In our latest podcast episode, Spencer Dusebout, co-founder and CEO of Aidium, shared how technology is revolutionizing the mortgage industry. Aidium’s innovative business intelligence and CRM platform integrates data warehousing to consolidate information from various sources, enabling comprehensive insights and optimized decision-making. Automation enhances efficiency by handling repetitive tasks, allowing professionals to focus on client relationships. The platform’s customizable content balances personalization with compliance, catering to top producers while maintaining regulatory standards. Looking ahead, AI’s potential to boost productivity through advanced content creation and predictive analytics is set to further transform the industry. Spencer’s insights highlight technology’s pivotal role in shaping the future of mortgage processes. For more information, visit thinkaidium.com and follow Spencer on LinkedIn.
How Technology is Shaping the Future of Mortgage Industry with Spencer Dusebout of Aidium
[David] Listeners, I’m really excited to have Spencer does about the co-founder and CEO of Aidium joining us on the call. Aidium is making a lot of noise out there. It’s a very innovative business intelligence and CRM platform. I’m hearing a lot about it in the marketplace. So, we really were excited to reach out to Spencer about him coming on. Again, Spencer’s vision is to streamline the mortgage process, enabling professionals to work more efficiently and make data driven decisions and I got to tell you, data is becoming key Spencer, so good to have you on the podcast. Such a joy to meet you.
[Spencer] Yeah, you as well. Thanks so much for having me.
[David] Oh, it’s a real honor. first of all, let’s let our audience that doesn’t know you get to know you a little bit, tell us a little bit about your journey from where you’ve been to where you’re at today.’
[Spencer] Sure. Absolutely. So I’ve been an entrepreneur really all of my life. At the end of high school, I ended up starting a nonprofit called Hans Brothers, which was basically like a crowdfunding platform before the GoFundMe’s of the world existed and we leveraged technology to help bring clean water to people around the world. And yeah, that kind of took off the TED talk about it, from there, just learned that I was really in love with leveraging technology to solve problems at scale. I would describe myself as like an obsessive problem solver type and not sure if we want to get into it or not, but I’ve found myself in this property tech space and I’m obsessed about really, as you mentioned, solving some of the challenges that mortgage professionals experience on a day to day basis.
[David] I think it’s bringing clean water to people starting there is you got a heart that immediately here is after mine. I love giving to ministries and different nonprofits that are doing that because that is a real crisis in so many parts. It can make such a major difference in people’s lives by just doing that. So, kudos to you, but we’re going to stay on topic today and I’m really interested in getting your version of business intelligence, what that means as well as data warehousing, because I am a big fan of business intelligence. I think the difference that’ll be in companies that succeed moving forward will be those that know how to use business intelligence well, understand it and use it well, along with data warehousing, data mining, all of that. So tell us about that. What’s your vision?
[Spencer] Yeah, absolutely. Business intelligence, I agree with you is one of the keys to being successful in the future in this industry. Of course, when it was raining refinances and we were on that run, you didn’t necessarily have to make always the perfect or the right decisions for your business, but as margins have compressed and the volume has decreased, it becomes increasingly more and more important to maximize everything in your business. I guess starting with data warehousing, that’s really what unlocks business intelligence from my perspective and, data warehousing would just be this concept of bringing all of your data into one spot and what we see with a lot of lenders is they have data in their LOS, their point of sale, CRM, all these different, maybe direct to consumer platforms, and they don’t really all talk to each other. And so because of that, It can be really challenging to make data driven decisions. And so business intelligence is basically making sense of that data and saying things like, which branches are maybe losing money which producers have really high fallout rates, which producers are converting at a really high level and why might that be right and so business intelligence just gives you the ability to really make sense of your numbers and make the best decisions for your business going forward.
[David] Yeah, that’s really important. And you sit and think about. The importance of the topic, but then it’s how do you leverage that? and especially in 2024 and then going into 2025, explain how people can leverage it.
[Spencer] Yeah, absolutely. So, I think there’s a couple of different ways to look at it. For the loan officer, it’s how can you basically do more loans? And when you think about a sales funnel, let’s see, you have the lead and some become an application, some fund somebody repeat business. It’s just taking a really close up look at all of those stages and like, where are you doing well, where’s the room for improvement? Maybe who else at your company is doing well, what can you learn from them? And then for the enterprise, it’s just, how do we operate? As efficiently as we possibly can. Which regions and branches are making money at a higher rate per loan, which ones are not, which support staff are you’re working at a high level and which ones that we need to work with and help them improve their efficiency. And I think there’s a number of different buckets we can unpack there, but I think, What we see mostly for the loan officers, how can we help you do more business? And then for the enterprise, it’s how can we improve your bottom line, which is a combination of increased volume, but also increased efficiency.
[David] I think there’s a general term we use as automation. Everyone thinks they know what automation means, but when you look at mortgage automation, what does that mean to you in today’s market?
[Spencer] So, I would think of automation as this concept of what’s being done with like minimal or no human involvement. I think BI again, unlocks maybe some of the challenges that your business is experiencing. And I think automation is in many ways the solve for that. And like I mentioned the example of a sales funnel for a loan officer on average, what we see is for every a hundred leads of an officer get 20 complete application roughly. And so, there’s a massive drop off there. Of course, a lot of loan officers. When I say that, just say that’s absolutely not true. That’s BS. The counter that I offer back to them as well. So then what is your percentage? And they never really know. So it just that illustrates the challenge that we’re experiencing. But like automation in that sense would be okay. How can we take that from 20% to 30% or something like that? and so that would be, how can we leverage automation to convert to convert leads, stay in touch with them, a great example of automation that we like to use at ADM is this idea once someone starts an application, they often don’t complete it and it’s because, they’re all excited to get pre approved and they realize they got to start uploading all these documents and stuff.
[David] The journey begins and the interest drops off. It’s so true.
[Spencer] It’s so true, but it’s also why not just automate really good follow up and good content to just stay in front of them? Hey, no worries. I get this is daunting. Like I’m here for you. Give me a call. Happy to help you. And what we see is oftentimes is, there’s new leads coming in or referral partners calling and, a loan officer oftentimes just forgets to stay on that potential customer. And that’s one example of automation. Of course, there’s a lot more we could dive into. But again, I think it’s this really holistic kind of circle from my perspective of what is the data saying that’s working? what’s not working? and then how can we leverage technology to maybe improve on the things that are not working so well?
[David] And I think one of the things you touched on when we talked before was personalization, how it is all important that things be personalized and specifically the campaigns and doing so using customizable and tailorable automation. What do you mean by that?
[Spencer] Yeah. So this is a big one and I think this is the problem I’m obsessed on solving right now is really building that
[David] I’m drawn to, obsessed people on this topic because it’s a challenge in our industry.
[Spencer] It is a huge challenge, but I think one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is that there’s not a lot of great technology that allows for this. And the reason is because You have these enterprises that, the bank, IMB, large brokerage, and of course they rightfully care about things like compliance and branding and all of that. And then you have the producer that wants to put their own spin on things and they feel like they have ideas and how they can do it a little bit better. Maybe then corporate would do it for them and the reality is there’s sort of two sets of systems in our space. There’s the system that serves the enterprise. That really doesn’t allow for any customization or personalization of the top producer. And so, what happens, the top producer goes out and finds some system that they can use and customize and the enterprise maybe has very limited or no oversight. And that’s why you see Like these IMBs supporting six or seven different CRMs, which is just crazy.
[David] And that’s a testimony that whoever’s providing the technology, isn’t really going to the person and doing their work at studying what the user wants. I think the fact that you have customizable and tailorable automation really goes into, but you touched on something about compliance and security, because that’s what drives corporate crazy. We cannot have in those MLOs, are there void of any understanding of compliance and security, which this isn’t true, but their job is to go get business in and they trip over that one. So how do you solve for that? How’s your technology solve for that?
[Spencer] Absolutely. So, our goal is to help the enterprise maintain compliance and branding while giving the producers the ability to customize and put their own spin on things and it is a difficult challenge to solve. What I will say is that we’re getting better and better every day. But what we typically see is exactly what you said, which is we have this compliant platform, our loan officers don’t use it, so they’re out there downloading these software and sending out text blasts and things like that are not
[David] Totally outside of compliance.
[Spencer] Exactly. And the thing is you’re still on the hook for that. I hate to tell you that, but we’ve worked with a lot of customers that have had lawsuits brought against them because their LOs are out there using some software that corp or the banks never even heard of before and you’re still on the hook for that. Yeah. And what we see in our industry is that people just close their eyes and say we have this corporate provided platform, it’s compliant, and we’ll just close our eyes to anything that the loan officers might be doing. And so the way that we look at it is look like. The bedrock of any enterprise driven system is for the enterprise to be able to create automations, workflows, content deployed at scale. But then we’ve put our own spin on it, which is two things. One is like, they can create what we call as like enterprise offered content as well. So let’s say the example of the point of sale, someone wants to level up, add a lead conversion campaign to their kind of set of automations that they’re running, the enterprise can provide it and the person can just go grab and take it and use it. And so there’s a little bit of room for growth there. Like we work with our enterprise customers to give them help them provide that path for the loan officers to continue to level up. And then, at the end of that journey, if the loan officer either is a top producer, or you can tell that they know what they’re doing we have the ability for people to unlock the ability for the top producer to build their own workflows, build their own customizations things like that. I just want to go on the record. We have some customers that say out of the gate, a hundred percent of our loan officers can do that. That’s not my typical recommendation, but I will say it’s way better to let some of your producers that are sophisticated to be able to customize on the enterprise software because they’re going to go do it, whether you like it or not. And so it’s way better to have the oversight into it and so that’s I think one of the key things that that we figured out and people like is look like, I just, I’m not going to let everyone customize, but I need to have the ability to let some people customize. And unfortunately, just a lot of other software systems out there. Even something robust like Salesforce doesn’t give those capabilities. So, the top producers just say, I’m not using it. I’m done. I’m gonna, I’m going to go use something else. And that’s not good for anyone.
[David] Yeah, which creates all the compliance issues. I think it’s really admirable that you’ve recognized the problem and you’re going after it because what you’re really talking about is creating a customer experience and the customer, in my opinion, that we at the corporate level should think again, we have so many people that listen to this podcast that are in the C suite and so many of the managers who go, that was doggone loan officers. So loan officers, we’re not talking down to you guys at all. It’s so important that here’d be a teamwork and this starts corporate going all out to make the effort to give the customer, their customer, the mortgage loan originator the tools that they need. And it’s really important that the origination side of the business, those of us in that side of the business really work on that. But that comes down to the customer experience. How does a user friendly design, customization, integrations, all those things that you do so well make this process easier? What’s your solution?
[Spencer] Yeah, so absolutely. And I think there’s again, thinking about that customer journey and that we can get into that, the overall use of use thing, the example that I like to give is like that, of like you’re at a bowling alley, there’s like those kid things where you put the ball and it shoots it, then there’s the bumpers and then okay, get rid of the bumpers. That’s what we’ve tried to conceptualize, maybe a loan officer that’s really due to the industry. Maybe they’re new to technology. Maybe they’ve been using Excel, like maybe let’s use the shoot, let them get a feel for it. Then let’s put the bumpers up and then let’s take the bumpers away. But I think, unfortunately, what you’ve seen is. A lot of these software systems are just, it’s just a shoot. And so then someone’s I feel like I’ve graduated from the shoot. And it’s tough luck. The shoot is all, and that’s where…
[David] We don’t trust you. But it communicates something so poorly. When you say, I just don’t trust you. We’re going to keep the shoot and the bumpers in there and go come on. And that’s why we have the adoption problem that we really do. Where does data fit into this, the data driven component of your platform?
[Spencer] The kind of way that I think about it is it’s the warehouse bringing the data together. We have a hundred plus integrations out of the box. We want to bring the data together. Then from that, we can do the visualization, the business intelligence. There’s a million acronyms people use for that of course. From there we have, 50 plus stock reports out of the box that show you things that you’re right away, you’re going to be able to improve upon, and from there it’s the automation component, which is great. We have this very robust workflow engine. Let’s start to automate these challenges in your business, and then I think, the fourth component of that is great. We’re, this is all happening behind the scenes, but then to your point on the ease of use or kind of customization piece the way to take it to the next level is to get that that adoption level up. And so having an interface that is crazy easy to use with robust notifications for when certain things are happening. And of course the customization piece where people can start to level up and progress and do more. I think that is key, but I think you mentioned data, like that’s really the heartbeat of all of this. And because you’re bringing the end to one spot and then we’re automating, and then we’re also reporting on what’s working and what’s not working. So, most of our customers use our, we call scheduled reports feature, which is they have different reports coming into their inbox daily, weekly. And they’re doing it to their originators as well, showing, Hey, this is the improvements we’re making. This is what’s happening. And that drives adoption a lot of times because a lot of us are like, great, you’re doing these things for me, but I don’t think it’s doing much for my business. We’re using data to show them. Yeah, it is, that you used to have a 20% pull through rate from lead to application. Now it’s 22% and you could probably get the 25 if you just turned on this campaign, like I’ve been telling you to do. And at some point you can’t argue with the data, that’s the key to driving changes in behavior we’ve seen is just is being it’s letting the data speak for itself.
[David] When you talk about technology, bridging the gap between the enterprise and their top producers, it’s a real problem out there with so many of the legacy systems that we see in the market, what are you finding about the customization? go a little bit deeper into the customization that would really excite an MLO. By the way. I should say audience that who brought this to my attention and told me about ADM and Spencer were some MLOs that mortgage loan originators that absolutely found this as a very good system. And then I happened to check into you, but before we advise you to come on, I heard from the enterprise side or from the corporate side, they go, yeah, this is a compliance system. I go what’s he doing to what’s he doing? How’s that work? because I usually, I don’t hear that very often.
[Spencer] Again, it comes back to the ease of use. There’s nothing that just takes the wind out of your sails when you have this idea of a campaign or a workflow you want to build, and then you get in there and you spend an hour and you feel like you’re closer to getting it done or you’re like, I’m just, I’m paying a developer or whatever. And so there’s nothing worse than that. And so we create, a very, like a drag and drop very simple interface with a lot of presets and playbooks that we have, or we work partner with our enterprises so they can put their spin on it. So, it’s really easy to get up and running out of the gate. And I think one of the things we’ve done that’s unique is our account managers at ADM, they don’t get commission on expansion or retention. So that’s, common in the software world. It’s like for every customer that grows or you retain they get commissioned for what we’ve done is we’ve incentivized them differently, which is basically as people are using the platform more and more they get commission for that. And we have what’s called the ADM success path, which is like beginner, intermediate, advanced, there’s more categories.
[David] So, it’s not just selling it, loving them, leaving them, your sales folks are in there for the journey to continue to work with the company and the MLS that’s how I’ve not heard of that. That’s brilliant. Brilliant.
[Spencer] Yeah. Hasn’t been done a lot before, or really haven’t learned much. Like we might be wrong, but we’re not confused. Like we want to get people using it more. And so it’s, it’s just incentivized. And so we’re tracking that for each account and we give access to our enterprise customers as well, who’s using it, who’s creating more workflows, how many integrations everybody have, and how are people progressing? And so we have this kind of mapped out internally like we have a good idea of if you’re really new to technology, here’s your likely next steps. If you’re a top producer, here’s how we can partner with you to really leverage more of the tech. And I think the keyword on the technology is flexibility. There’s a lot of flexibility how we can deploy it. But I think there’s also the drive for internally. And one of the things we just did announce and launch last week was our 24/7 support. So there’s 24 hours a day chat, phone, and the key there is, we know loan officers work on weekends or late at night or early in the morning. And it’s again, same thing. You’re trying to build something and you’re not sure what to do, or you have a question. We don’t want you to wait three days, for an email to respond or didn’t you watch the video? You didn’t figure it out. just pick up the phone, it takes two minutes and there it is. Like that now you’re good to go. And again, we’re not perfect at this. We’re striving to get better and better, but I think we have some tools that are allowing us to partner with MLOs in this capacity for sure.
[David] Maybe that’s where the word obsession, you said you have an obsession. That 24/7 seven is a good thing, you’re right and mortgage loan originators don’t work normal hours and if you’re there needing support, if you really want adoption, get in there and do that. I’m really interested as we wrap this up, get your thought on future trends. We’re hearing so much about AI. What do you think is next? And what’s your guess?
[Spencer] I think there’s the industry trends and then there’s tech trends, I think from an industry standpoint. What sort of happened with the NAR settlement and things like that are going to be very disruptive I think it’s going to suck some money out of real estate not the lending industry, and I think it’s going to give Loan officer is an opportunity to differentiate themselves. So, consumers are maybe coming directly to you instead to a realtor, then pass to you. I think it also means if the name of the game has been referral partner management, of course it still is a name of the game, but there’s also that’s going to have to expand as well. And we want to partner with our customers on lead truly generation and things like that. I think from an AI perspective, I look at it as really, of course multiplier. Thinking about generative AI, maybe a loan officer, let’s say they could create one piece of content in 30 minutes AI might allow them to create 10 in 30 minutes and things like that. And there’s a few things that we haven’t announced that we will in the coming months around that, which I think will be really helpful to the industry, but, I look at it as a force multiplier and again, it comes back to the core challenge we’re solving, like if you’re the enterprise. I think you’re excited, but you’re excited about AI in the sense it’s going to help you process loans faster and more accurately, but you’re nervous about what’s going to happen with your loan officers if they get ahold of it. And so it comes back to that same thing. Like, how can we let the loan officers leverage the power of AI, will still allowing the enterprise to create those guard rails as needed perhaps which also helps the LO too, it’s, an LO doesn’t want to bowl under the gutter, right? it’s not good for anybody. And so I think some people maybe are a little too bullish on like aspects of there’s going to be a chatbot that does alone I don’t necessarily buy into that for a variety of reasons that, that we can talk about. So I think that we see a lot of it. I think the way that we’re looking at it is how can we help people create great content that’s compliant, that works at scale and then also how can we drive adoption? So how can we help our customers predict who is going to be likely to transact again, which leads are good, not great and also just this is the vision and we’re not there yet. I don’t want to give that impression. We will work towards this idea of a dashboard or inbox where you log in and we’re ADM kind of knows what you need to do today. Right. And that’s, how helpful is that for LO to have that kind of system helping them and backing them up where I’d say, these are the things you got to do. And you still didn’t do these two things like it’s really important, actually, right? You make these two calls or whatever it is. And so I think that’s how we envision AI supporting our customers, but I think there’s a lot I think just broadly in the industry, on the document processing underwriting side, I think AI is going to be extremely transformative for sure.
[David] Without question, I’m reading the book again. I think it’s the third time, The Coming Wave and it’s a great book. It talks about all that is coming and I don’t know, just not sure that many of us are prepared for the transformation that’s going to be coming to our industry and all industries, Spencer, what a joy to have you here. I’m really excited. How can people reach out to you and learn more about you?
[Spencer] The only type of social media I do is LinkedIn. So you’re welcome to connect or follow me on LinkedIn. For ADM it’s think ADM. So just think A-I-D-I-U-M dot com is our site. And so you can learn more about it there and take a look as you see fit. And if you go out to the conferences, we do a lot of MBA, The Mortgage Collaborative, all those stuff. So definitely look for us and love to hear what’s going on. And our approach is to try and be consultative partners with everyone that we work with. And we’ve definitely found there’s a lot of challenges that every lender experiences, but again, the data shows that some do certain things really well and others, do other things really well. And so we’d love to work with and take that consultative approach with everyone that we chat with. And yeah just excited to have more and more conversations in this space and hopefully get closer to solving that challenge, building a really true robust bridge between the enterprise and the producer who’s right now, there’s really not a bridge there.
[David] There’s not. And if you accomplish that is significant. Folks we’ve had as our special guest today, Spencer Dusebout, and I think we should say he does a lot with ADM. And so encourage you to check him out playing on the words there. But Spencer, thanks for taking some time to be with us this day. I appreciate it. Really good.
[Spencer] Yeah, David. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
[David] I’ve heard so much about you. I’m glad I met you. Encourage our listeners to reach out and connect with you. Thank you.
[Spencer] Fantastic. Thanks.
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Spencer Dusebout, co-founder and CEO of Aidium, is driving innovation in the mortgage industry with a Business Intelligence and CRM platform tailored specifically for mortgage professionals. Under his leadership, Aidium has emerged as a powerful player, bringing easy-to-use and innovative tools to the forefront of the mortgage industry. Aidium stands out for its robust business intelligence capabilities, user-friendly interface, powerful automation builder, full customizability, and exceptional customer support. Spencer’s vision is to streamline the mortgage process, enabling professionals to work more efficiently and make data-driven decisions with ease. His dedication to creating impactful technology solutions has made Aidium a game-changer in the mortgage space.