We're here at the Yardi Forum in Boston, surrounded by colleagues, partners, and clients. It's the perfect setting to announce the integration of Nova Credit with Yardi Verification Services, an important milestone that strengthens how we support our clients, the residents and applicants they serve, and affordable housing providers throughout the country. In today's discussion, we'll walk through what this integration means, and how it works, and benefits it can offer for our PHA and affordable clients. Let's jump in. First, Patrick, can you explain for us what upfront income verifications means, and how it fits into today's affordable housing certification workflow? Sure, Chris. So upfront income verification is really just the process of getting folks to verify their income early in the application process for affordable or subsidized housing. For many, many years, decades even, it's been paper-driven, folks bringing in documents or completing attestations on a signed document. And I think the timing is just right to rapidly transform that. Operators have been looking for a solution for decades. Consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with the banking tools that are available today and doing just about everything from the comfort of their phone. And finally, there's technology providers and fintechs out there that are able to take that data and turn it into valuable insight for affordable operators and PHAs to use to help make their decisions. Excellent. One challenge that many providers face is getting both new applicants and existing residents to complete the verification process. What strategies have you seen to increase those participation rates? I think the key that we've seen so far is just education. Right? So our most successful clients at getting their residents to adopt these new solutions are making an effort to get educational information in front of those consumers. And so that's things like paper flyers in their leasing offices that explain the process, explain that they're going to get an email invitation or a text message to start the process, and then even sending follow-up emails from the property, property branded, so the folks know who they're coming from, it's a trusted source, explaining that they're going to see different emails or texts about these various pieces that they're going to have to do in order to drive them into the process of embracing this online solution. Fantastic. So when clients move from that paper-based process that you described earlier to automated income and asset verifications, what kind of time savings can they experience or cost savings could they expect? It's enormous. In many cases, people are cutting the time it takes to get folks to complete this process by upwards of 98%. We've had folks go from the beginning of the process to the end of the process in under five minutes. That's faster than even someone with great handwriting could fill out a paper form the old-fashioned way. So really seeing a lot of advantages in terms of the expediency of moving this all online. Fantastic. At the same time, a concern that we hear often is that affordable housing residents and applicants aren't too tech-savvy, or maybe they've got limited internet access. How do you typically respond to some of those concerns? I think those days are over. The vast, vast majority of folks have a smartphone. The vast majority of consumers at all levels are doing online banking. So I think it's very, very rare where you truly come across someone who either doesn't use a smartphone or doesn't do online banking. How do you deal, though, with the clients that might still be relying on that manual or paper-driven process? How can they adopt this new technology, this new way of verifying households? I think it really requires a cultural shift, and those generally have to come from the top down. And so once leadership announces that this is the direction we're moving in, we're going to embrace these modern technologies to help our processes evolve, everyone else tends to follow suit. I'd like to switch gears now for a moment and talk with you, Misha, and understand a little bit more about the partnership that Yardi has with Nova Credit. Specifically, what does the addition of your services do to enhance the Yardi Verification Services process, and what new value is that bringing to the housing providers? We've been very fortunate to be partners with Yardi for almost a decade now. It's kind of hard to believe that we've been in business for so long together. And over that long history, we've learned a lot about the rental housing space and all the opportunities to bring alternative data to help drive efficiency, get people through faster, as well as all the ways to fight fraud, which is a trend that's continuing to accelerate across the industry. And so I think at the core of what this partnership does for Yardi and your many clients is it's bringing leading-edge data connectivity, source-based solutions that help drive efficiency, get people through the door faster, as well as helping fight a number of vectors of fraud. Patrick, let's talk a little bit more about the Nova Credit partnership. How does the addition of Nova Credit enhance Yardi's verification services, and what value does it bring to our housing provider clients? So I think at this point, we have a really strong track record working with Nova. We've delivered a handful of solutions over the last decade, and as we move into this new venture, they were quick to jump in and ask us what the problem was we were trying to solve, how could they help. It took about 12 months or so to figure it out and get it to market, but we're really excited about how things are looking and some significant advantages over what we've been doing up till now. Akash, if I may, looking ahead, what is Nova Credit currently working on to expand the data available through Yardi Verification Services? Yes. So we are aware that there is a wide array of financial profiles in the affordable housing space, and that can be various ways of earning or various ways of storing your assets. And it's important that as many people as possible can actually use verification services and therefore enjoy the benefits of it. So it's about finding novel data sources, whether that's government data, more private data, and finding ways to tap directly into it so that people don't have to go through the arduous manual process of getting documentation and can instead just credential their data the same way they could with a bank account or with a payroll account. And then it's about using those data sources together to create new insights that reveal whether there's discrepancies or irregularities that you need to investigate further. And when you cross-reference these data sources, you can unveil a lot more than any of them could independently. And as a follow-up, if I may, in what ways are you leveraging artificial intelligence to collect and deliver verification results for these income and assets? Using AI in verification services is a lot of opportunity, and some areas where we've started seeing the benefits are in identifying patterns in bank data, so you can more quickly verify income. So instead of looking at irregular income and taking a long time to piece together what transactions mean, you can pretty quickly recognize, okay, this is an income source. It's recurring, it's reliable, and this should be counted as part of someone's verification. And then on the flip side, you can also use AI in the ever-escalating arms race related to fraud. So there's a lot of services that make it quite easy to create fraudulent documents for verification purposes. And in order to effectively counter those, it's helpful to use AI because AI is often used in the manufacturing of these documents to then it also detect it. Fantastic. And Misha, if I may, from your perspective, what do you anticipate the participation rates looking like for applicants, residents that are utilizing now Yardi's verification services powered with Nova Credit? We've seen some really tremendous results over the course of the past few months of working together and actually getting this product out in the field, getting it live, getting it tested. And over that period, we've been able to increase the verification rate and completion rate by about three and a half X, so 350%. So we're really thrilled about those results, and it's really been a team effort on both sides to pull that off. Misha, curious, why was it that you took on this challenge within affordable housing about verifications? Yeah, it's a problem we've known a little bit about from the sides, having had a business on the tenant screening side and put a lot of effort there. And the more we dug in, the more we uncovered just how important of a problem this is to solve for the industry. It's sad, ultimately, and unfortunate that some people can't get the keys to move into their home for weeks. And hearing all these stories about people who can't move in with their families for over a month as a result of something that is really, at its core, a data problem. And we exist to resolve these kind of data problems and to bring best-in-class technology, data infrastructure, analytics, reliability, and it was just a perfect problem for us to work on together with both of you. And over the last year, we've put a lot of energy into solving it, and it's just incredibly mission-aligned with what we do as a company, ultimately helping consumers get fair access for the products and services they need. Terrific. Well, I want to again thank Akash, Misha, Patrick, for a fantastic conversation this afternoon. We look forward to continuing to find new and innovative ways to serve the industry and really help to try to reduce the amount of time it takes to have somebody apply to ultimately move in to safe, sanitary, and affordable housing.