[David] But let’s get over to Allen Pollack and talk about technology, the latest in what’s going on. Allen, what’d you got?
[Allen] I don’t have anything really too crazy or funny to start off. Today I was working with GPT to come up with some funny things but one of those days where GPT wasn’t that funny but get this, I thought this was cool. Somebody has tried out a robot that is walking down the streets of Austin, Texas with a cowboy hat on. It’s called Jake the Riz. And it’s a cowboy hat wearing humanoid robot named Jake wandering downtown Austin, spitting out Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, like you got that boss energy G and it went viral. Built on a uni tree, G one robot platform and controlled remotely. So somebody’s in their closet in their house controlling this thing takes learning social interaction through deep reinforcement learning. So it’s pretty darn funny. There’s a picture which you can just Google, and it literally looks like somebody wearing somebody six foot tall wearing a giant robot costume for Halloween. What was that movie with the robot? Number five is alive. What would, do you remember the name of that?
[David] Oh yeah. Number five is alive. I love that movie. Oh, what was that? That’s what it.
[Allen] It looks like a nicer robot, but number five is alive. I don’t know why. I’m not remembering. But anyways, let’s get to a little bit of mortgage news. How about that? That’s what we’re here for. So I got a couple quick little stories.
[David] It happens at Austin. Allen,
[Marc] Allen, you do know that’s the norm for Austin, Texas.
[David] I was gonna say keep Austin famous bumper sticker from here. So keep Austin weird and it’s a robot. It would happen here if it, we used to have Leslie who was a transvestite and wore a pink tutu and would roam the streets Austin with a pink tutu and a bikini top as a transvestite. He was hilarious. And and he ran for Mayor Dang Year. just about one because everyone thought it was just hilarious. So anyway Austin, only in Austin. Keep it weird here.
[Allen] The name of the movie is Short Circuit. Just came to me. Short Circuit. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yep. Number five is alive. Let’s get into some Mortgage Tech news because that’s what you guys are all here for. So a couple quick ones. I’m gonna run through them because I think they’re quick stories and nothing too in depth. One, Mortgage Flex just launched what they call their cloud native LOS. You may be saying, whoa, why aren’t we a little bit past? We just talking about crypto and mortgage, and now we’ve got a cloud native LOS. Some platforms weren’t always built on the cloud, so hats off to the folks over at Mortgage Flex. If you’re a mortgage Flex user, now you have a cloud native LOS check this out. Rob Crisman he was one of the greatest guys in the industry. He just launched two things. One is the Crisman marketplace. So it’s now a centralized hub where lenders can discover, compare, and evaluate mortgage tech vendors. How cool is that? So there are a couple categories and a couple vendors on there. If you go check it out, and I’m sure that will build up and be larger. I use AI against his newsletter all the time, and it always pulls out stories. The funny thing though is because of the structure of how Rob puts it together, AI thinks technology vendors are the same as when a lender says we have a new TPO channel. And so trying to train GPT on certain words and certain things to exclude points of his newsletter. But my point of saying this is his newsletter and his content is always jam packed with so much stuff. And because of that, he’s gonna have a great marketplace there. So check it out and if you wanna be listed in it, I’m sure you just reach out to him or there’s a link on there. And then second, I also took a look at this Rob Crisman has launched what he calls the top mortgage talent finder. I don’t know if that’s the exact name, but you can go on his website and you can connect with leading mortgage employers and professionals. And if you check it out, there’s a whole bunch of jobs listed there. They’re categorized and you can even search for remote jobs. So hats off to Rob for what he’s doing in the monetization of his platform there. Alright, three more things. David. Yeah.
[David] Rob Robbie, your son is probably pulling this stuff off. Yeah. Good. Yeah.
[Allen] Three more things that we should know about this week in the mortgage industry. Number one better.com has just rolled out an AI tool called Betsy and 10 Min better. Yeah. Betsy does AI income and asset review and 10 min is automated pricing and eligibility, which is quite interesting. I’m gonna say this. Back in 2002 and 2003, when we built Nylex, we created something called Best X Doc type, which nobody had anything like it. And what it was is it showed you that the 4% rate you can go no doc as well as full doc and we’ve helped find opportunity. Can you imagine with a best X pricing engine in AI, how you can truly evaluate as the loan officer or as a guide, a helper to the loan officer to better evaluate ways that you can put someone in a product. It’s not that we as LOs don’t understand product or the pricing engines aren’t that great. Sometimes it’s just like what we were talking about last week with the Tesla and auto driving, right? You can look around the road at you, but Tesla’s cameras looking at a 360 degree view and processing information faster at the same time than your brain can do it. Imagine you have ways to look at different scenarios and opportunities. Imagine if you could look at down payment assistance, all these different things all at the same time. This is where AI, we’ve gotta get our head out of the gutter thinking. AI is just gonna do underwriting, just a US underwriting. It’s gonna be used everywhere, folks. And hats off to Better on that. I’m sure there’s 20 more people listening to this podcast right now that know about someone that’s doing pricing and automated AI. On the pricing side rather, eligibility qualification is what I’m talking about, not the underwriting of the loan and everything else. We’re doing it in income automation validation processes. It’s being used on the appraisal side. It’s being used. You ready for this one? My next item that so of the three last things I said, number two, Optimal Blue just introduced a refi opportunity trigger tool. So what they’re doing is an automated tool. It highlights refinance opportunities when rates drop. So it continuously scans existing portfolios. It’ll flag those loans. It’ll say, Hey, this loan could benefit and it will alert the loan officer immediately. It’s great because it’s got real time information, it’s got the database of content and it prevents raindrop churn. So right now, folks, we’re looking for opportunities, right? As originators, you’re looking to figure out ways that you can help your existing customers either refer you out even if they’re not ready to buy or refinance. Your communication, your outbound connection helps build upon that relationship, their brand. So anyways, hats off Optimal blue for that. And then finally, NCT launched Atlas. It’s a generative AI for capital markets. Get this, what they’re saying. It suggests hedging strategies, pricing tactics, and lock recommendations based on live agency, API data. And you get real time AI insight into the capital market moves faster decisions, less guesswork. So I haven’t seen it, I don’t know exactly what they’ve done, but I’m going to guess it. It can be like talking to a chat bot or getting suggestive information, like when you type something into Google and it suggests an AI response. So check it out. A lot of people are MCT users or fans and I would take a look at that. And then, the last thing I’m gonna say here, David I’m involved in one of my startups, which is in the music industry. And we just went to a platform to track all of our analytics and the company’s called Mixpanel and I was absolutely blown away. By how fast and how simple the BI platforms have come from over 10 years ago when I was building BI in the mortgage industry. And I know that, there’s a couple of BI systems out there, but if you’ve not looked at BI in general or you think, ah, it’s not for me, it’s been too complicated, or I don’t need to hire a data guy, go check out. There’s some solutions out there that they’ve grown by leaps and bounds. And it may be that I’m not suggesting any of the technology vendors in our direct industry are not good or are not innovating but you’ve gotta sometimes open your eyes a little broader or look a little further down the road, put your near side of glasses on and see what’s out there because I was building dashboards in minutes with data and it was calculating and coming up with suggestions. It’s wild. So check that stuff out and I’ll just leave you all with that. Just don’t chase every squirrel, every shiny penny, keep your eyes open. Hopefully you got good team members that are strategizing and looking out for you.
[David] You raised a great point. Remember Motivity Solutions years ago, and it’s bought by Black Knight. They were one of the first ones out there with a dashboard with the business intelligence. And now you have Power BI. There’s so many other new technologies that are part of the Microsoft suite products that can really build tools. And I have a client who has created these just gifted when it comes to technology. And he built a BI tool that a dashboard for running his business. It is brilliant. It’s proprietary. He is not gonna sell it. He is not gonna give anyone else any insight into it. But you look at how he managed, literally can manage it from a ski lift. And that’s how we were doing our on the golf course. If you were doing Mr. Kittle things, you literally manage your business from a golf cart on an iPad or an iPhone. That’s it’s, you have up to the minute information at your fingertips and you can make decisions and right there could go on and on about that. But we’re running outta time.
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.