[David] Allen Pollack, it’s good to have you here with your tech update. These are getting to be pretty popular, Allen.
[Allen] Yeah, for sure. What’s not more important to talk about than all these fun topics?
[David] I think everyone’s looking for solutions. When I’m doing more in interviewing, checking in what people are doing, trying to get an idea, and there’s definitely a consolidation in the number of technology companies that you’re working with. There seems to people, let’s get back into more fewer silos of data and try to get it more centralized because it’s very difficult to use some of the technology if everything’s siloed out separately into a different.
[Allen] Yeah, I think there is, but I think it’s not due to it depends who’s asking. Let’s put it that way. Let’s get through a couple updates here. Yeah. Because it’s one of the things I actually have funny enough that you brought that up, but it has to do with what was in the Crisman report, which is almost the identical topic. But little fun antidote first, Dave. We always talk every year about CES. That’s the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah. That’s in Vegas. I love that. Yes. Yeah. So there was a lot of stuff for smart homes and stuff, but here’s just a couple dumb things, but we always bring up the funny ones. AI, smart Hair Clippers, and there’s an actual video of a guy, it’s this headset on, and they they’re a driven by AI. They’re called Glide What? It’s actually a cool name. G-L-Y-D-E. And they use ai, it uses AI in sensors to guide you your new haircut. They claim that they can make mistake proof fades, so check that out. Okay. Also, what’s interesting is they had a vibrating chef knife. It’s a company called Seattle Ultrasonics, and they said that this $400 knife will vibrate 30,000 times a second to cut food with less effort. I didn’t know that cutting food with a knife needed vibration, but. It’s now out there. Hey, and then for all the pet lovers, they also had the version two of the bird watching. You put the food and the bird comes, eat the food, and then you can watch the bird eating. And then VEX, it’s an AI robot that follows your pet around all day and edits videos of them for you. So I don’t know why they seem to focus so much on pets, but that seems to be a major focus, of course, was all the different TVs and gaming consoles and all that fun stuff. But that’s nonetheless, these are the weird ones that stuck out. So talk about AI, David, right? All these pieces and all these platforms, everybody has, not everybody, a majority of people have the GoToMeeting or the Zoom or the Google Meet AI assistant, right? It’s always there. It’s like the eye in the sky taking notes, but how many people actually use it or know how to use it? So I did a quick little search. GoToMeeting, they had their own research done. It shows that many workers recognize that these AI tools are there, but they’re underused and they’re also not well understood in their daily work. For example, in a GoToMeeting Pulse of Work survey, and they’re talking about tens of thousands of people, this isn’t like 400 people. Many employees said they weren’t confident about using AI products at its full potential, and a large majority admitted they didn’t even know how to apply or use the AI tools effectively that were provided. I don’t know. Do you use those meeting assistance to go back and get the summaries and ask questions later on?
[David] Oh, I do. Constantly. Constantly. We use ’em constantly in our business. Yeah.
[Allen] Yeah. I know a lot of people that don’t.
[David] That’s, yeah. I understand it. And I go overboard and this stuff, ’cause I’ve got the limitless pendant that, listens to when I’m in a meeting, I’m at a conference and it listens in. I’m able to go back and search who, and I talked to so and so about this, it gives me credible data. And so yeah, there’s absolutely increasing number tools and I do use ’em. And if you don’t use them, shame on you. Shame on the person who’s, yeah, they’re great. They’re great. Tremendous. Yep.
[Allen] Especially if you can’t make a meeting, right? Or you were multitasking. I don’t know about the pet following my pet around.
[David] I’m sorry. I’m not buying into, no, I’m not interested in that stuff, but when it comes to tools that can help me be more effective when I’m talking with my clients and summarize things mis get the things I’m missing, yeah. I’m all for it.
[David] Yeah. Alright, let’s talk about our industry. New res, they just invested in AI powered underwriting solution with home vision. It’s a strategic investment and it Home vision is a B2B SaaS platform, as you would imagine, using machine intelligence to automate mortgage underwriting. And what New Res is hoping is to build an end-to-end AI powered underwriting platform covering income, assets, credit and collateral. And they’re saying it’s going to lower origination costs, improve accuracy and speed up decisions. So I’m willing to bet David that every week we bring these up right there, there’s another underwriting solution or an analysis or verify or validation platform. We’re gonna continue to see this. Everybody’s gonna go after the things that cost the most amount of time or use the most human capital, and that’s gonna be the underwriting and the multiple aspects of that process. Hats off to New Res and this company called Home Vision looks like there’s another platform out there. Here’s another interesting article, David also AI. This is a big one because we’ve all looked at, built.com and what they’ve done over the years, right? They have the construction management in the lending platform. Yep. So they just actually built an agentic AI. So for those of you that don’t know what that is, age agentic is when you can communicate, you chat on the left side of the screen or the top, let’s say, and it does the work for you as you communicate with it. And it’s think of, we used to have RPA before AI became a well-known household name. It’s driving the RPA with conversation. However it’s got, all the AI intelligence built in Anyways. Built just did a they call it the draw agent. It’s an AI tool for construction loan draw reviews, which were always traditionally manual, slow and error prone. So the agent uses an agentic AI to enforce policy surface risks proactively. So as you’re communicating and asking it to do this review, it’s doing these things with you and it speeds up decisions while letting humans choose oversight levels. So the Wall Street Journal is this a drumm highlighted drum roll thing highlighted It is. The Wall Street Journal highlighted AI’s role in reducing mortgage costs and increasing profitability, and they quote better.com. CEO. Who had said AI has delivered, not is or will, but has delivered the equivalent in savings of two rig cuts. Really? Yes. There’s your drum roll statement, so it’s a wild statement. It depends on, I don’t have any more context. I can look at it for next week, but better.com is clearly leveraging AI and claiming that the, they’re getting the equivalency of two rate cuts on the savings side. Interesting. Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. A couple more quick little things. All AI, but we’re gonna get into the vendor comment that you mentioned, David. So, on the Crisman report, for those of you that read the report there is a marketplace that Rob Crisman has, or the Crisman report has, and what they say is the LOS is mentioned alongside ai, inside sales tech and borrower engagement tools. But the overall message is that lenders need supporting automation layers. So ve vendors are now positioning themselves as extensions of the LOS, not replacement, meaning that you one in all system’s not going to be good for you. So a little bit different than what you were almost saying before, and the language that was in the Crismam=n report, which was very clear, I’m gonna give you the vendor side of it as well in a moment. The language that was very clear is the LOS was treated as infrastructure, not innovation. And the innovation discussed focused on tools that sit on top of the LOS that integrate with the LOS and that trigger actions before or after the LOS steps and their no vendor was pitching a new LOS or an LOS replacement. Okay. Remember years ago, David, you and I know someone very specifically that used to say, oh, the LOS is gonna be gone in a couple years. Yeah. Anyways, the quiz report mentions that, but here’s what the vendors are saying Out in the industry, they’re saying that they build tools to help inside sale teams work faster, that their tech improves borrower communication and responsiveness, and that their AI is framed as system automation, not decision making and the engagement and retention tools that are tied to all the way back to the LOS data. So the vendors are saying the same thing. So at the end of the day, the LOS is your core database of record. It is exactly where your transactions, it’s your infrastructure and all the other solutions you have, whether some are provided from the LOS or they’re integrated into, or you’re doing it on your own, are all based on where this article saying things are going. And then the vendor area. Yep. The marketplace is considered a problem of what Rob Crisman had mentioned. And this week I focus a little more on the Crisman commentary than I usually do. However, these were just great articles. But there is a marketplace now with over a hundred vendors and it reflects vendor sprawl and decision fatigue and mortgage tech. So this is a little bit in line with what you were saying, David, that people are tired of, shopping all the vendors and what do you use and what’s best for your organization, and how many different vendors do you need anyways, lenders don’t need help just finding and comparing tools. They need a marketplace of where they can go and get the right folks. Tats off to Crisman for saying that he’s solving the discovery, which is the problem itself with this. But there’s so much more in the market going on. David, there’s so much more around ai. I could go on all day long. Everybody’s talking about it and I personally think it’s still expensive. It’s not gonna stop us from trying to push our way into it, but I don’t know if the savings is just there yet. eah, good point.
[Marc] I got a comment on that. I think that that making up for a double rate drop, I think that’s fairly ambiguous. We don’t know if it’s a eighth percent rate drop, a quarter percent or whatever. Sure. It could be big different numbers. Allen, if , any way you can nurture some better numbers out of ’em that it’d be interesting to hear what they have to say rather than just double rate drop.
[David] Yep. Absolutely. Bill.
[Bill] So I went to the exact same place Mark did and he’s just more eloquent than I am. My comment would be we can look back on multiple. Fed drops that had zero impact on mortgage rates. So The sky is the limit as to what the actual benefit is.
[Allen] So I got the detail, David from, obviously just used AI to go get it and AI broke down what better dot com’s CEO is saying. He was saying AI reduced per loan cost and friction enough. For the borrower that the monthly payment impact feels similar to what you would get from about two federal rate cuts.
[David] That is a company with good marketing statement. They have a reputation for making great outlandish statements on the marketing side. So I’ll track that off to 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.