The consumer-direct mortgage model has shifted from a niche strategy to one of the most efficient, scalable, and profitable approaches in today’s lending environment. In this episode, we unpack the operational blueprint behind its success—focusing on speed, cost reduction, brand-driven lead generation, and the balance of digital convenience with high-touch human service. From technology stack decisions to culture-building, customer retention, and the evolution from refi-heavy pipelines into sustainable purchase business, this conversation reveals why consumer-direct lending is gaining momentum and where the biggest opportunities lie for lenders looking to modernize their operations and compete more effectively in 2026 and beyond.
[David] Listeners, we’re in for a real treat. We got Roger Moore of Loan Pronto joining us. And what’s so interesting, we published podcasts and let people know that we’re going to be publishing and interviewing who we’re going to be interviewing. I have never received such a response to this promo of Roger Moore. I’m getting to know Roger. I have a tremendous respect. My last mortgage company was a consumer direct company, so I had an already affinity to what he was doing. I really related to the guy and saw what the brilliance he was putting into his product. But I did not realize the following he has. So anyway, Roger, welcome to the podcast. I did not realize I was interviewing a celebrity when I brought you on.
[Roger] Well, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, David. I’m looking forward to our conversation today. And I wish I thought I was as popular as you did, but that’s good to know, it’s good to have people listening to me and follow our journey.
[David] Well, I think one of the things that comes out, Roger, is that people are following your success because you post your success. You talk about it, not in a braggadocious way, but you’re talking about success you’re having. Like, Mohammed, what’s it Mohammed Ali said? He says it ain’t bragging if you can do it. And you’re doing and I love that saying. But anyway, for those that don’t know you, for say the few that might not know you, it turns out a lot do of our listeners out there. For tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you’re at, Roger.
[Roger] Well, you know, I’ve been doing mortgages since July 28th of 2003. So a little over 22 years, grew up in Ohio, and honestly, before I got the mortgages, I didn’t know they had two G’s in it. And I was in um in school and in college at Ohio University, and some of my fraternity brothers had gotten into the mortgage business, and I heard they were making a lot of money, really good money. I was always into sales jobs. I was really passionate about commission-based roles. I didn’t really see myself as a person that would do well in a salary-based role. That’s just not how I function really well. So. I already had another job. I was prepared to move to Chicago. This job came up and drove down here in spring of 2003, interviewed at a big director consumer mortgage brokerage at the time, and just loved what I saw. I saw a lot of young people making really good money. And when you’re young, money is incredibly important. And I started there in graduated college, started pretty much the next day, and then kind of spent a year, year and a half there, went to another small brokerage in 2007, right when really, really good timing, David. I started right when the economy started crashing, so it was really good timing, and launched my first mortgage brokers when I was 26 years old and had that until 2017, had another business during that time as well, but in August of 2017, I wanted to go on my own. I wanted to be kind of paved my own path. I didn’t want a business partner, and I launched uh this company in October on October 23rd of 2017. So we’re just just past our eight-year anniversary, birthday, whatever you want to call it. And you know, when I started the company, my goal was to build a really phenomenal direct-to-consumer company that you know utilized technology, a lot of talent within the company, and just wanted to grow a specific type of company that was really predicated not on size, but on efficiency and speed and productivity. And so, really, everything we’ve done up to date is really about how can we create a great company without having massive amounts of employees, massive amounts of overheads. That’s really our guiding principles in how we build Loan Pronto.
[David] Well, one thing that comes clear and you pick up from your website is you have very low turnover because of a high morale that you have there. So you’ve created a culture that causes people to want to stick around. So, how have you done that?
[Roger] Well, it’s tough. I mean, the mortgage industry more than most is well known for turnover. You know, there’s a lot of missionaries versus mercenaries, other way around, a lot of missionaries.
[David] Mercenaries versus missionaries,
[Roger] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, my bad, trying to say, and you know, I really try to make all decisions um from the lens of my employees. You know, and there’s certain decisions that you have to make at a high level that you don’t you can’t do that, but most of them we try to do like how what how is this going to impact the employees? You know, what’s the consequence of the consequences of this? and if you do that, and I try to get I really try to get all my employees involved in all decisions at all levels as much as possible and make sure that they have ownership in those decisions. And if we’re building a company, I want them to feel like they’ve they own it as well and they’ve built it with me. And you know, if there’s a coin flip, you try to give it to your employees as much as possible. You know, you can’t be greedy, you just gotta be kind to them and try to make sure that they’re happy and that you’re making decisions that support their business, support their growth, that they’re making an impact. And I think that people really like to be fulfilled. And I think if we can do all those things together, people will stay, and the money tends to fall that as well.
[David] Well, it starts with hiring the right people, knowing you’re you know, knowing the type of person that’s gonna be successful there. How did you figure that out?
[Roger] Well, I actually owned a recruiting company for a little while. I didn’t like the industry, but I did own it, and I learned a lot about recruiting, talent acquisition, you know, spotting talent, finding weak spots, finding blind spots when you’re hiring people. But when I started this company, I was incredibly thoughtful about you know the first employees I hired, I thought they needed they were gonna be really the DNA of the company. And so we spent a so when we hired a lot, and most of those employees are still here to this day, we’re going on eight years from when we started. So for me, I thought if I if the first four or five people can be the founding teammates at the company, we’ll have really good, I don’t want to say this the right way, they will help me bring on more talent and they will create the stories and the memories and everything that really help build the company. And if those people will stay and be you know loyal teammates, then I felt that a lot more people would follow them as well because you know referrals are really the best place to get employees. I mean, the mass of the vast majority of our entire team is referral at some degree, and so if you hire talented people, they have talented friends, and their talented friends have talented friends. So we’ve really tried to always look at that, but really hiring people early on that we thought could be founding members. And then the next thing we did is we didn’t really look for mortgage experience early on. Uh actually, in fact, I was looking for the exact opposite. I wanted people from like diverse backgrounds in terms of industries and where they worked, and we always looked for people with great sales acumen, regardless of what role they were going to go into, because I thought I could convert a lot of those people into sales roles, and all that stuff just helped us build a really good core of people that are most of them are still here to this day.
[David] That’s right. But you also view yourself as a marketing company rather than a mortgage company, and that’s is that part of the formula in trying to find someone?
[Roger] Yeah, to the marketing company thing, we really wanted to never rely my to never rely on a third party for our success. I’m not saying that’s a bad way to build a business. A lot of companies have thrived and built wonderful business buying leads from lead aggregators and all that stuff, but for me, I wanted to create a brand, and I thought I could, if I could do that, my hypothesis was I could build a really great company over time. I do I did think I know it it’s hard to scale as quickly as if you’re buying leads or doing other things, but I felt like there was more longevity in it. And so really everything we do is really about how do we build our brand, how do we look to the public, how do we get out there so people know us as a company? Because the better the brand you have, the stickier your customers are, and over time it’s easier and easier and easier to acquire clients if their brand becomes more well known. So we’ve really the amount of effort and money and thought and time we put into that brand is it’d be hard to describe on this podcast, but it’s front and center and top of mind at all times.
[David] Well, one of the things that’s also interesting is you are being very successful in the purchase business already. I mean most call centers are doing the I mean direct consumer direct are focusing on the refinance business, but you somehow found your way into the purchase business. Is that because you’re because the way you’re getting your leads or you’re creating your leads?
[Roger] Yes, so we in 2021 and 20 we did 99.99% refi business. It was easy. Understandable, everybody. There really was no need to really explore the purchase business at that point in time. Right. Of course, 2022 hit, 2023 hit us really hard right in the jaw, and so we had to really pivot some and say, hey, we need to consider continue the direct-to-consumer thing, but all of y’all need to really be running some sort of hybrid business model, right? So you acquire the clients through really good advertising, and then how do you convert those clients into purchase clients down the road, right? And that’s just done through again great marketing, great customer retention strategies, making sure that person you did a refinance for when they want to buy a house, you expect them to call you, and you have to do that through marketing, customer retention strategies, email campaigning, all sorts of automation strategies. And then once you get that person on board, then you have a real estate agent that you can you can work with. And so most of my so we do you know 72% refi and 28% purchase. I think we’ll do roughly 180 million in purchase business this year, which is really good for a direct to consumer shop. And none of those are leads that we bought, these are all relate, these are all relationships that we’ve built. And so we just had a really had of a paradigm shift in how we thought about things in 2022. And we said we have to we can’t be solely relying on refi business all day, every day. Like we have to have some purchase business coming in the door. So we did an incredible job of pivoting into that, and we’re still working on it. I mean, every I mean we’re still trying to build that business out more and more and get better at it, but we are a rare company that’s great at referral-driven purchases and really good at directing consumer.
[David] Yeah, there’s Joe Stump is uh someone I listened to years and years and years ago back when I hit my first mortgage company in 1991. I met Joe Stump. He has a program called By Referral Only, and he really and you seem to have mastered that and how you’re going about it. So kudos to you for what you do. But it’s also where you’re finding it. This cracked me up. I had already talked to you, and I was listening to the NASCAR channel the other day on I think it was an XM, and I’ll be doggone if you didn’t show up there. That cracked me up. I mean, it’s kind of finding where anyway. Why do you rob a bank? It’s where all the money is. Why go to NASCAR? That’s where the consumers are that are that are kind of sound like your people.
[Roger] Yeah. So our strategy is you know, my longer term goal, I said this not too long ago, like I want to I want to be able to wear a hat or shirt that has loan prompt on it, and I want to be able to go to any state in the United States, and I would like if somebody would notice me. They would know that brand. Yes. Right. And so really our strategy is how do we reach people on a nationwide basis? How do we how do we reach them with the right message at the right time and with the right amount of frequency so that they will engage with us? So we advertise on XM radio uh across the entire nation. We are on eight or nine very large stations there, and then we do a lot of local radio, more localized market, terrestrial radio. And some people in some markets will hear us on both. And the amount of people that hear us on a daily basis is a lot, and the reach is huge, and the brand is and the longer those you hear us, the more you hear us, then our brand becomes more ingrained in your brain. So if you want to buy or you want to refi, you need some home equity, we hope that our frequency and message is enough that you logically don’t know who else don’t know who else to call. Like this is who we’re gonna call, and that’s our that’s been our goal.
[David] Yeah, well, it’s working, it captured my attention. I was, I mean, it’s really complimentary of your ad because it you sound like you related to the person in that, at least in the NASCAR. Yeah, I mean, it was just really good connection skills and how you do it. our last mortgage company that I owned, which could large I was an owner in owner partner, and I don’t want to make sure I put it. There’s a number of us that owned were owners in it, that and we did direct mail. Are you finding direct mail is something that is starting to work better? I’m hearing rumors that direct mail is back in a way and bringing results and returns such that we haven’t seen in a long time in certain markets.
[Roger] Yeah, we dabble in it some. You know, we have we’ve been growing, we took uh quite a few years off from really growing our sales force just because I thought like yeah, well, we just felt like the strategy was to hunker down, you know. I think I would say I was telling people we were kind of growing by not shrinking, you know, and so really we wanted to kind of be thoughtful about our marketing and our sales team, and then we didn’t really grow a whole lot. We just started really growing again this year, and we brought on some really some new, really young, talented loan officers, and we’ve been work giving them mailer leads, direct mail campaigns. They do work. it’s a numbers game, it’s it’s blunt force. I mean, you have to have the sales force that can answer a lot of calls and have a lot of a lot of turndowns, a lot of no’s, a lot of bad calls. They’re gonna get yelled at quite a few times. But if you do it, just I mean, with anything, if you do it with enough consistency and you put enough money into it and you’re willing to you’re gonna lose some money up front on almost all marketing. Like very few marketing things turn a positive ROI quickly. Most take 90 days to really get from the red to the black. And most the problem is most companies don’t have the either the financial wherewithal or the patience to wait through that. But if you can, mail works great. I’ve got a couple of guys in there, I got a guy in California I’m good friends with. There’s some other companies that that absolutely ton it via direct mail. You just have to really stick with it and run the analytics and see what’s working, what’s not working. It’s really about finding the company that supports you the best as well, because there’s part art and part science and all advertising mediums, and it’s no different than direct mail. You really have to monitor your inbound and where it’s coming from and what’s working. But if you do it right, you can you can ton it. And if you do it wrong, you can you can also ton the losses, and you just gotta hope you wanna you’re winning on this.
[David] Yeah, and direct mail is expensive. I mean, because you can when you have some hits, it can get expensive quickly and you start getting a little discouraged. But it I think you’re saying so well. But you also mentioned at the earlier comments about how technology has played a big role with you. Technology is a broad term. Is it the technology and that you’re using for originating loans? Is it technology I mean what what aspects of technology are the most important that are working the best for you at Loan Pronto?
[Roger] It’s a great question. We the I mean, it’s such a broad term, and you know, AI is such a sexy word right now, and everybody’s talking about it. I don’t I’m not aware of anybody that’s using it at scale really well right now. I can you correct me if I’m wrong. You know, you know, technology to me is it starts it starts with your phone systems, right? Like, how good is your inbound phone systems? What technology are you using, right? Like, do you have you know do your phone systems work well with you? Does it does it talk to your CRM? Like we have dial pad that funnels right into Salesforce, right? All of our calls are scripted and written down through AI, and all that call, all those calls are saved, and they’re always able to get them over. You know, you can always go back and read or hear those calls over time. Your CRM needs to be world-class, right? So to me, technology has a marketing component as well. It’s like how are you using intelligent marketing automation through direct emails or text messages that are done to your clients based upon their segmentation, who they are, why they refinance, you know, is a conventional refi, FHA, VA, all that’s really important. And then from the outbound dialing system, right? We use 5.9, but then 5.9 is fueled by outbound AI, and outbound AI is the system that uses AI to rotate your phone numbers around. So if you call somebody over and over again, it shows up a different phone number every single time.
[David] Yeah.
[Roger] And all that stuff needs to speak to each other in an intelligent manner. And if you can do that, you can be successful. Now, AI to me, there’s some play down the road. I don’t really know what it is just yet, somebody’s probably mastered it better than I have. and but then but then there’s a big piece of it that there’s really not a ton of technology involved. Like when a loan gets into the process, you know, that’s a very, very manual labor piece. And I think that customers actually prefer that. Like, I think as far as I can tell right now, customers want the digital application up front, they want everything to be signed digitally, they want to be able to upload everything very simply, but then there’s a comes a piece where they just want a human and nothing but that human, right? They want when the loans being processed, they want to work with a person, you know, they want to hear that person, they want to talk to that person. So technology is used a lot up front and it’s used a lot on the back end, but really from a customer service perspective, we’re very analog. You know, I think we’re trying to you try to ride that fence. Our mantra on our homepage is mortgage is made human, right? And that really what that’s in response to is that hey, like we’re gonna make this really simple. And our average, you know, app to clear to close is just under 14 days. So we’re doing it as fast as anybody, and technology is fueling the back end, but what the customer sees is a simple digital aspect and a very high-touch customer service aspect. So we’re trying to keep a balancing act of we think people still really want humans. I don’t think we’re to the point yet where they do.
[David] It’s the most important transaction of their life. Yeah. I mean, and I think there’s that human element being in there, and how you’re talking to them is it’s very, very important. We are seeing AI being very effective in aspects of it and how we stay in touch with people on updates and things like that. I think we can do ring those voicemails to keep people posted. It can be your voice, you can use AI voices to do some of that. But it’s still at the end of the day, it is a person a person transaction, the most important transaction for the vast majority of people, and they really want to know that you care about them, that they’re being heard. the overall uh aspects of your business as I was doing my homework on you has been your approach, technology, yes, but it really comes down to your people. That comes through when you go through your website, Roger. You meet if you like, I don’t know how you capture the pictures or how you’re doing it, but your people just seem genuine, caring, engaging people, there’s several of them I’m gonna go, I want to pick up the phone and talk to that person. I don’t know why, I don’t know how that is, what that is, but that seemed to be something that really came through.
[Roger] It should. You know, like the little things like putting your picture at the bottom of an email, like those little things that create a human connection are so incredibly important. And when we hire people, like the first thing I’m thinking about is at any level of the organization, doesn’t matter if you’re in marketing, sales, operations, funding, closing, compliance, every role must have that person must have the ability to speak with somebody else on a human level. Right? It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s my compliance department. If we’re in an audited and we’re talking to a state of Tennessee, like that compliance person better be able to talk to that auditor really well and could make a connection. It might make the audit easy. And this our processors are incredibly most of our processors right now could hop into an LO role and be a top 1% LO in a few months, right? So we really are I couldn’t underscore how much we thought we put into people that are going to be able to connect with our clients and make them want to come back. Like if you go to my if you could look our Google reviews right now, I think we have like 26 or 27 Google reviews. Right now we get a five-star review of 25 or 20. But they all mention the processors’ names. Actually, in fact, a lot of our clients that come back call the processor first. We call them account managers, but they’re processors, right? That’s because they are they’re they are compensated on five-star reviews, right? So they get make they make more money when the client is happy. And then when the client wants to come back, when the client leaves a review, they’re always mentioning the account manager and the LO, and then like that’s where you can see the human element coming across. There’s all the amount of technology fueling the back end of that is pretty unreal, super expensive, but the client should always the client shouldn’t really feel that. It should be simple for them. The human element is what the client should always be feeling. I think we hit it out of the ballpark with that most of the time.
[David] Yeah, and it comes across in I was looking at some of the Google reviews, and I’m going, my God, this guy, I mean, they’re they seem like superhumans the way they’re running these things, and going like, how the heck does he do that? But it’s very genuine, and you realize as you get to know you better, Roger, that’s not fabricated, that’s real genuine reviews from people with thousands of people who are very happy with your job. A lot of people are looking at consumer direct because of the MLO cost. I mean, the mortgage loan originators are getting more and more expensive in the traditional model of more and more people are out there trying to get costs down. Has the consumer direct model that you’ve built been able to be able to do it at a lower cost than what’s out there in the industry?
[Roger] Well, I think, I mean, a lot of that’s non-public data, but if you look at the Mortgage Bankers Association will list like the average cost for an IMB to manufacture a loan. And last I heard last I saw was still right around the $12,000. Yeah, I was gonna say $11,000 to $12,000. And I mean, last time I ran it, we were manufacturing loan for around $3,500 to $3,600, so a third almost a quarter of the expense. So yeah, I mean, I think at least us, I mean, we’ve found a way to keep expenses down, and we do that through not having unnecessary layout layers of management. We don’t have a C-suite within the company. We try to keep everything very flat as an organization. Any man almost any manager here on sales and operations also produces as well. And so, really, you know, I think a flat organization, I think where the death knell of a lot of companies is they start hiring management really early, and they put a lot of fixed expenses onto their P&L really early. And what we did the exact opposite. I mean, we made sure that we didn’t hire any management really at all until it was utterly necessary. And so, yeah, our cost of manufacture loan is you know a quarter of an IMB and much less than most other companies out there, and that’s translates to lower cost, higher conversion, and better deals for our clients, and it makes more clients come back to us over time from a retention perspective.
[David] The last question I have for you is what is the future of consumer direct? I I’m bullish about this. I don’t think this is a cyclical come and go kind of peekaboo business. I really believe that money was I believe consumer direct is going to be growing in significance. Your thoughts? I’m assuming you agree with that since you’re banking your whole business. I think your whole future.
[Roger] I agree 100%. Here’s what I’ve noticed recently. First of all, yes, I think it’s I think it’s here to stay. I think we took a punch in the mouth, you know, in the years where rates were high and the only business out there is purchase business. But I’m very ingrained in the consumer direct world in terms of knowing a lot of the big players out there in the broker and lender world. And what I see and what I’ve noticed is the technology that they’re using, the lead sources are they’re getting, the sales skill it takes to operate really well. I think that the industry, that industry, that platform is here to stay and here to grow. I mean, we’re producing loans at a lower cost, rates are better, products are better, we’re almost always faster. And what I’ve also noticed, too, that I’ve been really encouraged by, because right now, not only are we doing the consumer direct, but we’re also evolving some into building out a more uh some of a referral-based side of our business. Because what we do recognize is that as the MBS flows up and down, business flows up and down, we need a more consistent piece of our organization, which is you know, referral-based sales. And what it’s been incredibly encouraging, and I would tell all DTC companies, is the platform that you’ve already built to scale and dominate direct-to-consumer is the exact platform that a great referral-based LO requires and needs. And I could not be more encouraged by my conversation with LOs at big banks, small banks, lenders, brokers. Like DTC has the platform they probably need. And I think that’s like our next evolution of growth is how do we start using this platform we’ve built to start building out a more referral, a secondary, more referral-based focused side of the business that still fits within our core values as a company.
[David] Right. Well, I want to just congratulate you on the success you’re having. I love your posts. It’s been a real honor to get to know you. I do want to follow your success and continue to have you back. Anytime you are seeing some developments or trends you want to get on this podcast, you’re welcome to come on and share it. But kudos to you, Roger, for what you built. And kudos to the team you’re building. I think it’s great to have iconic leaders like yourself who draw people, but I love how you celebrate your people. You celebrate your those that are hitting the ball for you, and you celebrate them and you promote them. And it’s most people want to hide them because they don’t want to get their people stolen. You seem to lift them up, and I think that has a tendency to keep them more loyal to you.
[Roger] Great people that are happy don’t leave. That’s I live by that. Yeah, I was saying what I was saying, David, is if you make if you treat people you treat your people well, you celebrate them, you pay them well, you let them be part of the ownership of the company in terms of their thoughts and opinions, and you just uh treat them like you’d want to be treated, it doesn’t matter how much you celebrate them, you can’t recruit them away. And that’s how I look at everything. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, buddy.
[David] Congratulations, your successes. You bet, it’s been a delight and joy. Appreciate it so much. Continued success to you. We’ll be tracking you, we’ll be staying in touch. Thank you so much. You bet.
[Roger] You’re the man, appreciate you, brother.
[David] Yeah, appreciate you too, man. Thank you so much.
Important Links
Roger grew up in Cincinnati, OH, and graduated from Ohio University in 2003 with a BA in Marketing. He went straight into the mortgage industry and has not looked back since. With 20 years of experience and nearly $1.2B in loans funded personally and nearly $8b with his two mortgage companies, Roger is experienced in helping borrowers purchase and refinance their homes and loves finding solutions to his borrower’s problems.
An entrepreneur at heart, Roger is passionate about starting and growing businesses, hiring and developing talent, and has a strong understanding of top and bottom-line growth. He believes every problem has a solution and that we should never do something just because that’s the way it’s always been done.