[Kittle] So let me throw this over at this point and bring in Allen Pollack. And let’s give us, a Tech Update, Allen.
[Allen] Absolutely. By the way, the there was something I was gonna mention. I was in the Chrisman report maybe Saturday. But there was a loan officer who was beat out by AI, and he had given an unbelievable rate to a borrower. I’m giving everyone the summary. He gave an unbelievable rate to a borrower, and AI created a scorecard and said that his rate was in the middle. It wasn’t high, it wasn’t low, but it wasn’t good enough. And what’s interesting about that is customers are now going to AI first, and I’ve got something about that today which is very interesting. But I wanna start with something funny like I always do. And this definitely has something to do with the mortgage industry. And I know David, that you are an avid golfer. Bill, I don’t know if you’re an avid golfer or not. I am not. You’re not. Okay. But I’m sure David Lincoln likes to play. I think he’s learning how to play golf, but we’d have to give him the senior shaft ’cause he’s gonna need that extra swing power. But anyways, it’s called the Croc Alarm. And a Florida startup just raised money to build an AI-powered sonar system that alerts you if a crocodile or alligator is in the water. Green light, safe. Red light equals gator. But here’s the thing, when you live in Florida, and I’ve been here about 14 years now, the very first thing they tell you is any time water, just assume there’s a gator in it. So I don’t really know who they’re selling the Croc Alarm to. Just assume there’s a gator. And for anyone that loves tech and saw the TV show a couple years back, maybe 10 now, Silicon Valley on HBO, there was a guy he was an Asian guy and he was an engineer, and he developed this system that you can take a picture and it will tell you what the food is. And it was meant to be seafood, like S-E-E, but the venture capitalist folks didn’t understand that they… Actually it was meant to be seafood, but they thought it was see food. And he went to give a big demo and it said, “Hey, this is a hot dog.” And then he took a picture of I think it was like a piece of pizza, and it said, “Not hot dog.” So the Croc Alarm’s real simple. It’s either there is or there isn’t. Let’s just assume there is, so I’ll leave you all with that. Oh. All right, let’s get into some mortgage news.
[Kittle] So Allen, let me just interject. I saw on social media this morning, you bring up crocodiles. Yeah. And the lady goes to the front door and there’s like a seven-foot croc looking in her front door. Okay? Wow. And it had the caption on there, I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it says there are 1.3 million crocs in Florida. Is that right? Does that sound right?
[Allen] There’s a lot. They’re everywhere. But they don’t go af- they don’t, like they hop in people’s pools. They get lost sometimes. They do show up at people’s homes, but it’s very rare. You can win the lottery for the amount of times that’s gonna happen to you.
[Kittle] Yeah. Anyway, I just thought I’d bring that up. That would certainly make me cautious going out the front door after that.
[Allen] Yeah. Funny enough, you’ll see kids fishing in small little retention ponds and even small little areas off the intercostals, and there’s no gator issues. You just don’t wanna walk your small dog in front of the water because you’ll find that gators have spy senses and will pop out and come after you and your dog Great. You won’t find me there. So sorry to take you off message there. Get back. No, it’s great. So Zillow did, They’re always doing data analysis, but here’s the part I just said to. Borrowers are calling lenders first. So this is in the Crismon report and you know what? I gotta thanks to Rob Crismon and his team. The data that he puts in his reports all the time are just phenomenal. But October 22nd, he said 29% of buyers contacted a lender as their very first home-buying step, which is up from 18%. That’s a big jump, folks. It’s almost double. They’re saying that 58% of people spoke with a lender before their first three steps, and 47 were pre-approved within the same early window. So because of that, Zillow is integrating financing directly into the home search, so affordability adjusts in real time. So the takeaway of the story here, folks, is that borrowers are doing their research, they’re using AI, and they’re reaching out to lenders first. So if they’re reaching out to you, you didn’t do the cold call prospecting or it wasn’t a referral, you need to have… you need to pick that phone up right away. You need to have a great experience. You need to be personal, memorable, and educated. So keep that in mind. The shift is happening. By the way, that’s a huge jump, folks. 29% of borrowers contacted a lender, up from 18%, probably less than a year ago. It’s a big jump. Okay, let’s move on. AI marketing fraud is easier, not harder. So with AI, this is also from Rob’s report. With AI, people are doing way more fraud. It’s a lot easier. You can make a bank statement in 20 seconds, a fake pay stub. You can hack into email systems and generate mass messages that market people towards different ideas. LOs are now telling Rob, in his report, he was saying that AI has increased fraud more than it’s actually induced it– reduced it, rather. So keep an eye out. I know some lenders are doing education. They have emails and other types of things that go out to their customers. Keep that up. You can’t get, lax on that because you’re just gonna wind up with borrowers that lose their down payment. It happens. It may not have happened to you, but it does happen, so keep your eye on that. And then here’s some interesting news from ICE. I won’t give an opinion but they’re saying, get this, $1,154 per loan return. And when I saw that, I had to read it, and I was like, “What? How is that even possible?” So ICE commissioned an independent research from MarketWise Advisors for the 2026 Encompass ROI study. And what they found every dollar spent on Encompass returned approximately seven and a half times that amount, up to $1,154 per loan. But yet the cost to produce a loan has held between 10,000 and 12,000 for three straight years. By the way, folks, the, the cost to produce a loan for 20 years has been way, way up there. When the word digital mortgage started, everybody started saying that the cost for a loan is up there. But anyways people are saying that this report rather not people, that seven and a half times that amount, They’re generating eleven hundred and fifty-four dollars per loan. You may wanna check that out. You can find it online, the ICE Encompass ROI, and it was commissioned by MarketWise Advisors. So Google that. We’ve talked about Vensight quite a bit on our podcast. Actually, David, and I don’t know if you were, Bill, but you were friends with Regina Lowery many years ago before she unfortunately passed. She was doing a vendor management platform. I’d spoken to her many times about it. There’s a company right now called Vensight. They are a vendor management platform built for mortgage. The reason I brought them up to, to mention them today is because lenders, you folks, especially with the the regulation around AI vendor management t-there’s tons of questionnaires and tons of things you have to follow. They’ve got a, AI component built into it that you could ask. You could even say, for example, “What did we spend with a certain vendor in the last quarter?” Or, “What do we still need?” “What’s painful about my vendors?” And so forth. So check it out. Very cool. You should be doing this, and your IT team has so much going on, or your director of partnerships. So you can’t just assume one person can handle this. So go check out Vensight. And then the very last thing, we have so much mobile apps and the ability to speak agentically. UWM just completely converted their existing, what they had called the InTouch mobile app, into now it’s an AI-powered business assistant called Chat UWM. It’s for independent brokers, built for speed, convenience, and productivity. I stole that from their press release, by the way. But ultimately, you now can ask questions about borrowers, you can look at rate scenarios, completely conversational and the brokers now have that AI power tool right at their fingertips. All kinds of crazy AI stuff going on. By the way, everywhere you go, people are talking that they’ve built agentic systems or they vibe coded something in Codex. Just remember, it’s not secure, it’s not safe, it’s not scalable all those different things. And then one last note before I turn this back over is that, in a market where AI is competing, in a market where we need to be different, we need to better educate our customers, deliver personal experiences, just don’t leave everything to AI. You’ve gotta really show up, you’ve gotta be there, and you’ve gotta touch people. The days of going to someone’s kitchen table to sit down with them and show them how a mortgage works and educate them are gone. If you’re doing that, then, I applaud you, but we need to do more of that. We can’t just assume that, AI is gonna handle everything for us. It’s great to help us, great to build out some scenarios but I’m gonna leave it at that. We still got to show up personally, and we still have to educate our customers.
[Kittle] I love that ending, Allen, because I’m always gonna be especially at my age all about the relationship even though you do have to have AI, and I totally agree with you.
That’s a great ending, my friend. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, sir.
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.