[Alice] All right, we’re gonna move on to Allen Pollock. Allen, what do you have for us today on the technology update?
[Allen] Oh, good to be here, Alice. Thank you. Couple quick things. We got MBA National coming up, and I thought I’d focus a little bit on that, but there are a couple quick little things I wanted to mention. I know Marc, this is a great one. I wish Marc was here, because he probably says that he uses these, but maybe Bill, you’ll have some good feedback, and you, Alice. But I’ll start with this. There’s a company out there called Netlens. That’s N-E-T-L-E-N-S. How many times have you been in your house or in your office, and you don’t know where the Wi-Fi signal’s the best? Or you’ve been on the phone call and you’re like, “Ah, the signal’s not that great.” So what you do is you put this app on your phone, and you can walk around and it tells you how the signal’s getting as you’re moving and where it gets better if you were to walk 10 feet to the left or 10 feet to the right. So check it out. It was a very good advertisement that I saw, and I quickly went through and it looked like a very useful piece of tech. I just found it, so I haven’t tested it myself, but again, that’s Netlens. And then, I’m gonna bring a couple things up, Alice, but I wanna tease the end of my segment here. Thinking about this next week at MBA National, AI didn’t fix the integration problem, right? How long have we been talking in the industry about lights out? Everything’s gotta connect and be well integrated. AI didn’t fix the integration problem. It got layered on top of it. So walking the floor at MBA Annual with that in mind and helping yourself ask the question nobody wants to answer, what happened to all the integration points? How does all this new technology integrate is where the truth actually lives. So we’ll come back to that in a moment. For those of you that are using AI to help your mind feel better about things here’s three really good tips. I use these. That’s why I’m bringing them to you. It’s three steps. It’s called the clarifier, the expert lens, and the reframe. Let me tell you how these goes. And if you’re familiar with using the AI system, you can put this into your personal preferences, so every chat you have, it just remembers this, and you don’t have to keep telling it. The first one is called the clarifier. Add this to any prompt. Ask me clarifying questions until you are ninety-five percent confident that you can complete the task successfully. Then you wanna say the expert lens. What would a top one percent person in this field think? And then you wanna say the last statement, which is the reframe. Reframe this in a way that changes how I see the problem And swap changes with challenges if you wanna make it even better. What you’ll get out of this, folks, is instead of AI saying, “Oh, you’re right on– You’re right about that. Oh, that’s a great way to think about it. Oh, you’re so smart,” it will actually think about what it’s gonna tell you beforehand. It will ask you clarifying questions, and it will make sure it’s completely confident. You have the opportunity to tell the AI what you do and don’t like. This way, it gives you a very, very good response. So again, folks it was just three quick things: the clarifier, the expert lens, and the reframe. Give it a try. It really is good. All right, Alice, we already talked about– Moving on, we talked about the UAD two dot six extension, so we don’t need to refocus on that. For anyone that may have joined us later in the podcast here, there is an exception for more time, but you have to submit for the exception, and you have to provide an implementation plan. Make sure you check that out. Again, that’s for the UAD two dot six. Two quick things going on in the industry. The first one, Alice, is a company I, hadn’t heard of them, and I really like what they’re doing. It’s a company called Milo, M-I-L-O. They just had a listing in Prisma, and basically, they said three out of four borrowers use a different lender the next time they come around. Milo’s entire pitch is around closing the gap, so they monitor past clients at every step. Nothing new, folks. The difference is this is one vendor that does this instead of working with vendors that do everything and have this as an add-on or, depending on the makeup of your tech stack, you can’t always use everything that everybody offers. Or you have a great platform that does this, but you’re so buried in things they need to do for you that you can’t put the cart before the horse. So sometimes going to an independent vendor for something is good. So anyways, Milo does that. They say they know the exact moment your past client is back in the market. There’s no contracts, no adoption required and they do all kinds of great stuff. So check ’em out. I saw that in the Crissman report. Also, there’s a company in the Crissman report, this is a, shameless plug. my company Sendzie, that’s S-E-N-D-Z-I-E. We did our official press release announcing that we are out of pilot and we’re in the mortgage industry. I was picked up in the Crissman report as well. I had a lot of people reach out to me. I have a lot of demos this week for people that saw it and scheduled. So for those of you that are interested, you know how to get ahold of me. You can reach me at my Lincoln on Lending address, which is alan@tms-advisors.com. And then Alice, I just wanna end with this final point here. I’ll call it my opt ed of the week with MBA National coming. by the way, some of the panels are gonna be fantastic. There’s some really good speakers that are gonna be there, and there’s gonna be a lot of stuff focused on things we talk about on this podcast every week, folks. But also what to be looking for on the technology side. So I wanna bring this up really quick and then open it up for any discussion if there is any. The first thing is every booth that we see is gonna be talking about AI. And every demo at every booth is gonna look impressive, whether it’s on stage, whether it’s in the tech hub, and whether you’re walking around. And every vendor will have a case study. It’s what you have to do as a vendor to show up and be there. Now, if you all remember many years ago when OCR had gotten its way into mortgage, everybody was like, “Look at this. I could put a file in and it spit out all the data.” And we always complained, “It’s a trained file.” And I think Rich Serbinsky is… I don’t know if he completed it or he is in the middle of doing something in the industry now where there’s a number of vendors that are gonna go head-to-head, no trained files, and we’re gonna see how they all do in the underwriting, the AI underwriting world. So just remember, every case study and every demo is going to be prepared for MBA National. That’s the actual problem. So the question that nobody’s asking, folks, but we need to be asking, it’s not, do you use AI? It’s gonna be all over the conference. It’s gonna be, what happens when the AI is wrong? Show me a loan, show me where the AI was incorrect, and how did you train the AI or teach it what to do next? Where does the human intervention occur, and where’s the accountability? Someone’s got to be accountable for the AI, Even if it still generates an output, but it was only a certain percentage of confident and there’s a human body, a belt and suspenders approach that has to verify or validate that. We did that years ago, by the way, in the document processing side. we always added a confidence score. So make sure you’re looking at that when you’re looking at AI solutions. And what are you actually connected to? What requires a manual handoff? Don’t just assume the AI does everything. Remember what I said earlier. We just bolted or slapped AI on top of integration problems that still exist. They’re still there. They didn’t go away And then what to watch out for. If you’re looking at a bunch of demos, Remember, those demos are always gonna work. That’s not the question. The question is what happens at the integration point and the exception handling? And ask them if they can show that to you, not always the happy path. Now, it’s okay as a vendor to be there and show up and show the happy path, but you have to be prepared to answer those questions, and we should be asking those questions. And then the very final thing is you’re not shopping for AI at MBA annual, right? You didn’t sign up to say, “I can’t wait to go buy some AI technology.” You’re there looking for a partner who understands the difference between what a demo and a production environment is, and somebody that wants to partner with you to help you evolve your process, not have a check written for a one-year subscription to a platform that you don’t even know if it’s going to work. The process as lenders that you now sign up for contracts, and the process as a vendor has definitely changed. So unless it’s an, a loan origination system and there’s a lot of energy that goes into it from both sides, you shouldn’t be paying for a year or two or three-year contract with a significant down payment with no way to know if it even is gonna work correctly the way you want. So you need to reframe those conversations. That’s the best thing you can do in person when you’re at these conferences. So it’s gonna be an amazing conference, gonna be a lot of great tech. Can’t wait to see all the AI stuff, but just don’t forget how to approach AI. And with that, Alice I can’t wait to see everybody at MBA next week.
[Alice] Oh, I so wish I was going, but I have other plans. So Alan, great tips. I just think everybody needs to listen to that a few times and take that with you to MBA as you walk through the exhibit hall. So Alan since we have a minute here, could you tell our listeners about Senzi? You gave us a plug, but we need… tell us a little bit about it.
[Allen] Yeah, absolutely. What we do at Sendzie is we talk about borrower communication, and we talk about people don’t read emails anymore. And they have so many different places that they get information in the mortgage process. They get information through an email, a text message. They get it from the portal, then they get it from an underwriter, then they get it from a title agency. The emails… And borrowers don’t know where to go. And by the way, it’s not just borrowers, it’s referral partners. It’s the borrower getting consistent communication from everybody. So what we do is we have one place that a borrower goes to where they get access to their portal. They get access to message you, ask for a phone call. They can message you directly. They can set up a meeting. But we have a unified way that communication occurs. We don’t replace CRMs, point of sales. We sit on top of all those systems. But more importantly, we send repeatable, brandable messages out. We do video, audio, and reg-regular text messages, but we do them at scale, and they’re consistent, and they represent you and your brand, and they help you scale who you are without having to lift a finger. And we’ve got a number of pilots in the mortgage industry that we’ve been doing for many months. We did a pilot with Benchmark Mortgage for anyone that’s seen those videos. And we’re also not just in mortgage. We’re in real estate, financial services, tourism and we’re super excited about how we’re doing all that.
[Alice] That sounds fantastic. So you mean I can give my borrower one link for everything? I love that.
[Allen] Correct. And we’ll automatically message your borrower at certain milestones as they happen, and we’ll coordinate with your point of sale, with your LOS, with all the folks involved so that we just sit right on top. And just like I talk about, we have no contracts, and you only pay for what you use. So it’s super easy to get involved. And we’re trying to help other vendors bill lenders the right way. There’s no excess, and you only use what you need. And that’s really how this industry should be geared. So we’re trying to, eat our own dog food and live by the words that we say all the time. And we’ve been vendors and lenders for 20-something years, so it’s refreshing to get on a phone call with someone and say… They’re like how much does it cost? I need 10, 15 grand.” No, it’s $29 to have your user license, and then you pay for only what you use. So it’s super easy.
[Alice] Oh, I love that. That sounds great. Thanks, Allen. Thanks for the update.
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.