[David] Alright. It’s time to get over to Mr. Tech himself. Allen Pollack. Good to hear. Have you hear Allen? We kinda left you in the background there because we’re talking about capital markets and I know you used to work with Les, so it’s not like you can’t comment on that, but there’s, it’s just for the sake of time, I just really excited to get into the i your sweet spot.
[Allen] You left out the unofficial expert of not being an expert, so it’s all good. But I’ll tell you what and David Kittle was smart by his feedback on how he went into conversation. The reason I know Les Parker so well is not because he likes using his Panera points and taking me out to lunch because if you don’t know Les Parker Pro. if Panera had a contest, he would do everything he could to win that contest. He absolutely loves that place. But Les helped us back in the day when we built a capital markets whole loan trading platform and I was deep in the weeds with my partner. I was his partner really. But anyways we built a complete platform during the downturn of the mortgage market. We realized we needed something to do. We were able to keep our employees. We didn’t let anyone go and we did 60 pages of analytics and we did, based on what you said, bill, we worked with Adco and S&P actually spent time in their offices. We built in their models and we did economic shock analysis, intrinsic value analysis. We shocked pools. We provide the analytics to understand the performance of your servicing assets. So, my unofficial expert opinion on all of that is trust the experts. But Bill, you said it great. You have to pretend it’s your own money and what would you do? if it was your money? How do you forecast your own money your capital expenditure? and I think that’s probably the best layman’s term advice that you can give anybody. There’s a lot of great tech out there. You can shock the pool shock, the analysis, shock, everything. But you need to understand, what are loan loss reserves? Do you have loan loss reserves? What are those things? and cumulative loss, what are those things mean? Get the experts that know and don’t make assumptions. That’s the only thing I can add to that part of the conversation.
[David] Good. A really good ad though. Excellent. I forgot that was Nylex, wasn’t it? That’s your company was
[Allen] That was, yes. Yeah. Yes. Good.
[David] That was a long long long time ago, you guys were the number one company in that space at the time.
[Allen] Back in the day. We had some great other platforms out there too. , it’s all based on opinion, but yeah we had some fun back then. There were some great people out there. Yeah. So let’s get into some tech news. What do you think? The first thing I wanna bring up is for anyone that has an app that you charge on the Apple App Store, Apple was sued by Epic Games, I think it was. And the case one where Apple is not able to force you, the company to get people to pay for subscriptions or products through their system and pay them a 30% commission. Apple has already, Apple has already put in their appeal. But the reality is, and the court mandated instantly or immediately, other companies do not have to go through Apple’s system they called it external payment links. And you still had to pay Apple 27% and open up your books for them to audit them whenever you wanted. There’s not a lot of mortgage companies charging people, but there are some companies that are dealing with borrowers and helping, and they may listen to our podcast, helping those borrowers understand the market and how borrowers, and how people leverage their technology or their information through the app. Very interesting piece of information on that whole thing, David, I wanna bring this up. Everyone talks about too much tech. Too much tech. Too much tech. Guess what? Lyft just launched Lyft Silver and it’s not for the silver foxes that are listening, but Lyft Silver is for older riders. The folks that want a simpler app experience with more accessibility. And I mentioned this whole thing because when you’re a technology vendor in the financial world, you have to follow different laws, international laws, local laws, and those all have to do with accessibility. So you have to make sure folks that use devices that make things more accessible, work with your site. You have to make sure that, there’s an audible version. You have to make sure that people that are colorblind can still decipher between differences and especially with financial applications, I think our agencies even have details on the fact that you as a vendor have to make sure that your site follows accessibility guidelines. So Lyft just did that and think about that for your own vendors and your own mortgage technology that you push out there. Also, there was a company they just said after studying, this is about passwords, folks. After studying 19 billion passwords, there was one major problem. Over 90% are absolutely terrible. Only 6% of passwords are even unique and the common choice is 1, 2, 3, 4, admin exclamation, or one, one exclamation, remain completely widespread. People are using their dogs. They’re using their kids, they’re using the street address, their birthdate, their license plate, the list goes on. So think about that, especially if you’re consulting with a borrower and you know that they’re gonna be getting information from the title agency and from the attorney, just say, Hey, listen I talked to my customers all the time. Do me a favor. Go change your password. Get something updated. Keep your stuff secure. That’s always a good thing to tell people. A couple things in the news. UWM has partnered with ICE mortgage technology for in-house services. I saw that some people, yep. Some people may say it’s old news, but it’s now official. So you can check that out. Very smart by the way. They wanna streamline their servicing process and obviously they wanna leverage a lot of great tech. Also ICE has enhanced more of their new APIs pushing the SDK out. So, for those of you that work with the APIs, or thought maybe you had one more chance to stay on the SDK, it’s time to go. So I’ll make sure that you and your vendors have switched over. Get this David talking about E-closings now, Snapdocs. They just reported limited adoption of e-closing despite availability. So what they’re saying is 90% of lenders offer digital closings only a small fraction, or even closing, and at least 80% of their loans digitally. So, in other words, that small fraction. At least 80% of their loans are digital, including a gap between capability and execution. So Covid pushed everyone to just go digital digital, but it’s leveled out at this point. And so there’s digital closings, but only a small fraction are actually doing it and that was in Housing Wire about SnapDocs. Insellerate. They used to be a sponsor of ours. Great technology. They just launched what’s called Journey AI for borrower marketing. And it’s a marketing engine that adjusts borrower campaigns in real time based on activity. So here’s the great thing, and I want to commend them on this. They say it’s AI, but they don’t say The AI does it all for you. Which is great. So it’s called Journey AI, but you can go in and it’s real time and you can write rules and customize and alter that. So check that out. Xactus, I love this news release, by the way, Xactus, if you don’t know them, they’re another vendor in our market. So they just released what they call lightweight fraud detection, API, and it’s a new plugin for lenders that validate identity, social security numbers, and property ownership instantly, real time. So they wanna try and stop fraud as soon as they can. Hats off to Xactus and then I’ve got so many more, but I wanna just list this one more which is Docutech and they just updated their Solex closing platform to support the alos. We should be helping our veterans folks, we should be doing anything we can to let them know that home lending is a possibility. Some of those folks have been dying or trying to get into a home and they just haven’t talked to the right person. I love that update and then David, I’m just gonna end on this one little tiny thing, which has to do with five star reviews. So a lot of people like to ask for feedback. Hey, gimme one to five stars, right? It’s the Uber joke, right? I’ll give you five stars if you give me five stars. Here’s the thing, five stars are not that good. They don’t give enough transparency. They lack detail. They skew results. Yes. There’s manipulation risk. There’s suspicion and there’s limited insights and I don’t say that because you don’t wanna just quickly get the five stars. I say that because the perception of the consumer is that they don’t work. Everyone can get five stars. So as you’re looking at your customer outreach and you wanna quickly weigh, get them to weigh in and get their opinion and some lenders do this really well, they do it at multiple times in the experience. Think about is a five star review the right way to go about it. I’ll leave you with that.
[David] Yeah, that’s a good thought. Really good thought. There’s, I think about the five star review and it has been overused and oversimplified and I think you raised a good point. need a little more color transparency, which gets into a topic of recruiting that I wanted to get into. We don’t have time to do that. Hopefully we’ll do that maybe next week because there’s so much that I’m learning right now on the area of recruiting. Had to do with that very point. Transparency being able to be fully available, to be researched, comes from podcasts, I mean comes from social media and being on podcast. So anyway, a lot more on that.
Allen Pollack
, Chief Operating Officer, Tech Consultant
Allen Pollack, a Mortgage & Financial Services Technology Advisor, is a subject matter expert in the mortgage origination process along with software product management and software development.
In today’s financial services push to all things Digital, Allen has been helping lenders and financial services solution providers align their digital transformation and technology strategies by removing the human element of risk, and automating processes that drive efficiencies and margins into profits.
Over the course of his career, Allen has co-created and developed technology business models that have birthed highly successful, innovative solutions and companies.
Allen co-founded and served as CTO of New York Loan Exchange (NYLX), a loan product eligibility and pricing engine (PPE) that made an immediate impact on the industry, scaling the company quickly and forming partnerships with multiple mortgage and financial lending companies. In 2012, Allen was a co-founder of a merger between NYLX and Aklero Risk Analytics that created LoanLogics, A Mortgage Loan Quality and Performance Analytics company. Allen served as CTO where he continued to bring new and innovative product solutions to the market that made a significant impact to mortgage lenders that reduced risk, scaled business channels, and grew profits in a very competitive and highly regulated market.
Allen is also is mortgage and finance technology contributor on a weekly live industry podcast, Lykken on Lending, and is launching a new podcast soon to be released, TechStack Radio, dedicated to technology and innovation in Financial Services.