[David] Let’s get over to Allen. Love technology Allen. It is said such, all my phone calls this morning, we were talking about what do we need to do to become more efficient using technology? and we did a podcast we released on this last week on the AI update. And I had Jennifer on from Sunwest she used a great example, Allen, of Gemini versus AI supported by human kind of support and Gemini, so I would encourage everyone to go listen to that podcast that we did last week. It’s the one with Jennifer from Sunwest and we literally brought, she shared her screen and showed answers to what Gemini put out versus what in this case Angel AI put out. It was really interesting. Allen, so bring us up to date. What you got. Be fascinating discussion.
[Allen] Yeah, you guys all teed off a topic that I had all written up for today. So again, the good you would’ve won if you bet in Vegas. It would’ve been an exact box that, and you would’ve won billions. So a couple things. One, we’ve all talked about outsourcing. I just want to come back to that topic. I agree with everyone. Outsourcing is a great thing. And it can teach your staff things that they didn’t know. Sometimes when you’re head down, in the weeds, you lose track of things. And it’s an amazing approach. The biggest thing is having a champion that your team likes and your team can work with and know they’re not being replaced. When you don’t have an internal champion. And the same thing goes with out external tech vendors. When you don’t have an internal champion that your team likes and admires and respects, the project fails before you even start. So very important to have the right internal people involved in those projects now. Let’s talk about AI. I have some generic AI stuff I wanna bring up because today’s whole topic is ai. Let me because the news that was out there folks was not that great. It was someone integrates with someone, someone’s leveraging something else. It’s just all generic stuff. We know all that already. So for this week, I decided to pivot. So first thing there is an, there’s AI out there, AI’s taking over healthcare. Actually, what’s even funnier is I sometimes work from a coffee shop and a friend of mine’s in healthcare and sometimes we share a table together and we’ll take phone calls if we’re not each on a phone call together. And I hear his calls and, he manages a sales team selling healthcare AI and hearing how he talks about it and comparing that to how, I’ve been in, in mortgage for 25 years, hearing how we talk about technology and selling things is exactly the same. And how he’s presenting, how to even do the demo and how for people to understand what AI is exactly the same. So everybody’s going through the same thing. This transition on understanding what AI is and what’s to come. Now, let me tell you about this. There is a technology out there, it’s the size of a card. It can detect subtle changes that the human ear can’t. Okay. Leading to earlier, instantaneous heart condition diagnosis. So it can hear a heart condition in seconds offering potential breakthroughs in early diagnosis. And it’s the size of a playing card and it replaces the traditional chest piece that a microphone, the stethoscope that, we’re so used to breathing heavy, you know when the doctor’s there.
[David] It also performs the cold thing that goes on our skid.
[Allen] Yeah. It also is the cold one. Yeah. It also performs in ECG. But here’s what’s great. They took 12,000 people. Okay. And they found heart failure was 2.3 times more likely to be detected within the first 12 months. They found that abnormal heart rhythms and often symptomless items of the heart were three to four times more detectable with this AI piece in the small test. And they found that heart valve disease detection improved by two to four times. So their advertisement right now when they released their product, ’cause they tested 12,000 people, 12,000 heartbeats, one AI brain. And for any of you that understand how AI works or you’re learning AI, you code it, you tell it to do something, you give it the rails, but it has natural language processing, it has large language models, it can continue to learn and it creates contextual graphs of information. And so as it does these things, it can take the 12,000 people now multiply that times a hundred, right? And you’ve got a lot of heartbeats and a lot of information that AI can continue to analyze. And then all think about everything that we know about irregular heartbeats. I’m gonna stop on med, on healthcare, right there. Just wanted to show the point because we’re gonna talk about the same thing in mortgage in a moment. And then David, I just wanna bring up a cool tool. This is just at a mortgage. It’s a cool tool. It’s called ReciMe. It’s R-E-C-I-M-E. This is a, an app you download on your phone and when you’re on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest and you see a recipe, because by the way, recipes have gone completely viral. I’ve got 20, 30 of them bookmarked that I use all the time, or I send them to my kids or whatever, and sometimes I make them anyways. You save them, you don’t know where they are. All you do is instead of sharing it with a friend or saving it in your Facebook, you just click recime and it automatically saves the recipes and it creates an entire library of all your recipes. That’s a cool tool. Go check it out. Now let’s talk about GPT. So first, GPT released silently, both GPT and Gemini released things that you need to know about ASAP. GPT released connectors to anything. So for those of you that know, GPT had connectors, which you can connect to Gmail and Outlook and slack and other things, they now made it where you can connect to anything. Now, I use the Gmail one every day. You basically go in and say, Hey, I like you to go into my Gmail and find the emails between this date that talk about this and summarize it for me. And it created an entire summary. In one of my best examples that I provided to an attorney with quotes, references, dates, and paraphrases of what was said For the areas that were in quotes, it was unbelievable. Go turn this on. If you’re not using it, it can connect to Google Docs, you name it. But more importantly, you now can connect it to any app, not just the ones they list. So go, it’s in your settings, go to your name, go to settings, and you can go to connectors in there and you can see that. And then more importantly, get this. Google just released
[David] With this in your, on your iPhone. Your phone.
[Allen]This is in ChatGPT, Open AI. So just go into your configuration settings. Yeah. Not on the phone. It’s in open ai. It, okay. It’s, and this one David is absolutely, this one’s wild. Google just also silently released what’s called AI assistance for free. The physical name, or the actual name is called gems. GEMS get this, you can upload your own files to the bots knowledge base. It works across docs, sheets, Gmail, and web. Not just in chatting. It lets you spin up specialized bots. Content writers, sales, email helpers, research assistants, the list goes on. You can go to gemini.google.com, go to New Gem and add instructions. Now you can say OpenAI has something similar and they’ve had it. Yes they have. But not everyone likes OpenAI. Google just did it with a better tight knit infrastructure to their ecosystem and you can build your own AI employee. How does that work In the mortgage industry? You can build a loan officer helper, a custom bot that answers FAQs internally, of course, folks interesting, perhaps quotes, keeps messages consistent. An underwriting assistant, you can train it on guidelines. You can just throw in the Fannie Mae guides and you can create a scenario finder. You can flag missing items. You can create compliance bot, right? You can create your own Ask Alice. You can create a marketing AI. By the way, marketing has gone way beyond the standard marketing. It’s viral ads, it’s TikTok, it’s YouTube. You need ideas in a marketing plan. Even if you have a marketing department, AI can help guide you in the department with ideas. You need to be using this. And then finally, a training buddy, which is huge. Do you know how many college kids right now can take a chapter of a book, a published book and say, Hey, I need you to create quizlets and cards for me on this chapter in that book. And you can even take a screenshot of the cover of the book and it does it. Why aren’t you doing this to train your teams internally? Why aren’t you doing this? When you get new technology to take how their tech works, GPT can find everything you can on the internet and you can give it private documents and you can have it create trainings for your internal staff. Quizzes. You need to be looking at these kind of things. And if you don’t have someone internally that is an AI expert, you gotta hire someone. The world is coming upon us. Now, David, if I have an extra minute I wanna get into, this is something that I said, I’m gonna talk about AI and how critical it is. I’ve been building AI solutions for a little bit of time. I have a product that’s in beta pilot right now. It’s an AI video solution, and it’s a soft advertisement for myself. If you’d like to be in my pilot period, please reach out to me. Be more than happy to get you in there. It’s allen@tms-advisors.com. We’re gonna create some virtual David as well. Maybe we’ll do one for everyone on the podcast, but I’ve got the pilot up and running, so please reach out to me. But more importantly, I’ve been talking to a number of people in our industry. I’ve been looking at AI solutions, the back end of how these technology platforms come together. The amount of tech stack that people are trying to build and the amount of solutions that other people have built are out there. You can hire someone that’s well versed in AI and there’s a lot of people and companies out there, and you can build anything you want. Let me tell you how our industry think about all the vendors we have. Think about the vendors that do income calcs. Think about the vendors that do compliance checks, all these little tiny things. Okay? I want you to think about this. One, AI is moving faster than many legacy vendors can adapt. Think doc reading, Borrower Q&A and automated income calc. Yes. Okay. Old LOS and POS systems weren’t built for AI native workflows. The bolting it on slows them down.
[David] So glad you raised that raised that as a point. Yeah.
[Allen] New entrant to the industry. Okay. I’m not even gonna list them, but they’re releasing AI tools monthly. Lenders notice this because the cycle times and the cost to close are shrinking. Okay? We didn’t say that the overall average of cost to close is shrinking. What we’re saying is, individually, as you adapt to these AI tools, you’re reducing your cost. The risk for incumbents, okay? So if the old vendors that you all have right now, and I’m from the vendor side, so everyone, even vendors listening are probably shaking their head, yeah, we know this. We’re working on it. If they don’t modernize, they become plumbing. While AI first platforms grab the front end relationships and data, I’m gonna repeat part of that. If the old vendors, the ones out there today, do not modernize, they become what’s called plumbing. Okay? And then the opportunity right now is for big vendors like ICE, Blend, MeridianLink to catch up. They must invest heavily in open APIs for an AI ecosystem. Meaning they have to do, they want to stay consistent and be the forefront of mortgage origination. They have to allow for these AI tools to play in their sandbox because none of these big systems are gonna be able to maintain their system and replace all the vendors, and that’s not what they wanna do. So make sure as you’re looking at how to adapt to AI, you’re taking the right steps. It’s more complex in a simple conversation, find the right person. There’s a lot of consultants out there, myself, David knows many other folks on this podcast for our own areas of expertise, but AI is making a huge impact in our industry and it will continue to.
[David] So true. Such a good point. It is the topic of every conference. I’m at the one that I’ll be speaking of what’s going on here? The one that’s coming up at HousingWire. Then the MBA, by the way, the MBA. Be sure to register that everyone. This is good stuff, Alan. Thank you so much. Anything else?
[Allen] No, I can’t wait. I, I mark hell, I know I took a soaked up a little bit of your rant time. I apologize. I’ll give you back some time next week.
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.