I guess it'll be colder in DC, but for everybody else in our audience, and we have thousands of people coming to our website, Carlo, who are you, Carlo? What do you

do? What's going on? Let's start there.

So consumer lending, founder.

So I started out as an operator in the space, was at Capital One for seven years on credit cards, marketing, underwriting, building models, analytics.

data science stuff like that right and then I I thought I left consumer lending mentally I was like I'm out of lending big banks this stuff is boring it's slow like I had kind of talked myself out of it so I did these I did two smaller startups out of the category like sales and marketing type of work That's where I got really hands on into like paid search, affiliate marketing, early days of social.

This was like 2012 era.

I wish I had leaned in more into social because it just was like you could print money.

Okay, NWG, yep.

Yeah.

So, um, we were very fortunate early.

So, um, a few days after, maybe even the same day I announced it, it was cl- it was quick, um, the folks at Experian gave us a call and said, "Hey, we'd love to...

We love what you're building here.

We get the vision." Um, they, they actually said, "We wanna bring-- We're actually more partners here than we are competitors."

Okay.

So like this event made total sense to them strategically.

So they're our headline sponsor.

Does anyone else have a metric that they think looks useful but can be misleading?

Yeah, I'll add one.

It's CPA or cost per acquisition.

So the trap I sometimes see is And this sometimes comes from financial teams, maybe like the CFO's office, where there's an impetus to drive down CPA at all costs.

And I think that's a really dangerous one.

I'll give just two examples.

I see this often in affiliates where sometimes a lender just, for whatever reason, gets stuck in their head.

Okay, so Carlos, from the lending side, where have you seen teams mistake at lead volume for actual growth? Can you share an example of what looked really strong on paper but fell apart when you looked a little bit deeper and you started really digging into the 10 to 20 metrics?

What are some of the biggest challenges that folks are facing with right now in the affiliate marketing space?

So there's some evergreen challenges, I would say.

The evergreen challenges are model alignment, so making sure the model you underwrite with on the back end.

So when you run a hard inquiry, it's the same model you're using on the front end when you initially select who's going to see the ad.

So that's really important.

That's an evergreen problem that probably never goes away.

Maybe AI helps a little bit over time.

But how do you see AI changing the area of this business, not just like in theory, but in practice?

Hmm.

And it's the certainty the customer has along the way that will determine the, the conversion rate.

So as an example, I just came, let's say, from Experian or from Credit Karma.

I saw a specific offer, okay? It's a certain loan amount, a certain duration, a certain APR.

If you're very clear with me when I'm on the lender side that this is what I'm getting and that I'm pre-approved and that you just need to verify a couple of things, you have a lot more latitude to ask for income statements or for plaid linking, et cetera.

But if you're asking for all that information in the context of I need this to even determine if you're gonna get this offer, it completely changes the frame for the customer, and then the abandon rates really take off.

So to me, there's an art to how you sequence it all.

Thanks, Carlos.