Strategy
Our Ambitions
Looking Back
In 2025, we wanted to further clarify our approach to impact, confirm the financial viability of our business model, and take a step forward in the development of our team.
We’re proud of the ground we covered:
Galvanizing our Impact Strategy
2025 brought a wider range of potential borrowers than the year before, and we spent the year in conversations about how best to map those organizations and deals to our mission. We iterated on the scorecard-like tool we’ve historically used to decide which deals are good mission fits, and coming into 2026, we’re rolling out a new principles-based approach that we believe will help chart a consistent course in situations that often feel ambiguous.
From a Profitable Month to a Profitable Year (Almost)
We had a taste of a couple profitable months, but as a result of a worse than expected performance of some USDA guaranteed loans, we just missed this in 2025. Nonetheless we're right at the threshold of crossing this chasm, which we're especially proud of, as the market environment has shifted rather dramatically over the course of the past few quarters.
Our Evolving Culture
Our team grew significantly in 2025. We continue to focus on the development of our lending operation, and finding the right organizational structure to support them — and 2025 provided a useful foundation for future iterations.
Looking Ahead
Over the course of the rest of this calendar year, we’re focused on:
Defining “Mission-Alignment” in Lending
From the beginning, we’ve been grappling with the question: What makes an organization or individual loan sufficiently aligned with our mission to uphold the promise we’ve made to our depositors? Depositors choose Walden because they want to feel good about the ends their dollars serve; what does that mean when an opportunity presents itself to out lenders? We’ve tried several rules-based approaches in the past, where check boxes equate to black and white “yes/no” decisions. This year, we’re working to deploy a more principles-based, goal-oriented framework that better equips our team to navigate ambiguity as our loan portfolio grows.
Technology Foundations
In our infancy, our primary concern was getting the doors open. That concern led us to heavy resilience on out-of-the-box solutions from a limited set of vendors. Now, after three years of operations, we’re thinking longer-term about the technology that will enable us to maximize our impact. From better configuring Salesforce to ensuring we have the data infrastructure necessary to inform business strategy, 2026 will include a series of milestone technology investments that will lay the foundation for who we want to become.
Resilience
2025 included important progress in our journey to fill critical gaps — a full-time compliance officer, a dedicated marketer, a specialist in loan servicing. But entering 2026, there are still places where one person going on vacation necessitates Herculean efforts by the rest of the team to pick up the slack. By the end of the year, it’s our ambition for that to be different. More layers of redundancy make us more resilient when (predictably) the unpredictable occurs. Key hires, better tooling, and process improvement will all play key roles in this effort.