Debt consolidation has always rested on a promise lenders couldn't verify. A borrower takes out a HELOC, says they'll pay off their credit cards, and the lender hands over the cash and hopes for the best. Credit bureau data lags by 30 days. There's no mechanism to confirm the debt actually got retired. And a significant share of consolidation borrowers end up re-accumulating balances — leaving lenders with paper that performed worse than expected and borrowers worse off than before.

Figure and Method set out to close that loop. Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC originator in America, a public company on the Nasdaq running a two-sided capital marketplace on blockchain rails. Method is a financial connectivity API that gives lenders real-time access to a borrower's full liability picture — and the ability to pay those liabilities off directly at the moment of funding. Together, they've built what they're calling verified debt consolidation: a closed-loop system where the lender doesn't hope the debt will be paid — they know it will be.

Today I'm joined by Mit Shah, co-founder and COO of Method, and Rod Albuyeh, who leads AI at Figure and is something of a boomerang — he was at Figure from 2020 to 2022, left, and returned in January to a company that had transformed around him. We talk about what the data actually shows, what happens when this capability travels across Figure's 380 white-label partners, and whether verified debt consolidation is a premium feature or the future of the category.