[David] Let’s move on to our tech update with Allen
[Allen] Thanks, David. So I’ve got some funny things to mention. And first of all I will bring something up. So Alice, all of this that you mentioned about AI and being able to, as a human request that AI is not involved. Two quick things. One is my daughter had a fender bender this past week, and Geico’s been an amazing insurance company for me. They’re quick, they’re fast, but their AI assistant I was yelling at it. And I’m a huge believer and integrator of AI, but it was so annoying. So I said, the first thing I did when I finally got them on the phone is I said, “Can I please speak to a non-AI person?” And , the lady, the customer service rep said, “Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to do that. You have to go through the process.” And I caught myself, like we all know, especially, I’m in the, the Gen X slot there. You know you can always hit pound star zero, you can hit zero five times. Every time I did that on the Geico system, it kept putting me back at the beginning. It was extremely annoying. So I know everyone’s probably shaking their head like But that’s unfortunate for us that don’t want the So we’ll see what happens in mortgage, to your point, Alice, but interesting topic. Okay, David, I’ve got some funny stuff. I’m gonna start with a shower thought. This is a good one. Okay. Is your shirt tucked into your pants, or is your pants tucked into your shirt? Okay. All right. All right we can’t hear our listeners laughing on the podcast, but I’m sure people are laughing, so thank you, folks. All right, let’s get to the news. So get this, Sam Altman, we all know he’s the CEO of OpenAI, he publicly promoted to use ChatGPT to generate a morning AI podcast about your kid’s day so you can listen on the school drive instead of talking to them, meaning the drive to school. Okay. Alex Hirsch, which is the creator of a company called Gravity Falls, replied with eight words: “What if you just talk to your children?” His reply, Alex’s, got 122,000 likes, and Sam Altman only got 9,600 likes. So there you go. The CEO of OpenAI is trying to tell people to create a podcast to talk to your children in the car rather than you doing it yourself That’s where the world’s going. Yeah. And for any of you t- on the same topic of AI that Alice brought up today, check this out. LinkedIn added a button called AI Slop. if you think what you’re looking at is content that seems like it’s AI slop, you can hit the button. So far, in one week, over a million people have hit the AI Slop button. And what does that do? So if that tells you the trend of where things are going. What, what does this specifically, does the AI Slop button do again? If you feel that you’re looking at something on LinkedIn that, that is just AI slop, it just doesn’t- Oh, yeah … doesn’t make sense, doesn’t belong, or is overdone.
[David] But it’s subjective to the, the person looking at it. Of course. It doesn’t remove it. It’s just a reporting feature. I’m sure it’s a test, but they added this button, and you can click it. I hadn’t seen it, but I didn’t really look hard once I saw that this… I was gonna put this in the podcast today. So check it out, folks. Yeah. I was trying to look for it, so yeah, interesting. Very interesting. Okay. So InstaMortgage, a company called reAlpha just closed their acquisition. It’s- Yeah … eight and a half million dollar deal that gives this AI-powered real estate company, okay? That’s reAlpha, folks, direct lending, underwriting, and funding all in-house. Yeah. And what they’re doing is they’re calling it the operating system for modern home buying. For those of you that don’t know reAlpha Tech they’re a NASDAQ company. They’re an AI-powered real estate technology company. You can think of them as building an end-to-end AI home buying platform. So you can do everything on their systems, folks. You could do you can search for homes, a brokerage, mortgage, all that great stuff. They already operate a mortgage brokerage shop, so this acquisition adds direct lending capability. You wanna check that out. ReAlpha acquired 100% of InstaMortgage for eight and a half million. Yeah. And it closed- Yeah, Shashank, I was talk- closed today. Yeah, I was talking to him Friday or Thursday of last week, and he says, “We’re finally getting this thing closed.” It took him months to get that thing done. There’s some other factors into it, but kudos to Shashank who created InstaMortgage, has been through a number of iterations. Finally found an idea that the way he could it and was able to monetize it. So $8 million, not bad. Way to go, Shashank.
[Allen] Absolutely. Yeah. So Tidal Wave love these guys. Know a number of people that work here. They’re doing some really cool stuff. For those of you that don’t know, they’re really one of the first ones or the first one that’s brought the agentic AI experience into loan origination. Anyways, they just posted an editorial that is, “Don’t ask if it uses AI, ask if it can prove the answers are right.” And I brought this up, by the way, some– a very similar topic about two weeks ago. I think Rich Strubinski is or promoted an article, I don’t know if he’s involved or not, that had to do with these AI underwriting engines and, putting the same file into five engines and see what they all come out with. A file that’s not trained, a file they’ve not seen before and objectively see how they do. Tidal Wave’s saying the same thing. What they’re saying is the key question that you need to ask is not does it use AI, but can you prove the answers are accurate? And the distinction that Tidal Wave is saying is AI that produces outputs versus AI that produces verifiable, auditable, explainable outputs is where you wanna be. And so check that out. Very cool. Again, it’s an editorial from Tidal Wave. You can just Google it or find it on LinkedIn. Moving on, David we all know the company called Model Match. Oh, yeah. They say your AI gets mortgage data intelligence. So check this out. This was on August twenty-first. It was Thursday of last week in the Critchman Report. They just launched what they call an MCP integration that brings its mortgage and real estate data intelligence directly into Claude and GPT. You can now– So if you’re in those platforms, folks, and you’re connected to their MCP, we’ve talked about this on prior weeks what that is. If you all remember, Encino had released a mortgage MCP letting lenders connect to their system directly. Model Match just did the same thing. So from Claude and from OpenAI, you can connect to Model Match, and you now can research agents, originators, you can analyze markets, you can identify refinance opportunities, all different kinds of stuff. Work with CRM records, you name it all in there. We’re gonna see a lot more of MCP-controlled experiences, folks, because it’s just the way things are going. Think of it as glorified API, for those of you that aren’t sure what it is, and it gives you the ability to connect with their system from externally. All right, David, just two more quick things in the news. Yeah. The second to last one is Blue Sage. They just did a– They’re calling it AI in production. They’re doing some things that have been around forever but they’re doing some things that are interesting. So they call it Sage Vision, and it reads, classifies, and analyzes documents. Right? That’s been around our industry forever. But they’re saying that their AI studio now evaluates those documents against the guidelines rather than just checking them. It connects them to open conditions, and it services what needs attention. So if you’re using Blue Sage and you like that all-in-one solution they have, now they do connect to outside vendors. Check this out. It’s pretty cool. They’re also doing income analysis and voice AI for routi-routine servicing conversations, and it’s all running natively in their platform. And then the last one I wanted to bring up, David, is Nations Lending. They just launched their integrated insurance services. Now, we all know about insurance in the mortgage industry, and there’s some vendors out there that do insurance, meaning you can shop, your homeowner can shop for insurance during the mortgage process. Nations Lending just launched what they called Nations Lending Insurance Services, and it brings that insurance shopping experience directly into the mortgage process. They’re out in seventeen markets and expansion plan through the end of the year. So lots of great stuff going on in the industry. I probably could have given you updates on a hundred companies for a hundred total hours. Yeah. So I consolidated it down to the good stuff and hopefully you all have a great week.
[David] Yeah. I was just talking to Tony Bellagio at New American Funding. He’s a good friend, someone I’ve known for many years- and coached him back at the previous company. They just made the conversion or are in the process of making the conversion to Vesta. And I was looking at– But the amount of support it takes to support these new systems, some of these, like Bl-Blue Sage, you look at Vesta, some of the others that are coming up, there’s a significant amount of effort. Yeah. And they talk about how they have, I think it was over three hundred fifty or three hundred forty programmers on their IT staff, and it’s gonna take all of that- Yeah … to be able to do this. So I think I’d love to get your thoughts when you look at the LOS world, w-when you watch and- I’m so happy you brought this up. Keep going … Yeah, ’cause, you look at Encompass and it– everyone complains about the cost and how it’s so expensive. I’m looking at the complexities of the LOS and making changes, but I’m seeing like NAF, New American Funding converting over to Vesta, the amount of staff that they have to support that transition. People are frustrated with how much they’re paying to, for Encompass, but it doesn’t really seem like, or am I wrong? It doesn’t seem like there is for the smaller guys, they’re kinda locked into what they have, whatever that is
[Allen] Yeah it’s interesting. I wouldn’t say they’re locked into it moving or transferring an LOS or even upgrading to an existing LOS to a new version is always difficult and tricky. And the intellectual property of how your organization runs that you built in over the many years sits with the people that refined it for your business. And so if the staff isn’t ready and the folks that work for you aren’t ready, then you’ve got your initial point of contention, and it makes the process more difficult. A lot of people don’t want to see things change. They’re happy with how they’re going. And so when you implement something brand new, before you even get to the challenge of the upgrade, David, your staff alone becomes, like I just said, your first point of contention. But yes, the, systems are complex because there’s an average of fifteen integrations that touch every single mortgage loan. There’s multiple departments in an organization, and it’s one master platform, right? Your one database of record. And you also have all these other systems. So you have the alignment and coordination of your point of sale, your CRM. You’ve got your appraisal vendors, you have your title vendors, the, doc vendors, the list goes on. So what I’ve seen is that most mortgage companies are understaffed in the area of being able to move into a new technology provider or transition. Now, New American Funding, from my side of the fence, which is an opinion only already has a lot of engineers. They didn’t hire them, in my opinion, just to transfer LOS systems, because they do a lot of their own technology initiatives. But for the average mortgage company, they just have an IT staff that handles the computers and the emails and their vendor security and things like that, and now they’re gonna take on, or they’ve one person who’s the expert with, let’s say, Encompass. I actually just spent some time at a mortgage company, and the person that’s in charge of the LOS, and they’re transitioning on the same LOS to a newer version, has ready to walk away three times because the staff has constant needs, the executives have constant needs, and the vendor says, “If we’re gonna do this, you gotta do it now.” But then you need outside help because the vendor assumes you know how to do it perfectly. There’s– and that’s one scenario. There’s probably 100 others. The point in the end that I’m trying to make, David, is it is very complex to switch systems. There are newer systems that you go through the pain now, and hopefully you don’t have to go through the pain again in the future. But it is not a very easy process, and you do need engineers, consulting help. It’s a lot.
[David] Yeah. It’s something I encourage people to talk to you about, a-Allen. Also, congratulations on Senzi. I keep getting more and more feedback as I direct others to the website, so I always give you a shout-out Yeah, thank you thank you, appreciate it. Thanks for the report.
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.