[David] Allen Pollack is here. Allen, good to have you here. Allen is out as a new consultant, launching a new business. I'm really excited about what he is doing and he's here with this week's tech report, Allen.
[Allen] Thanks, David. It's interesting in new business that I mentioned needing photos for my new site. It's been difficult to find a photographer who can make me look halfway decent. So, I had to go to one of those AI systems. So, I think it's actually funny that I've got all these AI photos. I put one of them up in my profile on zoom right now, which you can see. I picked the ones that, looked the best, daughters have said, hey, those don't look too bad, but I am working on getting an actual photographer that has some unique kind of edge to them. But anyways. I mentioned that because I think a lot of us have tried some of those different AI generators and the ones that are offshore. Like I used one that I think is probably somewhere in Europe or in Germany and a lot of photos are like me wearing giant turtlenecks and overcoats, things that you would never wear in America or just really weird styles. But anyways, let's get on with some fun stuff. We talked about AI scams and phone scams and all those different things and every week We always bring these cool things up. We'll get this one. David phone scams are on the rise, but AI granny is on the job and I wasn't going to bring this up, but I've seen it in a couple of places now. So, I said, you know what? This is just too funny. So, Daisy who looks in chats like your grandmother is a conversational AI powered chat bot built by a British phone company called Q2 actually it's O2 to fight fraud, Daisy tricks phone scammers into thinking they're speaking with a real human and rambles on to keep fraudsters occupied and away from real people and while AI Grammy doesn't have enough knitting stories to stop phone fraud, it's worth a shot. So get these stats. Global consumers lost 1 trillion or more to online scams last year in Virgin Media 02. This company that came out with AI Granny. They blocked 315 million in fraudulent transactions. So, that's equivalent to one every two minutes. So AI Granny is about to hit your local phone systems.
[David] Wow. That is really interesting. AI Granny. Yeah. How did we learn more about it? What? What websites can we go to?
[Allen] We'll, you could actually just Google Daisy, D-A-I-S-Y, the AI Granny. Okay. And it will come up.
[David] We'll do it. Yeah. Wait to get in that one. I'm not gonna do it right now because I don’t wanna get distracted. cause I would, yeah. That's fascinating.
[Allen] While you didn't ask me to be a motivational speaker, I'm going to, I'm going to shed some motivation to our friends today, or at least some wisdom that you can give to other folks. It's interesting when I've, been co founder or in the executive team, different companies, I've always found certain employees that wanted more in your meetings with them and your annual reviews. But you never see them asking for more, especially in the technology side of the fence. Sometimes it's hard to prove that you're good or to ask when you're always heads down coding. There was a term that one person made one time many years past. He said, “Code till your fingers bleed” That doesn't help people. So anyways, I bring this up because a lot of times somebody will need help or ask for help on a project and people just don't raise their hand. Sometimes it's as simple as just saying, I can do it. I want to do it, or I'm here to help. It could be the silliest thing, but those are the ways that you start engaging with more people and helping people to understand who you are, your personality, your net worth. So here's the quote, David, and I love this quote. “If you don't ask, the answer is always no” So don't be afraid to stand up, raise your hand, ask if someone needs help, get out there, show them that you're interested in their business, that you're interested in learning what they do, have some empathy and that'll help you get a long way and it works by the way. I'm not just saying this because it's some random quote on the internet. I've done this myself. I know people that have taken my advice, go out there again. It's if you don't ask, the answer is always no. Alright, let's move on to some great stuff. So, talking about, asking for more and wanting more AI grannies getting a job. Did you know there was a survey by Glassdoor? They surveyed almost 4,000 people and they put this, these results together and they're staggering. Many professional, the title, many professionals are feeling stuck in their careers. Tech workers in particular are reporting dissatisfaction with their roles. Now, it didn't mention what type of companies these folks worked at, but get this 65% of all professionals surveyed reported feeling stuck in their career. It's a 2025 work life survey trend, work life trend survey, so, if you're interested in looking it up. Accounting was at the 52% mark, advertising was at 70%, so that was the second highest. These are, again, these are people that are feeling stuck in their careers. Consulting was 69%. Finance was in the 60s. Law was in the 40s. So, interesting, I think for some reason attorneys, maybe the type they spoke with, didn't feel as stuck. But technology was a whopping 73%. Which drives me to think why, because there's so many opportunities in technology, it's one of those areas where you can transform who you are, and you can do something different. You can go from writing technical specs to being a product manager to being a tester to learning how to code to, working with customers and customer success and onboarding. There's so many opportunities. So not sure the depth of that, but 60 in general, 65% are feeling stuck in their careers. So that was very interesting. Alright, David, some tech updates from the industry. These are not the typical ones that I usually talk about, but I wanted to bring these up also partially, hint, hint, because GPT told me these were important today. I don't always use GPT by the way. But Synergy One, they have a lending AI platform. They just introduced what they call Synergy GPT. It's an enterprise AI bot designed to enhance operational efficiency and customer service. So, what they're basically saying reading through the little pieces, like their initiative reflects the company's commitment to integrating proprietary technology solutions. At the end of the day, guys, what they're trying to say is that they want to serve their clients and streamline the process. So, Synergy One now has their lending AI integration. Check it out. If you're interested. Better AI, they have a loan assistant. This is a pretty cool one too. Better has launched a new platform featuring an AI loan assistant aimed at simplifying the mortgage application process. This tool is part of Better, broader strategy to leverage technology for improved customer experience and operational efficiency. Again, very similar to the prior press release, a lot of the same words are being used. I will tell you, thinking about jobs and thinking about, are you happy where you're at an opportunity? One of the startups that I'm involved in right now has, they're building a mobile app and in that mobile app process, even though there's AI and there's technology. In order to create the screens and the user engagement, there's iterations and review and critical thinking and talking to external people. There's things that are part of the process that are beyond just AI generating code or using AI to test. So, keep that in mind, folks. You just need to stand up and ask. You need to say, Hey, I want an opportunity. I want a chance. Go out of the realm. There's so many opportunities and there's so much complexity around what we do on the technology side and then David, there's a new battleground in mortgage lending for borrower retention. We're going to toss up one or two for next week. So, either one, we talk about, borrower retention and why it matters next week or way more fun, I think. That awkward showdown hiring people where you're pretending that your company has it altogether and they're pretending the person you're interviewing, like they didn't just ask chat GPT how to answer the questions without knowing what they would be when they came to the interview. Next week we can cover the real questions and beyond what's your greatest weakness or if you're a vegetable, which one would you like to be? So, we can think about why, being able to unmute in zoom is actually a skill people need to have, or knowing when or not to, when to hit reply all, so those are the two topics we'll have to toss them up for which one will be the best for next week.
[David] Yeah. Good stuff here. I think one of the most interesting things is the skills that are going to be most desired in the future. No matter where you're working mortgage or otherwise financial services or beyond. It's going to be your ability to work with AI Chat GPT. How effective are you able to use that? They're teaching classes on that and universities.
[Alice] was going to jump in on something Alan mentioned about interviewing. So I would be interested in talking about this because I think to your point, to try to test somebody on their knowledge today, you give them a test that they can take away and bring back. You have no idea how much AI they've used to complete that. We've actually been working with our managers on, you now have to do it live, like during an interview. You actually have to have your test cases there, whatever topic you're testing on, and go, okay, I want to watch you complete this in front of me and do screen sharing and really, interviewing is going to have to take on a whole new level because of AI.
[David] Yeah, it's a really good point. Now it's very good.
[Marc] David, all I got to say is, and Alan probably knows this. If you think that anything you pull off of chat GPT or any other major system is yours and nobody can ever figure out you got it off ChatGPT. You're in a rude awakening because they've come up with a couple pieces of software, you can supposedly run things off the major AI systems through blanket them and put a personal approach to them and all that, but it's really hard to do that. And the universities had to go to this because students were completely right and they had a class, everybody's writing on the same topic and all the papers look the same. You don't hit the same organization. Things are in the same order. it was crazy. So, there's a lot going in education about that now. And probably I think the smart thing do, and I think Allen would agree with us. Use AI as a guideline. Use as a tool
[David] yeah, not the end all be all.
[Marc] Provoke your thinking process to help you do a better job. Don't have AI do your work for you because when it does, you're not going to mean anything anymore. But use it. Get the laundry list of things that you need to make sure you include in your presentation and doing things like that make a lot of sense. But when you sit there and have it write it for you and you proof it, you change a couple words in it and you go down the road, that's not going to work.
[David] It's not gonna work. That's not what we're talking about using AI effectively. By the way, we're talking about using AI in a way to enhance your critical thinking skills, how are you processing this information? , it's a topic we should probably get into Allen. I'd love to have you covering that more down the road, but we're out of time. Absolutely. Yeah, we're just flat out on 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.
