How Better Mortgage worked with Amazon and AWS to grow their business

All right, good morning, everyone. So this session is for leaders who are looking to leverage programs and resources at Amazon and AWS to help you grow your business. We'll be talking about offerings beyond cloud services and you'll come away from this session with an understanding of:

1. Different types of programs that are available to help you grow your business.

2. How do you align with your executive team and your account team to take advantage of these resources?

3. We'll talk about some mechanisms that you can leverage to be successful.

You'll also hear from Neka Akp, the Head of Financial Innovation of Better a fintech who IPOed earlier this summer. She'll share more about their multiyear journey in building a relationship with AWS that helped them align executives from Better and Amazon to a common company goal. How she leveraged Amazon's digital innovation programs to iterate on several new products in parallel and how we explored an incremental business model through customer introductions.

We're gonna show you how to leverage resources in Amazon to help your team do more with less. I'm Richard the worldwide go to market strategy leader for our digital native business segment at AWS. This segment serves the disruptors who have become scale ups in industries like fintech, healthtech gaming, e-commerce, ad tech, transportation and many more.

Prior to AWS, I was the founder and CEO of a mobile ordering and payments company that was eventually acquired by Anheuser Busch, the beer company. We grew extremely rapidly after the acquisition, expanding into South America, launching several new products and started a SAS business with our data exhaust. This helped us grow our monthly active users and 10x revenue.

And throughout this entire time, my CTO and I rarely talked about code or services, but we're really just focused on business outcomes. After the acquisition. my co-founder and I had a really long conversation that you've probably also had with some of your teams. We were trying to figure out when we should refactor our back end from a monolith into microservices. And our conversation really quickly went from a why should we do this to when should we do this? And this all centered around a business trade off and ROI discussion.

Fortunately, we ended up pushing the project out by six months because we just needed to build some core marketing and product capabilities that simply couldn't wait until the new backend was built. But that made us rack up some pretty significant tech debt and we had a duct tape product that exhausted our team to keep functional, which at the end of the day crushed morale. Who knew that developers actually don't want to manage push notifications and coupon codes. And in the end, we needed to rebuild our back end anyway. And I wish that we had known about all of the free resources that we could have leveraged to save ourselves a ton of time while achieving our business goals.

My story seems to resonate with a lot of our customers because they're often surprised with all of the resources that AWS has to offer. And you'll hear an example from Better Mortgage later on. When I joined AWS, I realized that AWS had all of these free resources to help us with all of these challenges and they're available at no cost for our customers. And I'll talk a little bit more about why that's the case later on. This really would have helped me when I was the CEO of my company and I bet it could help your business too.

Our engineering team spent a ton of time evaluating the technical requirements and trying to build out a business case for some of our major projects. Our AWS account team would have actually been able to help offer some insights on how they would think about all of these tradeoffs that we were about spending a ton of engineering time trying to evaluate. And I think this would have helped our engineering org focus on what they would have done best and things that would have actually pushed our business forward.

Once we decided on that strategy, I think we would have been eligible for various build acceleration workshops and programs that would have helped us launch our minimum lovable products way more quickly. And rather than taking our product and development teams off of our core projects to run experiments, we would have been able to deliver on more of our ideas with build labs, innovation workshops and partner resources. Again, no cost to customers.

Then when we actually started to expand our business and start selling data AWS would have been able to help us share best practices on how to build that data product and make introductions to additional customers.

Now, I'd love to hear from you. For customers out there, which one of these business outcomes have you engaged on with your account team? So if you can take a quick picture, scan this QR code and put in this number, we'll have about 30 seconds or so to capture some of the results.

Alright, we'll close the poll in about 5, 10 seconds.

Ok. Let's see what we got. We, yeah, looks like this question was actually the different one than we had planned. No, but I think um we can come back to our initial deck. Thanks.

Um a lot of what I've heard from our customers is that they weren't really engaged with our account management teams. And they didn't really have a firm understanding of all the different resources at Amazon to actually help them. So my team is actually responsible for working with customers like you to understand the biggest challenges in your business, to develop programs and initiatives to help you solve your problems, usually at no cost and then making sure that our customers get access to all of these resources.

So if you don't currently speak with your account team, I hope that the rest of this session will give you a few reasons to reconsider. And now I'd like to invite Mari Mae the head of our digital native business segment to give you more insight in how you can work with your account teams and your executive teams to take advantage of these programs. Thanks.

Thanks Richard and welcome everybody to the session. As Richard mentioned. So let me introduce myself. My name is Martin. I'm working in the AWS for seven years already. And my job is to think about the future and strategy about digital native businesses and how we work together with AWS.

Now, when you think about digital native businesses, typically what they do, they disrupt industries, they show things in a new light, they kind of really do things differently and so on. And typically, from a technological perspective, they are at the very edge of innovation. What happens with that is sometimes it's not enough time to think about all the other things, business model monetization, customer acquisition and so on and so on.

Just last night, I had the privilege to speak to one of them who was kind of regretting some of the previous companies that he founded. He just said, if I only had this business acumen, we were technically super good and we had an amazing product, but we just didn't figure out through the business perspective what to do. And this is part of the session is to kind of expand on not only technology, but also the other things that we from AWS can actually work with you together on and help you figure out all of these other things.

Now, when you think about and Richard mentioned it already, like do more with less, we realize from all of our customers that they want to accomplish as much as possible in as short as possible amount of time using the resources they have. That's typically, you know, there are boundaries, there are limitations that, you know, what can they accomplish and what can they invest.

Now accelerating innovation cycle is the first and foremost, you know, what we hear from our customers, they want to go, you know, beat the market, they want to be first in the innovation cycle. They wanna bring that, you know, fresh ideas and fresh perspectives and fresh business models to the market as soon as possible.

Um they also, you know, what we try to, you know, help them to do is to really focus on what differentiates their approach, their product, their their solution, their service from the others. What is really that added value and that secret sauce versus just all the undifferentiated things that needs to be done, right? Keeping the lights on and, and so on.

Um then also one of the common things that we work on is how to grow your customer base. There are so many ways today, like, you know, we hear about advertising all the time and we hear a lot about this. Is it working? Is it not working and so on? But customer acquisition is one of the really, really key things, especially in the early phases of your MVP, LP, etcetera to really prove that your business model will work. So that's where talking to us and figuring out what are the commonalities and where do we overlap can be very useful?

Um last but not least every single one of our companies has a lot of operations in the background that needs to be frictionless, that needs to be really, really smooth in order for everything else to function properly.

Um and then when we think about these four different, let's say requirements in Amazon, we proud ourselves to work backwards from the customer needs. So we identify, ok, this is what us customers are telling us, this is what you need. So we work backwards from that and working backwards from that, we generally group resources into three areas. And how do we work together with our customers? Apart from technology? Of course, technology is table stakes.

Um the first group that we, that we typically engage with is a lot of executive support and a lot of industry expertise. If you think about Amazon, Amazon is bigger than Amazon Web Services. Amazon has retail. Amazon has music. Amazon has prime. So if you think about logistics, if you think about media industry, if you think about like there is so many industries where Amazon has expertise in. So that's one of the very interesting ways how to engage and how to get more of this industry, knowledge, expertise.

And also we will gladly share where we failed. Amazon is a good company to fail experiments because we learn from them, we move quickly on and we evaluate and then we iterate on what went wrong. So that is also a very valuable part of engagements.

Um another group is really all kind of workshops and facilitative workshops that we do now. Nothing really beats. Kind of us sitting down in the room, putting our heads together and trying to figure out certain things we can do a lot of, you know, virtual things, ideations and I don't know what not but kind of a workshop style sitting together and making things possible and really figuring out what is possible and where is that line of the art of the possible that's like, you know, really gold worth worth in gold.

And then also last but not least is there are various programs to accelerate your proof of concepts and to really bring them to life when we ideate when we go through this kind of a workshop style, et cetera. Now it's ok. Who's gonna do it? And that, who's gonna do it? Sometimes you know, there is expertise missing, there is people missing, there is bandwidth prioritization, there is so many things that can prevent you from making that idea a reality. And this is where AWS can also help in with various programs.

Now, um one of the things that we really wanted to share with you is what we have identified to be a common path for innovation. We identify a couple of discrete steps along the innovation cycle and typically it all starts, as you can see on the slide, it typically starts at some brainstorming slash ideation level. It's like what could we do? What is really the need on the market? What's happening? How can we plug this hole and so on?

And then from this ideation stage, we go on and we evaluate it's a kind of a reality check type of thing, right. So is it really possible that we do it, can we accomplish it? Is technology there sometimes, you know, that can also be a limiting factor doing all, all kind of these reality checks. That's kind of a generally the second step after we go to the build phase and build is typically the proof of concept kind of a build the MVP, build MLP, build that minimum functionality, go to market, test it, see how it works.

And then of course, it's scaling. Are you ready for tens, hundreds millions of customers coming in and using that service along each one of these discrete steps we have built, developed, worked on and and really can offer variety of different mechanisms to accelerate each one of these steps.

So when we talk about ideation step, then typically we have envisioning workshops or we have some kind of a we have several different mechanisms to help you really brainstorm together and to help you think about ok, what could we do together and how could this look like? What kind of an impact could this produce, et cetera, et cetera?

Then we go on to evaluation phase where typically digital innovation workshops and similar activities take place and there you get a really good sense of, you know how that could look like you shape it up. So think about idea that, you know, getting shaped up in this stage.

And then later on, there is a lot of a lot of prototyping solution building together with our partners, sometimes our pro serve and so on. And afterwards, you know, we go to to the whole scaling model when you think about each one of these steps and as we engage with our customers what we see is that their path to innovation and their innovation cycle accelerates. And this is literally the the the difference between these two curves is where the opportunity lies for you and for our engagement.

Now let's let's you know, do another quick poll. Um let's see if this is the aligned one with the question. So what do you think is the biggest challenge to successfully launching an innovation project? So let's give it up half a minute or so, this is the result of their, as can we set the result last call? Ah ok, seems to be working better this time.

So when you think about, you know, how you voted, we see the poorly defined business goals, which is a very important one, what, what, what were we actually trying to accomplish six months down the road and then you think back and look back and it's like, oh ok.

Um yeah, even more a lack of focus or resourcing missing executive buying and then unclear problem statement. So, I mean, just if you look at these goals, uh if you look at these answers, sorry, um you see that, you know, it really, it pays off to invest time upfront to really define what are we trying to accomplish? What's the path or what's the route that we are following and then later on, you know, we will see how we actually accomplish this.

Now, um let's go back to the slides and if you, if you think about how, if you think about how these things be kind of a play together in, in, in real life, we have identified there are three critical elements that need to come together in order to make a really good innovation project. And when I say to make it to really accomplish that innovation project, first and foremost, and you've seen that on the poll results as well, you really need the board level or really high level buying and engagement without it, it's very easy to reprioritize things. It's very easy not to have resources. It's very easy to do something different. It's very easy to kind of uh stray away and so on. So that's first and foremost, needs to be there when we think about the impact of that project of that idea that needs to be really sizable and really tangible for majority of the people that, that are participating and last but not least time frame, it cannot be like, let's do it in the next 20 years. It can, it really needs to be time bound.

What we've done also in the past is we've sliced the idea into more manageable chunks. And then see, ok, let's do a chunk one first, let's not do five at the same time.

so when you, when you combine all of these three, and when you look at, you know, the middle part here, the overlap of them is really what we are looking for and this is the majority of our ideation workshops, et cetera will really force clarity on what are we trying to accomplish? uh we call that typically the north star metric and it needs to be very clearly defined.

so when you think about, for example, increasing kp i by x percent in y years, this is typically a form that it gets defined. so just let's do you know 11 quick example, if we say that our goal is to increase profit by 200% over the next three years, that's time bound, that's tangible. that's definitely impactful. that's something that's on the agenda of the board. like all of these things combined, they, you know, we check all the boxes.

now, how do we go about it? we actually try to identify different outcomes. each one of the departments in the company might have a different approach to this and they might have a different outcome in marketing versus in product management versus in sales, all of them contributing to the same goal, but doing it in their own way, correct.

so we identify couple of outcomes per goal. let's say in this example, we've just selected three of them. one is to increase 100% revenue increase or revenue growth in three years with existing customer profile. so we have our customers, how do we increase the revenue from them over the next three years?

second one might be and, and this is typically something that you know, sales would think about. then the next one would be 50% revenue growth in three years in emerging markets. and this is typically something that marketing would look at and say, ok, what are our, what is our contribution to this? how do we actually help there? how do we do this emerging markets?

and then the third one might be to reduce cost by 5% with optimization projects that will contribute to the profit growth. and that is typically an operational kind of a devos type of thing. you know, people would think about, ok, how do we really decrease our cost per transaction or or typical metric?

now, if we look into one of these, we always have a format for this, a one pager or something where we, you know, very transparently with customers have that written down and very clear clearly uh with very clear taxonomy. who does what when how et cetera? but i'm just walking you high level through through the example now.

so when we think about the first outcome and what we want to do there, it's increasing, you know, 100% revenue growth in three years with the existing customer profiles. and then also on this outcome, we can have different initiatives that would support it. in this case, we have selected initiatives, new product launch to drive those conversions. we have a second one that's improving convergence on existing marketing channels and we have a third one, develop additional customer acquisition channels.

all of them are contributing to this first one and each one of them will have different participants. so taking the first one, for example, on the new product launch, that is where we would typically bring our digital innovation team to work together with the customer and say, hey, how can we actually do this? what this new product actually needs to entail? what are the features? what are the functions? how do you actually make that happen?

on the second one on improving conversion, we would typically try to optimize the existing application, the existing channel, we would dive deep into how the conversion works at the moment. where are the drop offs and what do we need to do to prevent those drop offs? so we could do a poc, we could do a b testing, we could do all kinds of things and then also on the developing additional customer acquisition channels is this is where other amazon business units can come in. if you are in, let's say media business, there might be a very good chance to talk to amazon music or amazon video and see how you know what collaboration is possible as an example or you know, we can name many other examples.

so i mean, this is just kind of a one view, one example and of course, you know that doesn't get done in 15 minutes. it takes a bit longer to build all of this and to work through. um but this is what we hear from our customers and this is how we try to, to work together.

now, i'm gonna call richard to come up and uh to, to walk us through the rest of the presentation and to help us. i understand how this really gets implemented in practice. cool. thanks martin.

my role, i, in my role, i often spend time advocating for resources to help our customers. and what that usually means is thinking about what is going to both help our customer base and how is that going to impact aws and amazon as a whole. and i think whatever our customers hear about the free resources that we have that are available, their immediate response is usually wait. but why would you do all of this and why are you essentially providing millions of dollars worth of consulting services for free?

and you might think that what we want you to do is to just adopt more aws services, right? just go on the side of the curve. but what we actually care about is whether or not the things that you're building are actually delivering value to your end stakeholder because value is what translates into usage and our priority is for you to build the right things for your customers and your teams.

so now that you have an idea for how you can help you and your team achieve your board level goals. you do think that amazon and aws has some resources to help you along in that journey. you've mapped out the initiative to the board uh to the board level goal and you can articulate why you should do this right now.

now, maybe you need to present some urgency to your team in order to get that engagement from different executive leaders, right? maybe it's product operations, sales, marketing, everyone needs to come together to really align to that north star metric. and sometimes what we hear from customers is, well, we're kind of heads down this quarter. we're focused on launching something or we have to fundraise. um and all of that is really understandable but customers who have worked with us and you'll hear from neca in a moment, what they tell us is that the time they've spent with the, with their executives and with the aws team running through that alignment exercise is really similar to coming out of a great off site.

their teams are much more energized, they're excited and projects actually can get done. and we know that you're thinking about how should you allocate your time. so we want to make sure that the time that your executives are investing with aws actually yields outsized returns.

so our questions and alignment mechanisms are succinct and simple. the process aligns to board level goals. we focus on meaningful outcomes that allows your, your executive team to really achieve the end goals that they're trying to, that they're, that they're trying to shoot for at the end of their quarter and at the end of their year and what we do with your account teams is to make sure that an investment to meet with us and to share your priorities for the year will allow your account team and your business development team to find the right programs and leaders all around amazon to help you achieve your business goals.

now, i'd like to invite neca head of financial innovation at better to share the story of their journey with aws. better mortgage is a direct lender looking to enable homeownership by providing a simple and transparent online mortgage experience backed by superior customer support. they are a digital native business and their product has been built on aws since 2014, but they really just started to build their strategic relationship with aws in these last two years.

and what you'll notice is that she doesn't talk about eks or s3 or bedrock, but she will talk about all of the business goals that we were able to work together to achieve in a shorter period of time. so please put your hands together for neca.

good afternoon, everyone. i'm gonna try that one more time. good afternoon, everyone. my name is nop. i am the head of financial innovation at better where we are on a mission to make homeownership and home finance as cheap and fast as machine possible. and that better complete customer obsession is at the center of everything we do.

and these are actual first time home buyers, leah and dorian in west orange, new jersey. i'm gonna tell you a little bit about how we got started.

so in 2014, the ceo of better vishal garg lost out on his dream home because the process was so long. so clunky and so complicated. he tried to get a fast pre-approval online by going to lendingtree. but instead he just got flooded with inbound phone calls because it was a lead gent tool at the time. and what we found was that they did not have the tools or technology or capability to help him move quickly. and maybe you know what i'm talking about.

this is not an official poll but show of hands. if anyone in here has tried to get a pre approval letter ever and keep your hand up if you are delighted by the process. exactly. so it was painful. but what came out of it was him asking different questions and starting to define the problem.

in 2015, the big idea was to build a fully digital product that removed friction like requesting data and documents that are readily available with tech integrations. when bsa lost his dream home, it was because the pre approval process was furiously long now, touch back to be's mission of making homeownership as simple, cheap and fast as possible. we created the first ever transparent, fully verified pre-approval that hopeful homeowners could get in one day and use to shop with confidence. that was 2017.

our business continued to grow. we hit the ground running, we scaled very quickly and our business was growing exponentially. we knew we had something special but no one could have predicted the growth that we experienced during the pandemic. when no one could go into a bank branch and sit down to get a mortgage by 2021 we were building, we were iterating and we were developing in house the first uh proprietary pricing and eligibility engine. it's called deep.

and this got us one step closer to the fully end to end platform we have today by 2022 we crossed the threshold of $100 billion in funded volume. we're the first digital native in the world to do that. only one other that's crossed that threshold uh and financial in ch and so in doing so, we helped nearly a half million people realize their dream of home ownership or get a better rate.

the better story continues this year with one of the most improbable ip os in us history which we view as a milestone uh rather rather than a destination. we also launched a new marquee product one day mortgage on aws taking the financing commitment process for months down to 24 hours and behind it all is a piece of software that we call tinman.

so what is tin man? you're looking at me? uh you may think that i'm dressed in honor of the original tin man from wizard of oz. you're not wrong but betters version is so much cooler. it's proprietary software that is sale and loan origination and it's the only end to end platform that's been built in the last 30 years. we call it automation with a human touch, let machines do what they do best and let humans do the rest.

so for most of the country, the mortgage process is stuck in the eighties. uh it's mostly manual, lots of paper, not a lot of technology. when we started out, we sought to bring mortgage to the 21st century through automation and this is before a i and ml got buzzy. we were already building a fully automated mortgage. we've been working on it since the beginning.

so we spent seven years building our supervised learning platform from scratch. and at its core, tin men is a workflow engine. it enables true disruption of the world's largest tangible asset class and allows us to have a lifetime relationship with our customers. it also creates and fully digitizes a verified financial data graph for every borrower $100 billion in funded volume. we have the industry's most robust learning data set. our data set is our competitive advantage and tim man's core operating principles are to reduce human touches reduce labor costs, reduce defaults and error rates and reduce the time it takes to close.

and through tinman, we've connected all things home under one roof. so 100% of transactions require title settlement insurance. tinman provides a seamless and fully digital experience for our customers. and through tinman, we connect with investors in the ecosystem who are ultimately able to purchase high quality high performing loans that fit their investment strategies.

and finally, we have our team members interfacing with tin man again, automation with the human touch, let machines do what they do best and let humans do the rest. whether you're trying to purchase, whether you're looking to refi whether you are looking to get cash out of your home through equity or whether you are looking for a fully digital heloc. we have the first ever fully digital heloc. we're able to close in about three days in as little as three days. i should say our goal is to provide everything our customers need in one simple, fully digital platform that they can keep coming back to for life's biggest financial transactions.

and i want to take a moment to highlight this. we've been investing in automation since the very beginning. i get a lot of inbound from new mortgage tech start ups who are just now realizing what we saw as the future. back in 2014 and 2015, the percentage of 10 man tasks that are fully automated has grown substantially and we continue to push forward towards a 100% automated mortgage

We are close. The ultimate goal is to get from click to close, fully automated for the borrower. And from the beginning, working with AWS was a no brainer. Uh the brand technological capabilities, we knew that we'd be able to scale quickly in either direction if needed. And we also were very aligned um in terms of culture and in terms of values and in terms of centering the customer, everything that we do, we knew that AWS could help us launch products faster.

But what we didn't know was that Amazon has all these dedicated resources to help with innovation, ideation, validation, and, execution. And this is where I'd like to focus the rest of my discussion today on how Better was able to do more with less.

I joined Better about three years ago and started to work with our account team to better understand how else Amazon could help. At the time, AWS was only working with Better's engineering team and our account manager, Dan piqued our interest with Amazon's digital innovation offerings. It's a program that gave us an inside look at how Amazon innovates internally and it took us a few months to get the right people into the room. Uh but once we did, we were able to fully understand the scope of what Amazon could bring to the table.

And there was a real learning curve for both sides here. We wanted to make sure Amazon and AWS understood our critical customer journey, but we also wanted to understand better all of the resources that Amazon could bring to bear. And so there were a few challenges:

First, our executives knew we wanted to build a more meaningful and more strategic relationship with AWS. But it wasn't clear who should be in the room at any given time. So we ended up having a bunch of meetings that uh did not necessarily lead to execution until we got the right executives in the room.

And each of our teams had a different view on how Amazon could help us. Engineering wanted new features, marketing wanted co branded uh offers fin fin finance wanted to discuss how they could support us in terms of getting discounts and it just wasn't clear which initiative should be prioritized first.

And so we worked with our account executive Dan on goal alignment. Uh you heard about that earlier just a moment ago and that exercise started with what we wanted to achieve. We told him that we wanted to double our revenue in the next three years and we had a few ideas on what to focus on:

• One day mortgage, an idea that we had since the very beginning
• We wanted to grow our large uh public company employee offering
• And we also wanted to expand uh top of funnel in general.

So Dan brought us into a working backwards session, which you also heard Myron talk about. We were able to start from the customer with a customer empathy exercise and work backwards to deliver a product um very, very quickly. And I wanna underscore that it would have taken us significantly longer to deliver a product without this session.

And this included experts from Amazon who asked very thoughtful questions and helped challenge our assumptions. They helped us draft a document, we know Amazon loves documents and we put our thinking on paper and that gave us a clear path to work with Amazon and build an MLP.

Wanna do another poll question here. How long does it usually take your team to go from idea to launch? Give it about 45 seconds. Ok. We'll close the pole in about 15 more seconds. Ok, let's check out the poll results.

So it looks like we have a tie between 3 to 6 months and 9 to 12 months. It looks like some folks take over 12 months. Some folks take less than a month. Kudos to you. Who is that? I wanna hire you. Some folks take 6 to 9 months. So you see it, it varies.

I wanna go back to the presentation and I want to talk a little bit about, I want to talk a little bit about One Day Mortgage. We've been building this for years. We had a lot of other ideas working with AWS to align technical and business teams from both companies really helped us to deliver on multiple ideas much more quickly.

And at the same time, because we didn't have to take our resources from the core to focus on experiments or innovation products we were able to lean heavily on AWS's resources to focus on what we wanted to experiment on and test before handing it back over to the core.

And from our initial conversations to deliver products took us less than six months. So let me share what One Day Mortgage does – it condenses the mortgage commitment process down to 24 hours. It used to take an average of 45 days. Actually, it still takes an average of 45 days for other lenders. We do it in 24 hours and we did it really by automating more of what happens when you're making a mortgage decision.

So we reimagined the assembly line to cut the decision time down by 80%. Plus, I also want to share a bit about Mortgages as a Service with you. It's a new offering that we just launched in partnership with Emphasis. And as we thought about how to take Tinman and expand into new markets, we work with the AWS team to build this offering and AWS helped introduce us to other customers.

Uh talk through Satis application of Tinman and accelerate our delivery cycle. And this is really what we see as the future of mortgage. We built successful partnerships with some of the biggest brands in financial services through multi models. And the next logical step is to offer mortgage as a service to any financial institution that's tired of breaking the bank trying to make mortgages.

We know it's hard. We don't, everyone is losing money trying to do it. We figured out how to do it faster and better. So let us do it for you with your brand forward. And the idea is imagine being able to buy a home as easily and as quickly as you tap to pay for groceries, digital mortgage as a service is the next frontier of ecommerce.

Now, our relationship with AWS has been tremendous because the two companies were values align on creating the best possible customer experience and values alignment can't be overemphasized here.

Better grew tremendously during the pandemic and had a lot of ideas for the next version of the company. But competing priorities and deliverables made it hard to get anything off the ground quickly. Even though we have a superior customer experience working with AWS allowed us to build new and innovative products without having to burden our team again.

We let the core focus on what the core was focused on and we took the experimentation to AWS and our strategic partnership enabled us to launch more quickly so the core team could take over.

And I spoke about two major initiatives that we developed and launched with the support of AWS. But here are some of the other features that we've built through the years that earned Ally powered by Better a number one ranking in digital mortgage experience by JD Power last year:

• First we have the fastest pre-approval process period. Um some borrowers complete this step in under one minute. And remember Vash, all's pre-approval process was a nightmare that took several weeks. He ended up losing his house. We're able to eliminate financing contingencies for the majority of our borrowers in less than 24 hours. That's One Day Mortgage. We're actually doing it in an average of eight hours today. Speed of light.

• We're delivering speed and certainty as early in the process as possible.

• We're also closing in record time. Some borrowers close in under a week and many in just two weeks again, speed and certainty

• And one of our fastest growing lines of business, we have the first ever fully digital he lock and we're able to close in as little as three days as I mentioned earlier

• And we continue to center the customer and interact with them whenever and however is most convenient for them. Some people wanna talk through their questions on the phone, some wanna receive education via bots. Some people are perfectly happy to click through the experience from start to finish without speaking to anyone at all. We're here and we're available to help them however they want.

• And last but not least through Mortgage as a Service, we'll be able to bring this digital experience to more hopeful homeowners uh from all lenders.

Now, you've heard about how Better worked with Amazon to accelerate innovation and you can do the same by engaging with your account executive to see what resources are available to you.

And if I had three pieces of advice for you and your executive teams to get the most out of your AWS relationship, I would say:

1. Educate your account team on your company and your product goals. This will help your account team at AWS, save you time and educate you on the myriad offerings. Amazon has to help you grow and scale. Remember that your success is Amazon's success. So let them help you do more with less.

2. Emphasize to your business leaders that Amazon's innovation resources are free and available to help you accelerate delivery of new products and services.

3. Enact the outputs from your ideation sessions with Amazon – have a bias for action on getting to an MLP and just iterate from there. Progress over perfection, done over perfection, have a bias for action and run at that goal and fast.

Innovation takes equal parts curiosity, courage and creativity to get out of the never ending product roadmap queue. I want each and every one of you to think of Amazon like an investor who wants to put sweat equity into your business. The resources to drive innovation are available to you. Just one call or email away.

And I'd like to pass it back to you, Richard. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Neka. All right. That was such a, an awesome overview of how customers can get more out of their AWS relationship. It's been wonderful working with you and your team, Neca. And I think we've been so successful because you and your executives have been so transparent about your goals to Dan and then Dan was able to help find the right resources all across Amazon to help you and your execs.

Now, I'd love to invite Martin and Neka back on stage and we'll have a couple of minutes for questions. And if we want to have a smaller group, we actually have a peer talk uh alignment or a table downstairs. If you wanna follow us um in a smaller group, any questions? No pressure.

All right. All right. Thank you guys so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of your event. Thank you.