SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws about us and our industry, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “seek,” “could,” “intend,” “target,” “aim,” “project,” “contemplate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans, or intentions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include statements about:
•our future financial performance, including our expectations regarding our revenue, our operating expenses, our ability to determine reserves and our ability to remain profitable;
•our ability to improve the effectiveness and predictiveness of our AI models and our expectations that improvements in our AI models can lead to higher approval rates and lower interest rates;
•our ability to increase the volume of loans facilitated by our AI lending platform;
•our ability to successfully maintain a diversified loan funding strategy, including bank partnerships and whole loan sales and securitization transactions;
•our ability to maintain competitive interest rates offered to borrowers on our platform, while enabling our bank partners to achieve an adequate return over their cost of funding;
•our ability to successfully build our brand and protect our reputation from negative publicity;
•our ability to increase the effectiveness of our marketing strategies, including our direct consumer marketing initiatives;
•the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and any associated economic downturn on our business and results of operations;
•our expectations and management of future growth, including expanding the number of potential borrowers;
•our ability to successfully adjust our proprietary AI models, products and services in a timely manner in response to changing macroeconomic conditions and fluctuations in the credit market;
•our compliance with applicable local, state and federal laws;
•our ability to comply with and successfully adapt to complex and evolving regulatory environments, including regulation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology;
•our expectations regarding regulatory support of our approach to AI-based lending, including our ongoing discussions with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB;
•our expectations regarding the success of our strategic investments and acquisitions, including the integration of acquired operations, products, technology, internal controls and personnel;
•our expectations concerning relationships with third parties;
•our ability to protect against increasingly sophisticated fraudulent borrowing and online theft;
•our ability to service loans and the ability of third-party collection agents, to pursue collection of delinquent and defaulted loans;
•our ability to successfully compete with companies that are currently in, or may in the future enter, the markets in which we operate;
•our expectations regarding new and evolving markets and our ability to enter into new markets and introduce new products and services, such as our recent introduction of auto loans;
•our ability to effectively secure and maintain the confidentiality of the information received, accessed, stored, provided and used across our systems;
•our ability to successfully obtain and maintain corporate funding and liquidity to support continued growth and for general corporate purposes;
•our capital allocation plans, including expected allocations of cash and timing;
•our ability to attract, integrate and retain qualified employees;
•our ability to maintain an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting and operations;
•our ability to effectively manage and expand the capabilities of our operations teams, outsourcing relationships and other business operations;
•our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our intellectual property;
•our expectations regarding outstanding litigation and regulatory investigations; and
•our ability to manage the increased expenses associated with being a public company.
We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this report.
Forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this report primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made in this report and in other documents we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission that disclose risks and uncertainties that may affect our business. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this report. We cannot assure you that the results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.
Neither we nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of any of these forward-looking statements. Moreover, the forward-looking statements made in this report relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Undue reliance should not be placed on our forward-looking statements as we may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments we may make.
In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the date of this report, and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain, and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.
Each of the terms the “Company,” “we,” “our,” “us” and similar terms used herein refer collectively to Upstart Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and its consolidated subsidiaries, unless otherwise stated.
PART I
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Overview
Our mission is to enable effortless credit based on true risk.
We are a leading, cloud-based AI lending platform. AI lending enables a superior loan product with improved economics that can be shared between consumers and lenders. Our platform aggregates consumer demand for high-quality loans and connects it to our network of Upstart AI-enabled bank partners. Consumers on our platform benefit from higher approval rates, lower interest rates, and a highly automated, efficient, all-digital experience. Our bank partners benefit from access to new customers, lower fraud and loss rates, and increased automation throughout the lending process.
Credit is a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, and access to affordable credit is central to unlocking upward mobility and opportunity. The FICO score was invented in 1989 and remains the standard for determining who is approved for credit and at what interest rate. While FICO is rarely the only input in a lending decision, most banks use simple rules-based systems that consider only a limited number of variables. Unfortunately, because legacy credit systems fail to properly identify and quantify risk, millions of creditworthy individuals are left out of the system, and millions more pay too much to borrow money.
We leverage the power of AI to more accurately quantify the true risk of a loan. Our AI models have been continuously upgraded, trained and refined for more than eight years. We have discrete AI models that target fee optimization, income fraud, acquisition targeting, loan stacking, prepayment prediction, identity fraud and time-delimited default prediction. Our models incorporate more than 1,500 variables and benefit from a rapidly growing training dataset that currently contains more than 21.6 million repayment events. The network effects generated by our constantly improving AI models provide a significant competitive advantage—more training data leads to higher approval rates and lower interest rates at the same loss rate.
Our AI models are provided to bank partners within a consumer-facing cloud application that streamlines the end-to-end process of originating and servicing a loan. We have built a configurable, multi-tenant cloud application designed to integrate seamlessly into a bank’s existing technology systems. Our highly configurable platform allows each bank to define its own credit policy and determine the significant parameters of its lending program. Our AI models use and analyze data from all of our bank partners. As a result, these models are trained by every Upstart-powered loan, and each bank partner benefits from participating in a shared AI lending platform.
Consumers can discover Upstart-powered loans in one of two ways: either via Upstart.com or through a bank-branded product on our bank partners’ own websites.
Loans issued through our platform can be retained by our originating bank partners, distributed to our broad base of institutional investors and buyers that invest in Upstart-powered loans or funded by Upstart’s balance sheet. In the year ended December 31, 2021, 16% of the loans funded through our platform were retained by the originating bank and 80% of loans were purchased by institutional investors through our loan funding programs. Our institutional investors and buyers that participate in our loan funding programs invest in Upstart-powered loans through whole loan purchases, purchases of pass-through certificates and investments in asset-backed securitizations. A large fraction of the whole loans sold to institutional investors under our loan funding programs are originated by Cross River Bank, or CRB. In the year ended December 31, 2021, CRB originated 55% of the loans facilitated on our platform and fees received from CRB accounted for 56% of our total revenue. In the year ended December 31, 2021, one of our other bank partners originated 36% of the loans facilitated on our platform and accounted for 27% of our total revenue. We enter into nonexclusive agreements with our whole loan purchasers and each of the grantor trust entities in our asset-backed securitizations, pursuant to which we provide loan servicing.
Our revenue is primarily comprised of fees paid by banks. We charge banks referral fees for each loan referred through Upstart.com and originated by a bank partner, platform fees for each loan originated, regardless of its source, and loan servicing fees as consumers repay their loans. Our agreements with our bank partners are nonexclusive, generally have 12-month terms that automatically renew, subject to certain early termination provisions, and may contain minimum fee amounts. As a usage-based platform, we target positive unit economics on each transaction, resulting in a cash efficient business model that features both high growth rates and profitability.