The market can be very unpredictable, but even more now, with all the challenges happening in the world. That is why we need to do a better job of keeping out and mitigating risks. Candor Technology has been doing exactly that, helping lenders make the highest quality decision possible across the lending lifecycle. In this episode, David Lykken is joined by three special guests that have built Candor into what it is now: the Founder, Thomas Showalter; CEO of the Data and Analytics Division, Sara Knochel; and the Chief Strategic Planning Officer, Earl Thomas Booker III. Together, they tell us the origin story of Candor Technology, the obstacles they faced, and the solutions they deliver to the mortgage industry. They also let us into the culture of the company, their strategic advantages, and how they overcome competition.
If you are interested in a demo of the Candor service, click this link —–> Candor demo
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Candor Technology: Helping Lenders And Changing The Mortgage Industry With Tom Showalter, Sara Knochel, And Earl Booker III
I am so excited to sit here and share with you something so special and unusual that’s happening in our industry. I’ve known about Candor. They just became a sponsor. We were excited about them and what they were doing before that because of what they are able to do for lenders to keep risk out and mitigate risk. In this market, we need to do a better job of that. Sitting here with me is Tom Showalter, the Founder of Candor, and we’ve got two special guests that you’ve invited to join us here, Tom.
Thank you, David. I appreciate the introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here.
It’s a pleasure to have you.
On my left is Sara Knochel, who’s the CEO of Candor’s Data and Analytics Division, and beside her is Tom Booker, who’s our Chief Strategy Officer. Sara is in-charge of taking our post-close products to market. Tom Booker is in-charge of taking our point-of-sale products to market.
Tom, your story about how you started Candor or why you started it is so fascinating. We’ve been sitting here talking for the last hour, and I’m trying to figure out how to pack this all into a 20 to 30-minute interview here. What is the basis for you starting and founding Candor?
I took a look at how mortgages and underwriting decisions were made and how data about those decisions was captured or not captured. I made a commitment to myself that we have to do a better job. I did all of this initial analysis about how mortgages were made in the early 2004 and 2005 timeframe. I come from the aerospace industry. As I’ve joked with you, David, I looked at how mortgages were made. I said, “If we made airplanes the same way we make mortgages, I’d never fly again.”
I came to that conclusion and said, “We have to do a better job at making mortgages and underwriting them.” I made a commitment to myself that I would find a way to create a technology that could truly make the highest quality underwriting decision and enable every mortgage executive to have that technology at their disposal.
I want to make that decision in technology so powerful that it could handle every aspect of making a mortgage and every decision related to a mortgage. I could do that. I also wanted to make it so that it would capture the reasons why it was deciding what it was deciding and save that for posterity. After the loan was made, look back and see what it was and why. I made that decision to figure out how to create a technology that would make the highest quality mortgage underwriting decisions. We set out to do that.
The Tom Showalter Quotables, and there are many that we’re going to be discovering in this interview, but one of them was you said, “I came from an aerospace background.” I was thinking, certainly mortgages cannot be as complicated as aerospace. You found it was just the opposite. We had that at capture but in a nutshell, explain that one more time which almost gets into where I want to go with obstacles, but share this.
When you’re analyzing an aerospace system, every potential failure and outcome is known. You can foresee it and therefore, you can lay, estimate its likelihood and create a probability distribution. All those things are known, even though it’s quite complicated because you have aerospace systems that have a million components. They all interact so that matrix is pretty complicated. By and large, everything in it is a known effect.
There are no unknowns there. In the mortgage space, there are easily over a billion outcomes in any mortgage underwriting. That’s a hard number for people to swallow but it’s not that hard to prove. I’m toning down the number of outcomes but the outcomes are huge. The other problem with the mortgage is that some of the outcomes are unknown.
You don’t know what you’re going to encounter. You don’t know the circumstance and you see a particular data, how it relates to the guidelines, how it relates to the bar’s application and that’s a problem. It’s never seen that problem before. Mortgages not only go through things that are known but also things that are unknown which the technology has never seen before. Once you start trying to teach a machine how to solve an unforeseen problem, that gets to be the stuff of legends. That’s hard.
The reason this is so much more complicated is we’re dealing with data and not components or hardware because the hardware has a known failure rate. We don’t know what it is when it’s in the data like this. There are so many aspects of this that almost gets into the next question. What obstacles did you have to overcome to create Candor?
It was the sheer complexity. The number of outcomes is so huge and then you add to the fact that the system had to figure out things on its own. You couldn’t teach it everything and say, “We’re done.” We can’t do that. You have to teach it how to think through a problem and solve things dynamically when it hasn’t seen this particular specific instance ever before. Trying to teach a machine how to solve an unforeseen problem turned out to be where most of the effort occurred in Candor because we had to teach it how to do that.
We went from these billion outcomes, which you can’t use traditional software methodology to solve a billion outcome problem. You can’t write a spec for a billion outcomes. You cannot do it. We had to figure out how to create a smaller population of similar problems that we could teach a machine to solve. We did what we called pivot points and anomalies, where we’re teaching it to solve a particular narrowly defined anomaly.
Anomaly is a missed expectation. You see in the BAR’s application that he says he makes $15,000. He says he’s a wage earner so you expect to see a pay stub with $15,000 but if you see a pay stub with $12,000, that’s an anomaly or an unexpected event. You have to teach a machine how to solve that particular problem. We call those anomalies. How many anomalies are in the current Candor architecture? Over 60,000.
Anomaly is a missed expectation. Click To TweetSara, you’re not only working on this aspect but I learned that you’re Tom’s daughter. How far does the acorn fall from the tree when it comes to the same analysis of understanding this?
The acorn did not fall far from the tree. I remember having discussions about data at Thanksgiving when I was in middle school. I have worked on and off with my dad throughout my entire career. Before data science was called data science, they didn’t teach it to you in school but I learned it on the job with him and one of my first jobs after I got my undergraduate degree.
Did you have a mortgage background?
Sort of. I started in the consumer credit space. I’m doing charge off models and handling defaulting credit lines. I then moved into the analysis of data in the secondary market for a mortgage. Servicing scorecards, HPA and things like that I ended up at CoreLogic. I’m doing data work there. I then ended up at digital risk. All of that was in the secondary space. Now that I have joined Candor, I have learned about what goes on in primary so I understand why the data was the way it was when we look at it in secondary.
I’m getting ahead myself, what this can start doing. Mr. Booker, I want to get you in on this conversation. It’s good to have you at the table here.
I’m glad to be here.
I love your energy. The first time I met you, that smile that you have, it’s one of those things you feel like you’re being hugged. From the moment I met you, I go, “What a likable guy.”
That’s very nice of you to say.
What got you excited about Candor? What is it that you saw here that the solution that Tom envisions solving that got your attention captured you?
I tell us a short story. Tom reached out to me.
Don’t tell me you came out of NASA too.
No. If I were in NASA, he would’ve had more work to do. Tom called me and told me a little bit about what he was pursuing and I was enthralled. I had been after this thinking and solution for some period. We had a few conversations about it and I said, “Let me go do my homework and look up all the things you’ve done.”
I was on vacation on a ship. I went and looked up all his stuff on the ship with slow internet. I kept getting more excited. He then set up a couple of more interviews with people who were on the team at that time. I came back to him and wrote him a two-page letter about what I thought we should do. This is after one conversation. The best way to characterize this is that he had brought into life something that I thought was not only incredibly necessary but frankly, our markets wouldn’t survive much longer without it. It’s important to be able to have organic truth.
What was your background before you joined?
I began my career in the computing business. I worked on Wall Street as a futures and options trader and a merchant banker. I went back to work for IBM company as a General Manager in Central Banking. I went to work for Fannie Mae, First American and The Collingwood Group. I did some things on my own and then found my real calling with Candor.
What we were talking about when we were having the green room discussion, I learned that Tom hires based on someone’s ability to learn. That was fascinating. Tom, we’re going to talk about the vision of this but get into that. You said that it is critical to you that you hire the right people and that’s true for anybody. It’s amazing how many people fail at that.
It’s hard.
Your training and all the things you did, we don’t have time to get into. I can’t wait to, at some point but it inspired you to write a book because folks got to hear your story. It’s the American dream.
There were three things that I try to interview for. One is problem-solving skills. Do we have people that can solve problems? Not everybody can. The second one is, are they motivated by a group goal? Do they think that they can work towards a group outcome? Is their morality going to support that or not? The third thing is whether or not there’s somebody I’d like. What I learned at NASA when I was being taught how to solve huge problems with people in technology was one of the ingredients besides problem-solving and being able to learn and work towards a group goal is, do you like talking to these people?
You’re going to have to live with them and solve problems with them. If you don’t like them, it’s not going to work very well. I learned that it was part of NASA’s charm. They hired people you could like. Here, I did that. One of the things that I’ve noticed about the people at Candor is that they’re all lifelong learners. They try to learn. They like to approach every day as though there’s an opportunity to learn.
That right there is worth the whole interview. Readers, pull that principle together. One thing is to recognize the need to hire learners but how do you discern who is the learner?
That’s a gut reaction on my part. Everybody that works at Candor gets interviewed by me. It’s my call.
You say the limbic part of the brain is such a fascinating thing because it doesn’t have language. You just know when you’re a knower and that’s the limbic side of your brain. I love brain science and studying that stuff. As a vocal major, I’m fascinated with some of the geekiest crazy stuff.
That’s how we do it.
That’s an important point for anyone looking to consider you as a company because you’re not hiring the company. You’re hiring the people in the company and then you want to figure out what is it that makes them tick. What makes them unique? Why do they draw the talent that they do? How do they keep the talent that they do?
It’s simple. Two things. They think we’re doing something special. That’s fair. The other thing is that they know they’re listened to and heard. They also know that the things they’re working on end up in the product tomorrow. They end up out in the marketplace by next week. If they want to see their stuff in action, we’re the place.
This is also getting right into the next point we want to get into. What strategic advantage do you feel Candor has? One of them is your people, the way you hire your people and inspire them. Come on, Sara, talk to it.
I got my fingers in pretty much every part of Candor and what goes on. I get to interact with all our different teams. I love them so much for so many reasons. Their ability to collaborate and problem solve together but also path find together.
Explain what you mean by pathfinding. Dive into that.
When we’re dealing with something we’ve never done before, we want to go in a direction and enter a part of the market we’ve never been in before. How do we do that? What does it even look like? You have to ask questions, grapple with ambiguity and do research. You can’t rely on your assumptions. You have to be open to making mistakes. Our people do that. They do it well and they do it together. There’s this great sense of team.
The other thing that I love is everyone feels that they’re serving the greater good. They get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of seeing our clients served. When we get feedback about the things our clients are able to do because of us, it makes everyone incredibly happy. I’m very grateful for our team. That is one of our strategic advantages.
I’d like to get your comments on this, Tom. Your last name is Booker. One of my favorite guys out there is Booker T. Washington. I love that man. He is what he is as a human being.
We call him Books because we’ve got a Tom and we also have a Thomas so he’s Books.
Let’s talk about the strategic advantage. From your perspective, how would you articulate the advantage?
We have a lot of strategic advantages depending upon perspective. From a lender or those who would consume our products, this is a thinking organization. You heard a very articulate and cogent way of thinking about pathfinding. That’s the number one thing you’re going to do if you’re going to solve old problems differently. You’ve got to be able to find new paths and circumvent what’s been done previously and appreciate it. From the perspective of organizations that would invest in a company like ours, we are a company that has leverage, intellectual and human leverage means we can think longer, harder and better about it and we will have more people who know how to do it. That’s how I would characterize that.
If you're going to solve old problems differently, you've got to be able to find new paths and circumvent what's been done previously and appreciate it. Click To TweetWe have these specific questions I want to get to but I could go down so many that each one of these questions has a whole chapter of a book written about it. I want to look at how does your newly issued patent play into the strategic advantage? First of all, writing a patent on this thing is not easy.
It takes 4 years and $250,000.
Maybe this is the intelligence NASA behind you but you planned it out so well. There only had to take one change or one iteration out.
We were very fortunate.
That in itself is amazing.
We’ve had several, I don’t call it good luck but we started with a certain product market configuration, what we’re going to take to market and why it was a good idea. It so happens that when we got to market with that, we found out it was a 90% fit from out of the lab to the market. That’s unusual. Most of the time from the lab to the market, it’s 60%, 65% or 70% fit best. What do you think, Books?
That’s fair.
We did better than that so that helped us. The original technical configuration that ended up in the patent has been preserved. We’ve been able to have that preserved for four years and God knows how many ups and downs. We’ve been very fortunate in that the original technological vision and the rigid product market vision have held up well.
It’s for the value of your company and the investors got to be smiling at the fact that you’ve been able to do that. That gave you a big chuckle out of that, Books.
Yes, it did. The reason for the big chuckle is that it’s a common theme across companies. It’s one thing to hear the CEO talk about it but you would hear other people in our company quote that. Part of it is because he interviewed all of them but also because he talks to all of them every week. That’s another thing so it’s a sustained engagement.
Talk about your management style. There’s a product about uniqueness and certainly, you have that. The way you’re solving the problems is unique but at the end of the day, it’s the people. It’s the sustained path of any company and the sustained trajectory, which is how it is run day-to-day. How is it that you have time to take time to talk to everyone? How do you go about that?
We make the time.
It’s a priority.
The other thing though is that everyone talks to him before they join, I also believe in the management style, not just of Tom but of everyone within our organization. There’s a comfort level with communicating. Here’s the other thing. No one in the company gets upset about bad news. What everyone gets upset about is inaccurate information.
It’s much more important to share something early than to hide it because you want to save face. We have this environment where it’s like, “We’re going to experiment and try something. It might not work but we need to learn from how it didn’t work.” That’s the culture. It’s very easy to get a message from people making the product or people in the field with our clients up to Tom and everyone else because of that culture.
I’m going to ask you a question that’s not on this list. How does the competition drive you? Do you feel some would say threaten? The Only the Paranoid Survive is what Andrew Grove wrote. It’s a famous book.
That’s true. Competitors are the way you true up in the marketplace. They are the folks that police your value proposition as well as your customers. We, like every other company, are listening closely but we’re also discerning. What’s the difference between listening and discerning? Not just listening but we’re doing our research to figure out what they told us and what they didn’t tell us. It’s a focus. It goes back to this pathfinding. It’s a similar priority.
Some would say, “You’ve got a patent.” Once you have the patent, who could threaten you?
Everybody can still threaten you.
It’s not even just about the competition. For one thing, competition helps us reevaluate ourselves so that’s continually happening. We have so much more value we can deliver. Even if no one ever catches up to us, we have a lot of places we want to go.
You can have field people nipping at your heels but it’s the vision of what you can accomplish. Working towards someone that you’re excited in the direction you’re going is so much more exciting and motivating than the fear of someone overtaking you.
You make better decisions when you’re thinking about the value you can create and the opportunity rather than the fear of demise.
You make better decisions when you're thinking about the value you can create and the opportunity rather than the fear of demise. Click To TweetOne more thing about the patent. This is a 100% machine intelligence solution, that’s why it was patentable. Our competition has a man-machine solution where they have men or women adding intelligence along with the machine. It’s not patentable because it’s not patentable subject matter. One of the differentiators about the patent is if you have a human making the decisions in your system, it’s not a patentable system. The patent is a true differentiator for people that are truly trying to sound like and be like a 100% machine solution.
We are a 100% machine solution so that means our process, technology and decision making is portable. We can put it anywhere. Besides in fulfillment where we started, it goes in backward towards the investor, the post-close and the due diligence environments. It goes forward at the point of sale and direct-to-consumer. It can be there in all those places and this technology performs extremely well.
I want to get into all of how and why about that but touch on an important question, which is what are the beneficial outcomes that Candor clients have already enjoyed? It sounds like there’s more to come but what have they already done for your clients?
First, we sat on a three-year journey to reduce repurchase typical exposures.
Especially in markets like this. When all the previous mistakes come out, we can at least afford them.
It’s unfortunate but that’s the way it works. The repurchase exposure, when we started the insurance program, was gauged at twelve basis points. They wanted to price our insurance at roughly $138 a loan. We couldn’t sell our product with an insurance rep with that pricing. I went to the underwriting and I said, “We think we have a better mouth strap. We think we can take that exposure from 12 basis points down to 1.” They looked at me. These folks were across the pond and they were like, “The Yank is on something.”
It’s to their credit and they’ve done other deals with me in the past so having a pattern of truth and intelligence has been helpful. They listened and believed. They believed that we had a better solution. They believed that Candor could, in real-time, identify and resolve defects and that it was going to do it better than anybody else. They reduced their price substantially. They took a risk with us when we didn’t have the data to prove it. Based on the quality of what we were saying and the quality of our thinking, they took a risk with us, which is unbelievable.
If you have an insurance company that makes an adjustment like that without empirical data is pretty significant. For a NASA scientist, it sounds like you’re a pretty good salesman. Sara, do you want to add to that?
He was right and they are happy with how it turned out.
$2 million underwrites and 0 repurchases.
They’re getting an insurance fee with almost zero risk.
They like that.
Books, do you want to add to that?
The only thing I would add is that record has allowed us more opportunities to expand what we do into more use cases where we can ensure those as well first again in this industry. It’s a good gift that keeps giving.
This is also exciting but let’s start getting into some exciting things that you have on the roadmap. Can you give us a little insight? Can you tease us a little bit like more patents are coming?
Sara’s taking our product to the post-close QC and the due diligence markets.
It’s huge from a securitization standpoint.
There’s so much fertile ground there and we could talk for hours about what could be done.
Books is taking it in the point of sales space to bring it earlier in the life cycle with the consumer, where they’ll benefit immensely from having a powerful, accurate and authentic underwrite right up front.
One is looking at it from a standpoint, the rearview mirror, would of, could of and should of. Books, what you’re talking about is taking this as, “Let’s solve that problem by getting this thing viewed from the beginning.” Talk about that, Books.
The point of sale is where everything begins in the mortgage business. For far too long, it’s been very difficult to make the point of sale meaningful to both the lender and the borrower, both in different ways. The borrower wants to get a loan quickly. The lender wants to have high degrees of commitment quickly. Those don’t happen very quickly. We figured out a way how to do both at the point of sale.
The point of sale is where everything begins in the mortgage business. Click To TweetSomeone might say, “Is this going to eliminate jobs?” Is this creating a disadvantage? Some people might take that and start going down a negative path.
No, it would be the opposite.
More inclusion, I see.
Not only more inclusion but if you think about how many difficult loans don’t get considered because they take too much time and energy, they’re too complex. This isn’t just underserved populations. It could be difficult to serve populations. People who have complex financial circumstances find it difficult to utilize the mortgage markets. Having a tool that can interrogate those files and make judgments that are well-reasoned, systemic and quick is a huge tool for everybody.
This could shorten the time it takes for going from application or consideration to close, number one. What goes into securitization, to your point, Sara?
The two meshed together quite well because the sooner you know with great certainty what loan this is going to be and if it can be made, the sooner you can tell the secondary market about it. You start to collapse the space from both ends. It’s fascinating.
If you think about what we discussed, it’s beginning to make the mortgage transaction that had more of a commercial product feel with a closing look more like a consumer transaction that happens very quickly, has very defined requirements and happens with some predictability.
I can go buy a Tesla X and walk out in a matter of an hour on a depreciating asset theory. Some would say it’s appreciating.
Depreciating is good.
It’s a depreciating asset. Some would say, “It’s not even an asset when you look at something.”
It’s worth less in a year, for sure.
What you are doing is creating an appreciating asset, which could be something more very compressed. That’s very exciting.
Higher quality, lower cost.
Tom, I came from an MBA in Nashville in 2022. I listened to the economic forecast and how many we’re not cutting. Marina Walsh was talking about performance and how companies are not getting to the right size fast enough. The rate of loss is huge. The volume is falling faster than their cutting. This comes in as a solution on how to right-size a company. That’s one of the statements you made earlier.
We say it a little more emphatically. We say it right size for the last time. What we’re saying is that Candor has the technology so that you could anticipate the lowest volume of loans you could imagine. Staff for those extremely low volumes, which is lower than now. Keep your best people and turn the overage to Candor.
That almost opens up the question of who becomes your best people.
That’s the lender to decide.
I will say what our technology does is it’s not just a widget you add to an existing process. It allows you to rearrange and rethink your existing process and even your business model. What we have seen lenders do is they don’t necessarily come in like, “We’re going to make big cuts.” Instead, it’s like, “We can specialize people. We can have them focus or we can create new quality-focused roles within the organization that didn’t happen before.” They repurpose people. They put them in different positions and they come out with this operation that’s much more efficient, higher quality that doesn’t cost any more.
Dynamic and productive as well.
It is a tool they can be creative with.
I’m all about company culture. One of the things I’m most passionate about is if we get everyone focused. James Collins talks about this in the Good to Great book. “Get the right people on the bus. The ones that are on the bus get them on the right seats.” This sounds like this is a tool that allows you to start working in the area where your greatest skill is, which is oftentimes your greatest interest, therefore, your greatest joy.
For example, 80% of the effort in a mortgage company goes to making a loan, crossing all the Ts and dotting all the I’s and coping with this massive amount of detail, which Candor manages for you in many instances. You not only let the technology dot the I’s and cross the Ts but it also writes the sentence. Your job is to interpret what the sentence means if you like it or not.
What you can do then is start repurposing your people to do higher value jobs that you couldn’t get to before because you had so much of your effort and cost absorbed and managing the detail, crossing the Ts and dotting the I’s. We are seeing our customers start to report that. We’re also seeing our customers start to report that they have a new business model where they can go and serve particular segments of the market with the same cash offer that they could never do before.
They are able to reinvent their business model given that they have a new economy. It’s enriching for them. It’s better for the consumer. The consumer’s going to get served far better with that new business model than the old one. It’s also good for us because we get to enable the kinds of productive change that we get behind.
We’re recording this at Union Station in Nashville and locomotives are going on in the background. I go, “This is a pretty good mode metaphor.”
It’s so authentic.
With that, I’m sensing metaphorically, Candor is the locomotive that is going to bring so much potential change and needs to change to our industry. It’s so exciting. I’m honored to get to sit with the three of you. I’m going to go around backwards. Books, what a great pleasure to meet you and have your input here.
Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure working with you. Your enthusiasm is electric. It’s made me think about this business a little more actively with the trains and everything else going on. Thank you for the opportunity.
It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been many years in the industry. I’m a DE underwriter. I was a top salesperson in the industry. I’ve done everything. What I want to do is give back to an industry that has been very good to me. One of the things I get so excited about housing is it’s the fourth-most transformative thing you can have going on in your life. When you start realizing that if you can do it more responsibly, which means that you can do it more predictably with a greater outcome, it works all the way from the borrower.
For the second largest capital market in the world.
It’s the most transformative thing in a person’s life and the second-largest capital market. The implications change the everyday life of people up to the entire economy of our country and even the world.
We got to do this again. This is beyond fun here. Thank you so much. Sara, it’s so nice to meet you.
It’s great to meet you. I can’t wait to do this again.
It’s a surprise to know that Tom is your dad. To meet Books again here is so much fun. I’m excited about this. Readers, there are a lot of things we covered here. It’s the company, the people and the process that they’re going and they’re applying to this. You have got to look at the bigger picture. It costs this much and it is so much more than that. You must look at the vision. Share this interview with those that need to hear it inside your company and within the industry. Thanks, readers, for being here. Thank you, Candor.
Thank you, David.
I appreciate it.
Important Links
- Candor
- Sara Knochel
- Tom Booker
- Only the Paranoid Survive
- Good to Great
- Tom Showalter LinkedIN
- Candor Technology
About Tom Showalter
For three decades, Tom Showalter has been the genius behind the curtain, having developed and brought to market now gold standard data & analytics products for industry notables. Now, with Candor, he’s introduced the industry’s first Loan Engineering System powered by CogniTechTM Knowledge Engineering Technology. Since its Q3 2020 production launch, Candor’s lender clients realized massive economic benefit: reduction in underwriter touches (2.7 to ≤1), cycle time reduction (18.7 days), and the ability to deploy a true “lights out” manufacturing process, with ~1/3 of loans requiring no human interaction to underwrite and reach a decision to lend.
Much of Candor’s data validation and verification principles were informed by Tom’s experience at NASA in Systems Safety Engineering, where he developed aerospace technologies for use in civilian and military aircraft, as well as the former Space Shuttle program.
Tom has held a variety of key executive experiences holding positions as CEO, C-Level Executive, SVP and VP – across a variety of nationally known firms: Digital Risk, Core Logic, First American, Loan Performance, Experian and several boutique data and analytics firms.
For three decades, Tom Showalter has been the genius behind the curtain, having developed and brought to market now gold standard data & analytics products for industry notables. Now, with Candor, he’s introduced the industry’s first Loan Engineering System (LES) powered by CogniTechTM Knowledge Engineering Technology. Since its Q3 2020 production launch, Candor’s lender clients realized massive economic benefit: reduction in underwriter touches (2.7 to ≤1), cycle time reduction (18.7 days), and the ability to deploy true “lights out” technology, with ~1/3 of loans requiring no human interaction to underwrite and reach a decision to lend.
About Sara Knochel
Sara Knochel has spent the last twenty years delivering data and analytics solutions that transform clients’ business models. She received a Computer Science degree from the University of California, Irvine and began her data science career analyzing consumer credit. She then graduated to residential mortgage while working at Loan Performance, CoreLogic, and Digital Risk. Sara pursued her MBA at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, after which she launched her consulting career, building a data and analytics practice serving multiple industries in the Atlanta market, including Candor Technology. In 2022 Sara joined Candor full time as the CEO of their new data and analytics business where she is leveraging Candor’s unique and proprietary data assets to deliver transformational products to the mortgage industry.
About Tom Booker
Over 30 years ago, as a futures and options trader, Tom Booker began his career at the intersection of finance and technology; transitioning into executive leadership in the fintech industry as one of the original players. Tom’s career spans time with powerhouses such as IBM and Fannie Mae, where he oversaw the launch of the DU in the early 2000s. Since then, Tom focuses his career on the investment of fintech providers, leading to his current role as the Chief Strategic Officer for Candor Technology. As a technologist, Tom led the outsourcing of bank system operations and application development, mortgage loan origination sourcing, default servicing and led a business transforming severely indebted borrowers into viable creditors. His breadth and depth of knowledge as an industry leader affords him a true appreciation of what fintech is, how it works and what outcomes are critical to success.