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Better‘s fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 earnings call showcased the company’s growing revenue and its plans to further integrate artificial intelligence into the mortgage process.
Vishal Garg, Better’s CEO and founder, said that despite a market with historically low housing affordability and persistently high mortgage rates, Better saw progress in its funded loan volume. It finished 2024 with $3.6 billion in volume across some 11,800 originations.
All three of the company’s product channels — purchase, refinance and home equity — saw annualized growth. Purchase business was up 25%, refinances soared 611% and home equity products (which include HELOCs and closed-end second-lien loans) saw 416% year-over-year growth.
To top it off, Garg showcased the progress of Better’s AI voice assistant, Betsy, which he said will be capable of completing most functions currently done by a loan officer by the end of 2025.
Following the earnings call, Garg sat down with HousingWire to talk about the HELOC boom and Betsy’s progress. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Wolak: Something to focus on outside of today’s earnings news is Betsy, which experienced outsized growth in 2024. Can you share an update?
Vishal Garg: We went from doing 5,000 customer interactions with Betsy in June to 115,000 in February. That’s 20 times growth, and we have yet to unleash her on all of our customers.
The current demo of Betsy takes someone all the way from inquiry through preapproval to loan amount, rate and locking. So that’s the beginning. Now we’ve got to improve the voice, we’ve got to improve the tone, we’ve got to improve the speed. We’re going to do all of that.
We’re now doing basically 100% of the functions that a refi LO does or a HELOC LO does with Betsy. And that’s pretty groundbreaking for the mortgage industry.
Wolak: I heard during the call that the conversation where Betsy takes the customer through the mortgage rate lock previously would have involved three sales members and several phases of manual data entry. Now Betsy is replacing that workload. Do you see Better being able to eliminate roles or realign roles?
Garg: We were already four times more productive than the industry from our loan officers. I see us being 40 times more productive for our loan officers. I think we said it on the call, we’re going to start this week with Betsy taking all the interactions with customers and the loan officer being there for the guardrails.
I think that’s going to enable our loan officers to do 50 loans a month, 100 loans a month. That’s what we think we’re going to get to.
Wolak: Better launched Betsy less than a year ago. How were you able to scale so quickly in terms of growth?
Garg: We have a team dedicated to it. I think if you look at our earnings supplement, there’s a great diagram where in the traditional industry, you have all these separate software systems that someone has to deal with, and take data in and out of, and move data from in between.
At Better, we effectively have the AI able to interact with one system and effectively enable us to have the AI to have complete context about where the customer is in their journey. We’re also not using vendors — we’re building on a relationship that we have had with OpenAI, and we are directly fine-tuning the large language model.
Now, in the retail channel, what we’re doing is creating AI avatars for every retail LO, which will answer calls while they’re sleeping and be able to help customers. So in theory, the LO will never, ever miss a customer interaction.
Wolak: What are you projecting for Betsy for the end of the year, aside from LO avatars?
Garg: We expect Betsy to improve in voice tone speed. We expect Betsy to manifest itself into hundreds of avatars. We expect Betsy to be able to take a consumer all the way through the process and provide recommendations, the right options and recommendations that a consumer might find helpful, just in the same way that a skilled loan officer would be able to provide. And we expect to scale full Betsy implementation from one state to many states.
Wolak: I wanted to get your perspective on what fueled Better’s record HELOC boom and what that’s been looking like.
Garg: HELOCs are a great business. Other fintech firms were doing HELOCs before we got started. But right out of the gate, our marketplace approach, our wider credit box and our willingness to work with correspondent and wholesale partners directly, letting them use their own software, is driving us to scale our HELOC volume dramatically.
Wolak: What do you think initially drove this HELOC boom?
Garg: I think we have tech that is on par with Figure but much wider underwriting criteria, which allows us to be a much better partner to other mortgage companies. And it also allows us to lean into direct-to-consumer, because we’re monetizing many more of the leads that we’re getting through direct-to-consumer.
Wolak: Can you share anything more about the underwriting technology?
Garg: In our earnings supplement deck, we noted that 40% of our mortgages today are being AI-underwritten through Tinman. So we are taking one-day mortgage and turning it into one-minute mortgage. We think that there’s a capacity to AI-underwrite 75% of the mortgages that we manufacture by the end of this year.
