From Mortgages to Auto Loans: Figure’s Plan to Revolutionize Finance

Michael Tannenbaum joins us now.

He is the CEO of Fire.

Very grateful for your time.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

An online platform, a blockchain-based fintech company.

Talk about what life has been like for you and the company since going public in the fall.

We are one of the best performing companies that IPOed in 2025, so it's been quite a ride, but really exciting.

I think the reason why you see that strong performance is we're one of the few companies that's doing something very meaningful in the blockchain space.

We are building the future of capital markets on blockchain rails and specifically we started in the mortgage space where we built a Marketplace of around 300 partners that use our technology to originate mortgage assets into a blockchain-based capital market and in doing so they save about $12,000 is the industry average of origination costs, and they can do it in about $1000 so they save 11.

And they can do this process in about 5 days versus industry average of 45, so it's a much faster and efficient process, but our ambitions are actually much broader than just mortgage.

So we're expanding into new asset classes.

We recently brought on auto loans with a partner named Agora.

And I think in general it shows that we're executing into this really big market of consumer lending and beyond that and at the same time we're rapidly growing, so we have about 100% year over year growth and about 50% margin.

So we're a rule of 150 when everybody sort of talks about the rule of 140.

So, what does the future of capital markets on the blockchain look like and then I'll ask you specifically about the A side in just a moment.

The future of capital markets on blockchain is significantly more efficient and significantly more liquid.

So I talked about some of the origination side benefits like the lower costs and the faster speed, but another benefit that comes is the reduction in third party diligence costs.

So as loans move throughout the capital market, they're often verified and re-verified, and third party diligence firms are paid to do diligence.

But what we do instead. we take the attributes of the loan upfront, put those immutably on the blockchain, and so any loan buyer doesn't have to recheck those every time.

That saves about 80% of third party diligence costs.

So that's one great example.

I think.

Another great example is the reduction in fraud, and you've probably seen over the past year or so some really meaningful examples of fraud in the capital markets and double pledging assets.

There was a tree Color bankruptcy, First Brands, MFS over in England.

These are all examples where people were double pledging assets to multiple banks.

But if you do that on blockchain, you actually cannot do that because you create a digital padlock on the loan and there's only one verified owner of that asset and of that lien.

You mentioned Agora for auto loans.

Is it data that's being shared specifically or a bit more than that?

It's a bit more than that.

It's actually the loans.

So what Agora does. is they are ultimately a lender to multiple auto dealerships and they've taken that aggregated loan production that they do and brought it to figures democratized prime marketplace. democratized prime is a DFI or decentralized finance, essentially commercial paper market, so short term hourly liquidity place that you can borrow against and lend to loans, and Agora has taken their auto loans and brought them onto our marketplace as a way to scale their capital markets and help themselves grow beyond the capital market infrastructure that they have in-house and because we have so many investors and capital partners that are used to buying our loans on blockchain, Agora can then use our technology and in a really capital light way for us we can offer them this broad marketplace and help expand their business while expanding ours.

Everybody sort of wins.

So I imagine you're as you're expanding your, you're trying to figure out the new rules of the road, regulations have to shift with that.

What does this new age CFTC look like, I'd imagine, or are there other acronyms of choice here that sort of need to evolve with the times?

And do you feel as if they are in lockstep with your ambitions, or is it a lot of, hey, we want to do this, we just are still waiting for the regulators to play a little bit of catch up?

Well, Figure has been operating under a number of different regulatory environment.

We have state lending licenses.

We have money transmission licenses.

We have US alternative trading system licenses as well as global crypto trading licenses.

So we have been operating in a number of different regulatory frameworks and we're not relying on any one bill to pass to really unlock what we do.

As an example, we have a stablecoin called Yields, YLDS, and it is actually not a Genius Act stablecoin.

Instead, it operates almost like a tokenized money market fund.

It's a registered security.

It's a face amount certificate, but it's still peer to peer transferable, and I think that's a great example of how Fire has historically worked within the existing regulatory framework, but used blockchain to push the capital markets forward.

Congratulations on all the success since going public back in September.

Thanks for visiting us down here both at the stock exchange and for being on the show.

It's nice to have you.

Yes, thanks for having me.