Blend

09/02/2026

At Blend Forum 2026, we explored what becomes possible when lenders are less constrained by team capacity, manual processes, and the application form. The conversation focused on how AI could help lenders expand capacity, create more time for customer relationships, and build more personal experiences from offer through close.

We brought together lending leaders from banks, credit unions, and IMBs for candid conversations about how AI can expand capacity, strengthen relationships, and reshape the customer experience.

Read our recap, Unbound: Five Takeaways from Blend Forum 2026, for the ideas shaping the next chapter of lending, from a renewed focus on capacity and the changing role of employees to a future where the interface could fade into the background.

Read the Forum 2026 recap: https://hubs.ly/Q04wkkbb0

08/31/2026

Seven deserving customers took home Best in Banking awards at last week. 🏆

Each of them has pushed us to build better, whether by putting agentic AI into production early, co-building integrations, or unifying experiences across lines of business.

Congratulations to all seven! We'll share more on each in the weeks ahead. Full announcement linked in the comments. 👇

08/28/2026

has officially come to a close, and we're grateful to everyone who made the trip to Austin.

Three days of keynotes, panels, and hallway conversations with the banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders working through the same hard questions. What borrowers actually experience when they shop for a loan. How consumer behavior is shifting. What has to change inside an organization for AI to actually deliver.

A few things Nima Ghamsari took away from the week:

1. Customers have moved past "should we" to "how do we."
2. AI adoption barriers are no longer technical, they're organizational.
3. The world is becoming headless, with institutions wanting AI intelligence embedded in their own apps, chatbots, and websites.

Thank you to our customers, partners, speakers, and to all who helped make Forum possible. Here's a look back at some of our favorite moments.

08/27/2026

A lot of ground was covered yesterday at .

Garth Graham of STRATMOR Group opened our home lending panel with a hard stat: 94% of loan officers tell borrowers to apply online. The conversation turned to what the LO's job becomes when the digital experience carries the process.

Jason Ream led our consumer banking panel on how Americans are saving, borrowing, and spending right now, and what our customers are seeing across credit card and personal loans.

Srini Venkatramani pushed our AI panel past strategy and into structure, asking what has to change for AI to deliver results instead of decks.

Stay tuned for a full recap tomorrow.

08/26/2026

Autopilot is expanding to both sides of the loan. 💬

Borrower chat already answers questions and collects what's needed, often outside business hours. Now meet Navigator, a new productivity tool coming to beta soon that lets loan officers ask about a loan in plain language and approve changes directly in the conversation. Reads are instant and changes will require explicit approval before anything is written to the file.

See what's coming 👉 https://hubs.ly/Q04vrJJn0

08/26/2026

Yesterday was a full first day at .

Josh Linkner set the tone on the main stage, making the case that the institutions who win are the ones willing to find another way when the obvious path closes.

Our Origination Index panel made that concrete. Drawing on the 1 in 6 U.S. mortgage applications Blend processes each year, our own Mukesh Jha showed where borrowers drop off and how far apart the top and median funnels really are. Jason Pugh, Jeremy Bowling, and Matt West brought the lender perspective from California Credit Union, Huntington National Bank, and PenFed.

Nima Ghamsari rounded out the main stage sessions with Unbound. A year ago autonomous lending was a concept. Today Autopilot is running on real loans, and Nima showed what that looks like in practice.

More to come.

08/24/2026

is officially underway in Austin!

We teed things up (literally) on the course at Omni Barton Creek this morning, then welcomed customers and partners at registration ahead of tonight's reception.

Sessions start tomorrow. Josh Linkner opens the main stage, Nima Ghamsari shares where we see the industry heading next, and our panels dig into the questions banks and lenders are working through right now.

Highlights coming all week.

08/20/2026

Most AI in lending speeds up one step in a process that still runs sequentially, each stage waiting on the one before it.

Autopilot works differently. ✨ Its pre-underwriting agent works the file in parallel, in real time, before a human ever touches it. The early results, based on more than 50,000 live production loans and validated against 175,000 loans across 24 lender cohorts, point to something bigger than efficiency gains.

"What would this industry look like if you designed it from the ground up around agents?" said Nima Ghamsari, Co-founder and Head of Blend. "That's no longer a thought experiment."

➡️ Full results: https://hubs.ly/Q04tKvb60

08/19/2026

👀 ICYMI: "Everything can be the future." Nima Ghamsari sat down with HousingWire's Allison LaForgia to talk about what happens when you stop making incremental changes to mortgage workflows and rebuild the process around AI from the ground up.

The conversation covers real-time underwriting, a 19% lift in conversion, and where Blend Autopilot is headed next.

▶️ Watch the full video: https://hubs.ly/Q04tCjNp0

Blend Founder and Head Nima Ghamsari explains how Autopilot, real-time underwriting and AI could reshape mortgage lending and deliver clear-to-close approvals in minutes.

08/18/2026

For Frost Bank, account opening isn't just a form to fill out. It's the front door to the entire banking relationship, and it's why the bank has extended its partnership with Blend to power deposit account opening too.

"One of the most important things about having both lending and deposits in Blend is that we're driving the customer to be primary with the bank." — Brad Bremer, SVP of Consumer Deposit Products, Frost Bank

Completion rates rose from 50% to 80%, manual review fell from 15% to 3%, and now one platform connects the full customer relationship, from checking to loans.

📣 Full announcement: https://hubs.ly/Q04tlZ2l0
➡️ Case study: https://hubs.ly/Q04tlL6b0