[David] Allen, it’s probably a good segue over to you. I would love to get your thoughts on the workflows and then we’ll get into your segment and then get over to Marc for Marc’s rant.
[Allen] It’s so funny every week it’s like you’re using AI to think of my thoughts, because 80% of the time, the content that I prepare you segue into without knowing what I’m gonna talk about.
[David] Yeah. It’s so funny.
[Allen] And it happens all the time.
[David] I’m glad to hear it. Glad it works out.
[Allen] Yeah so here’s the funny thing, my show opener today, I’m gonna say. But Alice, it can tie directly into what you just said. There are old LOS systems and there’s people trying to build their own and there’s systems that are they’re calling it they’re more puzzle pieces or componentized or service-based and then you’ve got people that are stuck on systems that can’t customize and personalize, right? Some lenders have big aspirations, but they can’t follow through on their aspirations. And that’s why we’ve got so much differential out there. But let me throw this out here. This is my show opener for today. So this week, a drive through robot at a fast food joint completely lost it, tried to hand off a tray and instead flung it across the lane like it was competing in the Olympics. Moral of the story automation is great until it chucks your fries across the parking lot. If you think about what we’re doing in mortgage, everybody wants the best. They wanna chase the squirrel, they want the shiny penny and then there are some people that think, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s hard to take on full automation, it’s hard to go full remote online notarization, it’s great for us to talk about it every week and it’s great to go to a conference and, have a couple drinks and learn that this vendor’s gonna be the best thing that you’ve ever had. But the reality is you wanna make sure that your AI automation robots are not flinging your fries across the damn street. You know what?
[David] That’s amazing.
[Allen] Yeah. And it it’s your customers, it’s your reputation. It’s the, what is the closed loan experience? Did you send them a damn email through AI and not personally call them? My realtor has a service. I’m done with the house sale. She has me still on it because it costs her almost nothing. I made a lot of money. And she wants referrals. Every month I get a link. To a local place in the Ponta Vira beach area, north Florida where I live. And it’s a free coffee at a coffee shop. I’ve never been to that’s a local store, not a chain. It’s a free bagel at a bagel place that I’ve never been to. It’s a appetizer at a lunch place and it’s once a month. It doesn’t cause her a lot and she does this for all her clients, but she’s in my mind all the time when I’m driving, looking for somewhere to eat because I’m looking to see what discount I get this month or what freebie slice of pizza somewhere. Technology has its limits and you still you can’t just use tech and walk away. It just doesn’t work. But let’s get into a couple, couple cool things going on in mortgage. How about that? So a bunch of people over at that company called Tavan, we all know who they are. So they just launched what they call touchless lending experience and what that is it’s a modular suite of tools that are fully touchless. That includes automating onboarding, document collection, priceless or pricing, not priceless pricing and even closing. And what’s cool about it is lenders don’t have to rip and replace as Tavan says it. They can plug in just what they need. So there you go. Rip and replace. Meaning Tavan is a third party provider. They’re not your dedicated, they do have an LOS, but they’re not your dedicated player. They’re integrated with a lot of people and if you’re integrated with them, they can plug and play features on. So check that out. Very interesting. And and there the tagline, by the way, in their press release is perfect for everything you said today segued right into my segment so perfectly. Alice, the same thing you said, right? This is build your own Tavon’s a big player if you wanna build your own or go your own pace. So check that out. Maxwell. They just released point of sale workflow templates by channel. Now you’re gonna say I’ve always had it by channel. Retail, wholesale, different variations of of wholesale. They just dropped the new set of borrower workflow templates tailored for retail, wholesale, and correspondent. Here’s the thing, when I was selling a point-of-sale platform after I built one, that’s what everybody said. Can I customize the screen? Do I have to ask those questions? Can I make these fields required? The real answer is yes you can. No, you can’t. Every system’s different. Maxwell just created templates. So, if you are highly interested in not building your own and componentizing the pieces, plug and play, make different experiences based on channels. If you think about the wholesale experience, you want a broker to onboard docs knowing they’re onboarding docs to other vendors, right? So what is the experience, the template, the differentiator? Are you sending applications out on behalf of the borrower for that broker. What should that look like? Different than if it’s a retail business lead that you’re bringing in on your own. So Maxwell’s got these things check it out. Very cool. Also, Fannie may connect, they have a new API for gig and rental income finally, right? You’d think that they would’ve had this for a long time. They just enhanced their Connect API to support gig income and rental income via Schedule E. So check that out. Also, dark matter technologies, we know who they are. They now have what they call their automation playbook for Encompass. They put out a white paper on how lenders are automating workflows inside Encompass, and they highlight things like auto generating conditions, auto checklists, and bot-based file reviews. You heard me, right? Bot based file reviews. So don’t throw the fries. You’re gonna have to figure out what the exceptions are in those reviews that you review, right? The reviewing of the reviewing, it sounds stupid, but you have to do it. But anyways, hats off the Dark Matter Technologies. Check that out. Then David, I love this Total Expert. They did branded chatbots for lenders. So now they’re offering a lender branded chatbots that are built into the customer experience and the bots can handle rate drop alerts, doc upload, nudges, app status updates, et cetera. Check it out. Very interesting. And I’ll tell you before I do my little closing piece here, ChatGPT recently released something, and if you folks have not seen it, you need to go into your settings. Marc, you probably have seen it and used it. Go into your settings and you click on interfaces and they now silently have released automatic interfaces to different platforms. So, if you use HubSpot, interesting. You can now take chat, GPT, connect it to your HubSpot account and start asking it questions. Have it generate reports, have it do all kinds of shit. I said the word shit. You can do all that kind of stuff. So, check it out. They also connect the Gmail, all the folks using Gmail, even if it’s your personal and you’re looking for a contract that was sent to you personally or something. GPT now connects to your Gmail. And I tell you, I use Gemini inside Gmail and it sucks. So, I said shit before, I’m gonna say shit again. It’s horrible. So check out ChatGPT. Sorry for the swearing, David. And then I’ll end with this. So whether it’s a robot and a drive through or a new AI in your LOS, don’t just chase automation. Make it work for you and if your tech stack still feels like it’s flinging trays instead of closing loans, it might be time for a smarter strategy.
[David]Y eah. No kidding. Great comment. Yeah, that’s I got all kinds of, Marc your thoughts.
[Marc] I got two comments on that kind of stuff. And then I’ll go onto the rant. Yes. First thing I got is I just, while I was sitting here, I had a flash up on my email and Allen, Chat GT for socialmedia.com is available really for a website. I would’ve thought somebody would’ve stuck that up. They probably won a Gazillion dollars, but I got a bunch of Chat GPT domains that I’m gonna start selling, but I never thought of that one. It’s a long one, but it’s out there. It just popped up on my phone. So that’s one thing, but I wanna talk a little bit about an airport conversation with two doctors attending a conference. Okay. One was a general surgeon and one was an orthopedic surgeon. And this was on my trip back from Charlotte. They were attending a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we’re sitting there talking, we got off on the subject of social, a really ChatGPT, AI, all this other stuff. And they were telling me how. They feed their recorded notes. That they do during visiting me in the waiting room, in the appointments and all right. And they load that to ChatGPT to clean it up and put it in the file. Think about that. And they read it when it’s over, but they just take random notes and then it puts it together and then they go back and fix it.
[David] What it it’s like it’s like using Otter ai, Avoma, we use Avoma and it’s just like it, listening to a conversation and being able to organize an outline out of it and pull the action items. It’s really extraordinary.
[Marc] Let me tell you what it does though. It actually chat GPT if it’s relative, their, the condition a person has is relative to some research has been done. It’s picking up that research and putting it in there, and the doctor says periodically they find out something they didn’t know about.
[David] Yeah. See one of my good friends, I have one friend that just passed away from cancer, got another one, unregrettably, gonna be passing away from cancer, but they all have done real well financially. So, they’re pulling on all the resources that are available out there. And some of these hospitals especially some of the research hospitals have this database that is extraordinary, that helps doctors diagnose things and get things right. Unfortunately, that database is proprietary within staying within that hospital ecosystem. And it’s not being shared as openly as it shouldn’t be. It should be all open source. It should be a lot of the paths where if you have some proprietary discovery, make it open source so that everyone gets to see it.
[Marc] Yeah. Let me, what I’m gonna hit you with on this is the last part of the conversation. It’s gonna blow you away. I was talking to him, I said, what do you see the real ability of AI in surgery? And by this time we’d been talking 25 minutes and they were calling me Marc, and one of them said, Marc, within 10 years, I believe 60 to 80% of surgery on people will be driven by AI because it’s gonna be more, more accurately move the tools we do service with than the human hand can.
[David] Which is the robotic, like the da Vinci?
[Marc] Yeah. Think about that. We can get our appendix removed, we can get a tumor frozen out of our kidney. We could go in and get a hernia fixed. All this stuff that used to take a human standing there will be done with robotics. You’ll still have that doctor there, but it’s gonna eliminate the jerking of a finger. It’s gonna allow doctors to stay around a lot longer in medicine if they want to. Because they’re not gonna be around. Okay. Just enough.
[Allen] Marc. Just on that real quick. People say, I’d love to live to 99, but I just, I don’t want someone to have to wipe my butt. If AI does it, would you wanna live to 99?
[David] That’s going to a new, that’s going to a new AI.
[Marc] Think about it. AI could devise our diets that we eat so you don’t have to wipe your butt. Everything gets processed.
[Allen] It’s a very good plan. That’s very good plan.
[David] Not this has to do with lending, but you did shit earlier.
[Marc] He started it using that s word a little earlier. Yeah. Yeah.
[Bill] I was gonna say Ben, allow me to take this to conversation.
[David] Take us outta it, Kittle.
[Kittle] Hey, how about if I go this direct with this particular conversation and say, if all that is true, that our care costs should drop by 90%, think about that. All the risk, all the everything, the liability insurance. If that’s true, then we should see cost be driven down dramatically.
[Allen] Good point.
[Marc] I see it. I see it happening. I don’t think there’s any question that’s gonna happen. What you think, Allen?
[Allen] I agree. I’ve already taken all the medications and the vitamins I take and I put them in GPT and it has already told me the quality of them and the regimen of what times they are most effective. That’s simple.
[David] Amazing. I hadn’t thought of that. I’m gonna do that.
[Marc] I thought David Kittle was my only brother from another mother. But you are too. because I did the same thing.
[David] I have not done that. I’m gonna do that.
[Kittle] I know. I’m gonna do that right now with my five o’clock martini and see if it tells me I’m taking it the time.
[David] If you taking your martini yet five o here thing it’s gonna five. You started to make it a three o’clock martini.
[Allen] It’s just gonna suggest two olives instead of three. That’s all. Yeah. Yeah. That’s all. Yeah. That’s great.
[David] We have degraded, we’ve di digressed all the way down to wiping your butt. So I think it’s probably a good time to pull a plug.
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.