Lykken on Lending

[David] Cause we’ve got Alan Pollock with the tech update, Alan. So good to have you here, friend.

[Allen]It’s so good to be here. Sorry. I couldn’t make it last week. I spring break for actually spring break, it was graduation and my daughter came home from college and we took them to the USVI what a great place. I had never been there before. The island can use some electricity because it goes out every day and we got lucky, house we rented had a full diesel generator. So we never ran out of air conditioning, but you need air conditioning and you need power.

[David] You do. Yeah. Mr. Kittle knows a little about the USVI.

[David Kittle] So USVI. So Alan what Island were you on?

[Allen] The St. John.

[David Kittle] Okay. That’s the best of the three. St. Thomas. You got to go to St. Thomas to get to St. John, but you were on a while. Yeah. So yeah. Electricity is beautiful out there that you can count on.

[Allen] Definitely not. And David, I was at a restaurant called the Windmill when the podcast occurred last Monday, and I didn’t have any service. I was planning on calling in and it overlooks, you can see the edge of Kenny Chesney’s house. So it wasn’t a bad place. Sorry to make everyone jealous, but man, I think everybody needs to go to the USVI and then you can get on a boat and visit the British Virgin Islands, which is even more amazing and then you’re lucky if you have power and air conditioning after that.

[David] Yeah, but let’s get into the tropics like that. It’s beautiful. Yeah,

[Allen] it is. It is. So, let’s get into a couple of cool things. One, David, a couple of people laughed a while ago. We talked about the, eat a taco on top of this plastic bowl and everything that lands in the bowl falls into your next taco. so someone else actually came out with it’s called the taco spoon and it’s shaped in just the right way that it fits inside your taco and you can scoop the meat onto the bottom perfectly the cheese etc. If you went out and bought the the taco funnel now you want to go out and buy the taco spoon at $6.00 by the way on Amazon. All right, let’s get to some good stuff. It’s a mortgage industry like no other. We definitely use a lot of video calls. I actually, David, just turned my video off because I was getting intermittent audio and I didn’t want to mess this up, but check this out. This is a company called Daily Tech. They send out all kinds of really good daily tech information. They said 71% of people add extra energy to maintain good posture during video calls. 32% of people feel free to get up and exit the frame during a video call. David’s doing a good job of his posture right now. 48% smile extra more on camera than they normally would off camera. And 27% use exaggerated gestures on video calls. So I thought that was great. Yeah, there we go.

[David] And to all you are just listening. We’ll run the video on this on YouTube and and also do some promotion watching Mr. Kittle’s very demonstrative expressions as you’re doing that. Yeah. Very good. Daily tech. So that’s one of the things that people can go check out. If you’re wanting to get,

[Allen] Yeah, they’ve got great tech stories every single day. They told me this as well, David, do you know that every single new JP Morgan hire, it automatically gets AI training as the company embraces the new tech world. That’s right.

[David] We’re going to talk about that in just a minute, but I want to go through your report and then I want to talk about the conference. I was just came back from last week.

[Allen] Yep. And one more tidbit I stole from the Chrisman report or borrowed, we shall say. Check this out. Rob had said about two weeks back, insurance companies are monitoring homes from the sky using drones and homeowners across the country are having their coverage ended due to aerial monitoring airplanes and satellites. Yeah. Now we’re talking about fraud, right? And there’s fraud in so many different ways and areas. I actually don’t think it’s a bad idea. I think it’s somewhat genius. I know drones are being used for a lot of things. But if you’re interested in more, you could just go ahead and Google that. But super, super interesting. All right. Two quick things. David, we’re always complaining about how tech vendors or let’s just say we’re providing a fun conversation around why tech providers talk about they’re the best, the leading edge, the number one, right? Everyone has the same claim to fame. Here are two advertisements that I recently saw online and I love the way they place their message and I just wanted to share this. I think from the lender point of view, it’s real, more realistic and it hits home. The first one is Total Expert. It was a simple one line advertisement. It said, it’s not you, it’s your technology. totalexpert.com genius statement, stay more with less. They didn’t claim they’re the best. They hit a personal opinion and a personal spot. So one hats off to those guys. The second one, David, this one’s great. This is actually from Maxwell and it says. Does it feel like your current point of sale vendor has lost focus on mortgage? So they didn’t call anyone else specifically. They had another personal pain point and they say as a mortgage specialized partner, Maxwell is committed to giving lenders a competitive advantage and then they go on to say, and this is the part I love the most with Maxwell’s point of sale. You can get tailored workflows and it fits your unique needs. But then finally they put in the proof point compared to a top competitor. They didn’t have to name anybody Maxwell point of sale averages a 5. 9 percent higher pull through rate from rate lock to close, and that averages 42 million in additional loan volume. That’s huge! More than likely, your prior or your existing company on the Point-of-Sale side may, in your mind, have lost focus on mortgage, because everyone has different needs. And Maxwell just simply put it. So, to the vendors that listen to our program here advertising is really important and I think having something more truthful proof points and not trying to say you’re the number one, you’re the best, you use AI for everything. Everybody’s saying that and it’s far from the truth in some cases. Those are two, just want to make those two quick call outs. All right, David, I am going to move into customer experience. Interestingly enough. My daughter, and this was what kicked it off actually, and then I just happened to run into two articles that matched it. My daughter had to go back to Mississippi to college after our trip from USVI, and so I put her on a Delta Airlines flight. Make a long story short, the flight was severely delayed, she was gonna miss her connection. So I called Delta Airlines. First person I got was very helpful. They put her on a new flight that said, Hey, you’re gonna get an email, you’ll have to print a new boarding pass, et cetera. She lands in Atlanta. Luckily, I got her two hours of time in the delay. So she goes up to the first counter and asks for help. The person not only made her wait, but then, and she’s, she’s a young girl. Then wound up telling her they can’t help her. She went to the next one, couldn’t help her customer service had a line down the hall. So I started calling Delta airlines and they have chat with us now. So I clicked to chat with them. Now, the first person I spoke with said, sure, we can help you. Then disappeared, never came back. And you know how these chat systems work is they’re talking to 5 to 10 people at a time, right? And so they lose track, make a long story short. Delta never was able to provide me her flight information through a chat. I was a 30 minute wait on the phone call. She finally went to the fourth or fifth gate agent that felt really bad for her and finally helped her. So this is really interesting. There’s two pieces that were put out in our market within the last two weeks. The first one is from ICE and you know what the first thing they said is. Know your borrowers and help guide their future, right? And the survey basically says this invest in your online offering. Even the oldest and least tech savvy borrowers want and expect the convenience of a digital portal to process part of that transaction. We know that now there’s, we no longer have to pretend people want to need to go digital. Everybody’s experienced this already. Even when you walk into the DMV to renew your social security, let’s say you lost your social security card. You’re going to do it through a kiosk, a computer interface. Everything is digital now, digitize your back office is what ice talks about. Invest in relationships with realtors. That’s huge because that’s all about capturing that initial lead, doing good for people, showing people that, you want to do good for their customers, creating good relationships. That’s huge. High tech high touch is what ICE called it. But this is the most important too. Know your borrower. Understand their preference by age and experience. It may even be that once you get their birth date, you tailor your workflow based on who they are. Make the font larger. If they’re in their late sixties, whatever it is, know your borrower and then finally, the last thing is this is the absolute most important stay in touch. Ongoing relationships will generate repeat business and referrals years from now and I got to say, ICE does a lot of marketing and they’ve had a lot of people. This entire article was so spot on. So go check it out. It’s called know your borrowers and help guide their future. And the last thing I want to mention is BeSmartee also had an article they just recently put out within the same timeframe called mortgage technology trends for 2024. Navigating the future. And you know what? The first thing they said is catering to the digital consumer. Now that means a lot. I’m not going to unpack it today. What it means is know your customer. You’re serving people you’re doing a good deed for them. They don’t owe you anything. Make sure you give them the right experience and you understand who they are.

[David] Yeah, Kittle, you and I have been in the business for forever. And it’s like basic stuff. It’s like basic stuff, but it’s so important that it get reviewed. Allen, good report. Appreciate it.

[David Kittle] So Allen, I was going to tell you before you go, that was one of your best reports and I was wondering at the end, you’re talking about know your customer, if you were going to use the R word, because it comes down to relationship every single time. I can’t tell you. The age group, the geography, because of whatever is customary in that particular part of the world may not work someplace else, and it is a great report.

[Allen] Yeah, just on what you both are saying. I’ll just leave this one thing out there. If you’re a financial institution, you have brick and mortar and you have somebody, whether it’s a reverse mortgage or they’re looking to take out equity to give to their kids, whatever it is, you need to let them know if they want to come face to face and shake your hand and sit in front of you. You offer that. Absolutely. A lot of people of those different age ranges and I’m not going to mention anyone on this podcast, they like going and talking to people and seeing people. So we’ll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.

[David Kittle] Allen, before you go, the thing I still enjoy most when there’s a lot of screaming at a recording, you start to think you’re going crazy. Cause they can’t holler back at you. Yeah. Yes.

[Allen] Good report, Allen. I thought of you last week, Allen, because I have been retained to be a KOL key opinion leader for a new cryptocurrency it’s called real coin. Based out of Vietnam. It’s coming to the United States and they want me to come in and be an influencer with them. And it’s a KOL, Key Opinion Leader. And so met them, flew out. They retained me just before the conference. Could you come out, be here? So I got to go out and meet the founder and as well as some of the investors in it. This is real, what’s going on. So it was the blockchain expo, North America and the next one is in Dubai. The conference at go imagine being at the biggest MBA conference you’ve ever been at in the tech. And you know how some of these bet this was bigger than that. We are seeing an explosion in technology in the world of blockchain. It is coming. We’re going to a digital currency. I’m convinced of it. I’m convinced that there’s a lot of changes that are coming. And I keep telling you, listeners read the book, the coming wave. I’ve talked about it. I’ll say it again and again. There’s not a book that you can, it’s more important for you to read right now to get your head wrapped around what is coming and it is coming. And that conference that I saw was made me so aware of it. We’ve got coming up on a future interview is Bill Erbey. Founder of Ocwen and also the founder and owner of AltaSource. He has got a new digital currency out that he’s working on. It’s called ForumPay F O R U M. We’re recording the interview on Friday. I’m looking forward to releasing that, but it is exploding and lenders. If you’re not on top of this, you’re going to find yourself spinning like a turtle laying on its back in the middle of a busy highway, you’re going to get squished. It is so important. You understand what is happening, please. Allen, good report. You help us work through that each and every week. Thank you, sir.

[Allen] Good to be here, David. Actually, I think we’re laggers, we’re not far behind, but in the top X amount of countries that are leading in blockchain, I do not think we’re number one or even number two.

[David] No, it’s happening. we could go on. In fact, we’re going to have. Bill Erbey on to talk about that. And then we then also go to starting a series of interviews With David Levine who is working real closely with the founders of Real Coin And we’re going to start laying out because I want to bring our listeners up to speed on what is happening In the digital currency area and these big, the tokenization of everything And how blockchain works. We’re going to cover some of the basics and you’re going to want to be tuning into some of these future podcasts. David Levine has agreed to come on. It’s going to be really good. So anyway, good stuff.

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Allen Pollack, 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.