simply need to focus our efforts, and I hope the new CEO will be able to help me do that, on enabling us to have an operations function that is able to perform at least to industry averages. Why have you not done this before in terms of achievement of industry standards? What are the plans for wholesale? I think there are two questions there. So why have you not done this before in terms of achievement of industry standards? We used to. We used to beat the industry standards in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Then we changed. The culture changed. The culture became much more about experience than about agency and achievement. I think we need to go back to that. Better 2.0 is a return to the Better that was growing 300% a year in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. That is based on, and in particular, if you think about what AI native companies focus on, they hire for ambition, they hire for agency, they hire for achievement. That is what we need to do again. Two, I think the question around what is the plan for wholesale. We are full speed ahead on wholesale. We think the wholesale channel has extraordinary potential for us. Between what our AI is able to do and the two leaders in the wholesale channel, Rocket and UWM, and what their cost structure is, we see there to be a significant role for a third option in wholesale. One where you can come in and deliver a loan and get an instant response for your customer and at the lowest rate, just like what we do in D2C. For the longest time, we were focused on D2C and large partners. Now we will serve and partner with all partners. We look forward to empowering the mortgage brokers of America to deliver a cheaper, faster, easier, and better loan, a Better Home to their customers through Better Wholesale. What else? What will be your position? Vishal, what will be your position at Better? Will you still be the face of the company, or do you expect the new CEO to be that? I expect to continue to be the face of the company. I expect the new CEO to contribute, and I expect our other management team members to contribute. I think you will see a lot more of all of us. There are so many new surface areas that we are covering. We used to be just a D2C company. Then we became D2C and retail. Now we are becoming D2C and retail and wholesale. Each of those areas has their own specific audience, and we have to find the person that is best able to meet that audience where they are. I think what I am best at is helping to build a future that makes the product delightful for each of those audiences. I think you will see us more focused on that. You said that during the two months that you were out, you had time to reflect on what you were very good at. Did you also reflect on the things that you were not good at and the things that need to change? Mike Alfred. Yes. Very much reflected on the things I was not good at. When you wake up in the morning and you know the things that are harder for you because you do not have any support at all, it is just you, it just becomes much clearer what is harder for you and what is easier for you. What you like to do, what you do not like to do. The things you like to do, you get off your list really quickly when it is just you. The things you do not like to do, they are sitting there at the bottom of that pile still for the next day. I think the things I am not good at are. Let us be super blunt. Communication with empathy. I have a very hard time understanding and caring about feelings of people that are illogical and contra to what the math says. I grew up a math geek. That is how I buttered my bread. That is how I got out of Queens. That is how I came to be an arbitrageur in Manhattan instead of a hustler in Queens. To be blunt, because I was so good at math, I never had to learn the people skills that most people do in corporate America. I think that served me well when I think some of those things were okay. We live in a different environment now with a different labor force than we did before. I think that real leaders are able to lead with empathy while driving results. I am able to drive results without empathy, so I cannot be a real leader of the company. We are going to get a real leader of the company that can drive results and take the things that I am really good at, and then drive them with empathy. You shed light on- Can you shed light on the near-term actions under your control to improve volume and EBITDA profitability by channel, starting with Credit Karma by partners? Look, when it's a partner, they determine how much flow comes in. They determine how much they open the aperture. They determine the flow. We can't control that. What we can control is how fast and how well we convert the ones they send through. As you know, the volume coming through CK as it ramped was significant. If it wasn't for the Iran conflict, that volume would've been massive and taken us to well above the targets that we had set out earlier in the year. Nobody planned for what has happened. Nobody planned for $100 oil. I think refi is challenged. The fact of the matter is, last time rates were this high, refi was composed of 50% cash out and 50% rate term refi, and that was in the mid-2000s. During that time, the HELOC product was a multi-trillion-dollar product for the American banking system. Most of the American banking system is currently not in the HELOC product. They want to get back into it, but they're not in it. That leaves a chasm open for us to fill, and we think we can fill that. I think that's where you're going to see us sign up partners. That's where you're going to see volume come through from these partners and as they open up their customers to us, that is something that we can control and that we're going to do a better and better job at by empowering ourselves and our humans and the AI to do as good of a job, if not better than anybody else in the industry. In today's technology environment, a lot of lenders have built or are building their own versions of what originally made Tinman such a differentiator for Better. Do you think that technology moat is narrowing over time and making Better less differentiated than it was a few years ago? Looking 24 months out, what do you see as Better's biggest competitive advantage that will meaningfully separate it from the other lenders? Yeah, I'm going to be super blunt about this. The other lenders are putting lipstick on a pig. They got nothing. The reason is that fundamentally, the LLM models remain poor at math and poor at math on multiple recursive functions. If you think about a typical function where the error rate on a typical LLM, if you just dump Fannie Mae guidelines in there and you tell ChatGPT to look at it, sometimes the error rate can be 30%. If on one function, just calculation of income, you are at 70%. Then calculation of debts, then sum of all debts. Now we are at three functions, 0.7 * 0.7, that is 0.49, * 0.7 again, right? We are at 0.35. So you are at a 65% error rate on three tool calls. That is before even calculating the DTI and then running the recursive function on how to fix it. Other lenders, if all they are doing is this simple front end on top of a LLM at the back end, which is the bulk of what they have, they cannot actually use it, which is why the average cost to produce a loan in the industry after all t he other lenders started copying our AI or started implementing AI, remains $11,700 per loan funded. The reason why some of the most sophisticated counterparties in the mortgage industry and in fintech are choosing to use us is that we have built an LLM engine on top of a machine learning deterministic engine that brings the correct answer all the time. Tinman's error rate is 6 basis points on a critical defect basis. That is 99.94% accuracy across over 10,000 parameters that are checked in a mortgage manufacturing process. Two, Tinman is the MCP. That is very different from others who have to have multiple connectors connecting into old school software and systems of records. A system of records simply cannot be the calculation layer, the record layer, the communication layer, the decisioning layer, the investor matching layer, all of that stuff. Only Tinman MCP does that. What you will see is as the AI agents become even more sophisticated, right? What you are seeing out of Muse or Instinct or any of those guys, and then they build connectors. You are going to see Tinman return responses, just like you saw in our old ChatGPT demo from April, May. While everyone else is returning options. I think that you are going to see that differentiator. Actually that, and then the last thing is we have tested this and then back tested this on over $110 billion of originations through cycles and across the entire product suite in mortgage. No one else has that. We have all the communications that took place. We have all the back and forth that took place. We have all the changes that the underwriters made to the decision file. We have been recording all of this maniacally since we started on January 2nd, 2016. No one else has. People thought we were going to boil the ocean with what we are doing, but now that data, that learning data, on $110 billion of production is so valuable. I think those three things together, no one else has. I think you are going to see us actually run faster going forward. Congratulations to you and the entire company for fighting through a very crazy and unnecessary time that was self-inflicted, in my opinion, by a negligent board. With The Mortgage Factory being a top three priority, please discuss how you're going to inspire that workforce to perform above industry standards. Is that going to be you and the Interim CEO? Can shareholders help you find great rock stars to join Better's team? Do I have an email we can refer to? How can shareholders help the company? Tony Brodmilinski. That is an amazing question. We need all the help in the world. Let us be honest, we trade at 1x revenue. We trade at a lower revenue multiple than store-based lenders. Physical store-based lenders. We'd have a higher multiple if we opened stores around the country in malls than if we were digital. We need all the help in the world. We need to inspire our people just as much as we need to inspire the shareholder base. We need to inspire our partner base. The best way to do that is to hire amazing people. If you know ambitious, aggressive, high agency, somewhat intelligent people who can run through walls to help families achieve the American dream of home ownership, we would like to meet them. You can send them all, just like our customers have the right to send them to and respond to me at any time, vg@better.com. You can send them to me at vg@better.com, and me and my team will respond to each one individually. We promise you that the ability to make the American dream better using AI is such a meaningful and rewarding challenge. It makes you feel warm every time you come in and every time you leave the office. There are lots of ways to make money in America. There are lots of ways to make money with AI. But there's only one way to make money through AI by making America and the American dream better, and that is here at Better. If you can use that message to help us find these people, that will be amazing. As a team operation, every one of us on the team today here at Better feels that way. Every one of us. All of us are part of that process. All of us are part of that challenge. Did the leadership dispute have a negative impact on execution and or partners' relationships? It stalled a number of partnerships that were in play. That is the truth. We may have lost one or two who went and decided to pick someone else, or the incumbent, where we were playing David versus Goliath. But the pipeline is very full. Those partners aren't going away. Many of them have stood by waiting for us to come back, because even while I was gone, I was keeping them fully abreast of what was going on, and our team here was holding down the fort. We have an unbelievable rockstar tech team. Our product is superior to all of the other places. There's nowhere else that you can get mortgage and HELOC in a box, all done for you instantly, and with the fastest implementation turn times, and across a broad cross-section of investors with the highest approval rates and the lowest interest rates in the industry. The product utility functions that a multiple-time user, like a business partner, chooses to see or seeks in a partner, we have all of those. Now we just need to get out of our own way and go and close them. "What is the Nasdaq board cure plan and the timeline for a permanent CEO?" Scout Markets. The Nasdaq board cure plan, we have 45 days to submit a plan and 180 days to cure it, so we are going to do that very short order. We have been out there recruiting people to join the board, bringing in friends and understanding people who have been interested and a part of the Better family in different ways. You should expect to see us bring people onto the board that will be extremely impressive. Two, the, what was the second question? The timeline for a permanent CEO. Look, these CEO searches take three to four months. We are getting the search firm in, so let us assume Q1 2027. It is October 8th today. "How do you plan to recruit and empower top software and AI engineering talent?" Hardik Gupta. Hello, Hardik. The same way we recruited you back in the day, Hardik. We gave you mission on top of money, because there is a lot of ways to make money as an AI engineer. You sit there making money, optimizing Facebook ads for dental implants. Or you can make money optimizing certain processes in a different place. I think the way that Better makes money, I think there is only one real company that is very close to that, and that is Palantir. Better makes money by making the American dream better. I think that is always been the play here, and I think that is how we have always recruited a team, and that is how our tech team is here today, building the best AI in mortgage, in secured financial services, in secured lending. They get to work on a great challenge, and every day, they get to help American families save $22,000 on the purchase of a home, and that is an extra bedroom. That is a better backyard. That is a better commute. It is a better school district. It is a better house. Will you be Chief Innovation Officer or carry a different title? I do not necessarily think I am going to be chief anything. I can make a joke. I think we need more Indians than chiefs. I can get away with it because I am Indian, but I think my goal is to increase the tempo in the company, increase the energy in the company, and I think my goal is to bring the best out from the tech and the people. So maybe I should be the Chief Motivation Officer, the Chief Energy Officer. I think that is probably what I am going to do. I do not really care about the title. It does not matter. The goal is to make Better great. Will Better allow independent retail brands to operate on the platform outside of NEO, or d o you see NEO remaining the primary retail brand strategy? Really great question. Open for discussion. Depends. Honestly, I think the way to think about it is Amazon third-party marketplace, right? Of course, Bing Gordon has taught us a lot about that. But why would we not let multiple stores exist on Better, just as multiple brands exist on Better, right? If we are willing to have multiple brands exist on Better, especially in places where they are not necessarily always in competition with each other and gives us geographic reach, why would we not do that? I think that is our goal. If we are going to be a platform for the industry, we have to allow multiple wholesale brands, multiple retail brands. I think we have publicly disclosed, we have signed up over 10 wholesale partners. We will have more details on the new progress, but we should allow multiple brands and multiple partners to exist on our platform. What else? Go ahead. Last question, and I think what we have seen this on comments on X is cash runway. Any need for a capital raise in the next 12 months? I think we expect the bank to be sold in the next three to four months, and hence we do not anticipate any need for a cash infusion for the company as we try to get to break even and beyond. Are yo u considering releasing preliminary Q3 earnings in the next few weeks? I am back day two. I am just getting my handle on things, so I do not know. I do not even know what the benefit of that would be, but maybe. So I do not think I answered your question, but that is the honest answer. Okay. Of course, you guys have more questions. Many of you have not spoken up. Feel free to send all and any questions you might have to vg@better.com. Unless it is super confidential or something I am not allowed to talk about, I will do my best to answer them, just like I do my best to answer all consumer queries. So you are all important. Thank you for supporting us. We care about you. We are sorry to have disappointed you. There is a $100 billion company hiding inside here. I have 20+ million of my own money in this business. I have never sold a single share. I am currently working for $1. So I believe, and I know many of you believe in Better and believe in me, and we thank you so much for that belief. We do not take it lightly. It is the reason I am back. Thank you, and here is to Better 2.0. See you next time. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.