[David] Allen Pollack with his Tech Update. Allen, good to have you here. Always interested to see what you’re seeing go on out there. Again, folks, I had a chance to get a demo of Allen’s new Sendzie AI product. S-E-N-D, Send, Z-I-E .ai. is really impressive, Allen. And I’m obviously… You’re seeing I’m already referring you out to a number of places. Listeners, if you- Yeah … haven’t seen it, free plug to Allen.
[Allen] Appreciate the, the mention, David, and the referral, of course. It’s interesting, i’ll tell you what, I’ll come back to Sendzie. Let me get through some interesting things in the news that’s actually more interesting I always start with something fun. Check this out. There is an AI bot out there, just fired someone, and the people that run the bot said it was kinda kind but dumb. And here it is. It’s a San Francisco shop called the Andon Market, and it’s run entirely by an AI manager. The name is Luna. It’s a Claude Opus 4.8 agent, and it’s part of a controlled experiment by an AI startup called Andon Labs. Luna became the first documented AI to fire a human employee, a worker who was late 17 of 23 shifts. The problem was that Luna forgot her own employee handbook and kept excusing the delays and only recommended the firing after researchers literally spoon-fed her the disciplinary record and asked exactly pointed questions. And Andon’s… At this, cafe, the same AI manager had already, prior to this mistake, ordered 15 liters of coconut milk. So after the firing, Luna was asked to hire a replacement. She pushed to hire someone who had flaked on the interview 15-plus past jobs and had an unverifiable reference. So Andon described the pattern as kind but sometimes dumb. One employee described the AI manager as nauseating. So AI’s not coming for everyone’s job. It clearly is being tested, and it is not doing a great job. Yeah. Pretty troubled place. Where… Yeah that’s appropriate. Yeah. I will tell you, my daughter was with some of her friends. Now, she just graduated college. She was fortunate to get a job out of college. But I was with a couple of her friends, and everybody was talking about people losing jobs and AI, and it’s interesting to hear the younger generation talking about how AI and what kind… They weren’t talking about learning AI. They were talking about what kind of job they can get that AI won’t replace, which was an interesting conversation. Yeah, it would be. All right. Yeah. Yeah, let’s talk about this. I wanna point this out. This is not specific to the mortgage industry, but it’s called Wild Code. We’ve talked about AI slop folks and the fact that anyone can write code. We talk about it every week almost. This is called Wild Code: You Can’t Govern What You Can’t See. And it’s Tines and TechRepublic putting on a webinar together. Now, TechRepublic is a massive news publication that’s very tech-centric, read and sponsored by a lot. Just think of the Rob Crismon report on every industry if you don’t already know what TechRepublic is. It’s August 25th. It’s next week, 11:00 AM Eastern. Just Google it, Wild Code webinar. But let me explain what this is. Employees no longer need development teams to build business applications, which we know, right? AI lets them build workflows and agents independently, but many of these tools remain invisible to the teams responsible for securing and supporting them. No different than the mortgage industry, folks. This is the shadow AI problem. Your loan officers, processors, and ops staff are building AI tools right now that nobody in your IT compliance department knows even exist. And other industries have the same problem we have in mortgage. This is why you wanna check out this webinar. It’s called Wild Code. It’s a TechRepublic webinar. It’s very interesting because the governance that we have, that Fannie, Freddie have put out there is something that other industries haven’t gone, thought that far out. So David, who’s to think that the mortgage industry, when you’re talking at AI governance, is ahead of the pack, or is at least in the race compared to being a lagger so far back? Wow. And with that being said on the AI governance side Fannie and Freddie have put out those new guidelines. They require servicers to document their AI tools and designate an internal overseer and demonstrate responsible use on demand. ICE just put out a full compliance infrastructure that audits everything automatically for you, that you don’t have to go and do the research. So if you use ICE for your servicing, they’re helping you get ahead on that AI governance component. I have a couple other things to get to, David. Before I do, I just wanna pause there, see if anyone had any thoughts on the Wild Code and what ICE is doing.
[David] That’s interesting what ICE is doing. The challenge that they face with all the things that are coming at them from a competitive standpoint, as well as changes to the, we were just talking about the new appraisal their hands are full. Anyone who’s got a software company, their hands are full, and we have- … new entrants coming in making pretty wild hair, BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals and representations that what they’re gonna solve to take out the big guys and specifically ICE. And I just don’t see that happening a- as quickly as some would like to.
[Allen] I think their the overall plan, thinking back to some funny movies and people dominating the world, I think their plan from the outside in looks very complex. I don’t know what it is from the inside out, but I think it’s fair to say that AI has created a lot of platforms and opport- and alternative opportunities where you don’t have to have the all-in-one platform necessarily. Yeah. And it creates complexities around people wanting to integrate, so I don’t know it’s much faster than people expected it to. Yeah. And so be interesting, like you said, David, there’s a lot to manage there. Let me talk about a couple other things, ’cause everyone’s using AI. We have Floifi they just created what they call Dynamic Apps 2.0 with embedded AI. It lets their borrower application experience virtually work seamlessly with any product. But what’s really interesting is that, it extracts all the borrower data, it auto-populates. These things are not new folks. What they are new is how they’re being done with AI, and they’re debuting it at Akuma’s Make Your Mark conference in September in Vegas. So check that out. Also, Stratmoor, I love talking about the work they do. On Monday, August 11th, in the Crissman Report, there was an editorial section about this. Their latest insight report surveyed 68 lenders across 9.8 million loans. That’s a lot of loans. Borrower experience now ranks ahead of pricing when lenders consider switching sub-servicers. 83-plus percent of lenders using a sub-servicer prefer a single partner over multiple vendors, and more than 70% specifically want a sub-servicer that is not competing for future borrower relationships. How about that? Not competing against them. Imagine hiring a technology partner who’s competing against you with your own customers. That was very cool from Stratmoor. And then David, one more thing I wanna bring up here, and then I’ll talk about Senzi, is you had Brian View on the podcast back in November. He was talking about MISMO and the cost of MISMO and the donations that people give and the pricing. Well- Yeah … what’s what’s interesting is it was in the in Rob Crismon’s editorial section. Here’s Brian’s full quote. It says, “For the mortgage executives still referring to MISMO funding as a donation, stop. If your company is benefiting from the standardized data sets, AI governance, appraisal modernization, eMortgages, and everything else, or any of the countless standards developed through MISMO, all for 75 cents per loan, you’re already consuming the output of an investment made by others.” So what he’s saying is, the question isn’t if your company can afford MISMO, it’s whether you’re comfortable letting your competitors invest to build the industry’s infrastructure while you benefit for it for free. So he’s basically saying, look, they’re not looking to change the price. And it’s not mandatory, folks. It’s 75 cents per loan. There’s a minimum per year membership cost. What he’s trying to say is, “Don’t look at this anymore as a donation mentality. Please make an investment and help guide the future of how you’re gonna do better business and your peers as well.” So very interesting. If you haven’t seen it, you wanna go check that out. It’s a great article. I gave you just the two or three just quick sentences from that. And then David, on the AI slop and shadow AI and all that, the, the company that I’ve been bringing to market Sendzie, S-E-N-D-Z-I-E.ai, is focused on one small part of the market which is, taking the personal connection and extending that, that you have with your customers. It goes beyond mortgage, but in the mortgage industry you have to typically buy an entire platform. You have to buy a whole CRM. You have to buy a whole tech stack. We focus on just one thing, which is your personal connection with your customers and how to amplify that and create better engagement. So thanks for the mention on that. If anyone’s interested, you know how to get ahold of me. It’s alan@tms-advisors.com.
[David] Yep. Check it out by all means, and then go to the website. You’ll see there’s some great examples in there. You did a good job of ex-explaining what you do there. S-E-N-D-Z-I-E.AI. Check it out. Encourage you to do so, everybody.
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.