[David] Allen Pollack, who’s the consultant and tech expert for us. What do you got on this week’s tech report, Allen?
[Allen] Hey there. I was just reading an AI joke and it was so bad it’s not even worth bringing it up, so I’m gonna go right past that. There is a company David called DUPE, really cool tech. So if you buy something if you see something you like, like a chair, this was the advertisement I saw and I took a look at the tech. You can put it into dupe, same as you could at Google Reverse image search. But what dupe does is it will give you the same chair or very similar and the price at all different places, so if you see something you like very expensive you can search for it at a much less expensive price and that kind of technology works great. They’re probably doing something similar to Google, because when I was working on decorating my home, the interior decorator presented me with a whole bunch of different options and I did a reverse Google search and I found things cheaper, which showed that she had a markup and she stopped me and she said, if you’re going to do that, I can’t do this job for you. Everything I do comes with more service than you just ordering it and installing it yourself. But yes, reverse image search does a really good job. So check out dupe. Anyways, it looked like a really cool piece of website. Apple, remember last year, a year before last, we talked about vision pro people were walking around town wearing the goggles and moving their arms in the air to swipe windows. Guess what, Apple, this is what the advertisement says, really funny, the statement, Apple’s having a weird time with eyes. The maker of the oft forgotten Vision Pro headsets has called it quits on the Mac connected AR glasses it was developing. So the Vision Pros are gone. Meta has glasses that are like Ray Bans and then there’s another company out there that has glasses that have a little tiny projector that projects on a pair of glasses. AR is not going away. Apple’s AR is going away, at least for now. But the ability to just imagine in looking for a house ability to walk into a house and it to tell you everything about the house as you’re walking, even the paint color on the wall and oh, that kitchen sink is stainless steel and I found three other options I put in your shopping cart when you get home, there’s all different things AR can do. So, I wouldn’t expect it to go away, but it’s definitely not, on our doorstep. So Mark brought up earlier today Deepseek or Matt did. So get this, Deepseek not only did they say that they built their technology for 1/16 or 1/32 of the cost is everybody else. It turns out that some people went on the internet and found out that it’s completely wrong. The numbers over a billion as to what they spent to actually build the technology, but in addition to that DeepSeek just had a major security flaw last week. So they had exposed data that included over a million lines of logged entries, digital software keys, backend details, and user chat history from their AI assistant and it was a US security firm called Wise that found this and their researchers found that DeepSeek had inadvertently left unsecured ClickHouse database access. So, it’s another database brand. Left it online with open access. Raising significant security concerns for enterprises and governments globally. Everything sounds great, another country has built this wonderful AI thing. It’s really cheap, really fast. Guess what? They’re the only one that’s had a security breach now. Be careful of what you’re thinking to use. Stick with the things that you feel comfortable with and that you can put your finger on touch and feel. But anyways that’s what happened with DeepSeek. David, there’s been switching topics here for a second. There’s been a lot of talk about AI agents. What are they? What do they do? GPT now does tasks. Other people remember RPA was a big term going back to 2018, 2019. RPA is still a big term right now. I remember when I built New York Loan Exchange NILACs and all of our pricing engines, we scraped millions of rates using technology that today you’d probably call RPA. So, all kinds of stuff out there, right? So, what really is an AI agent? I’m gonna tell you in hopefully two sentences what an AI agent is in our world. What it means to us mortgage folks, right? This is what it means. You have So if you have a AI, let’s just say you made a custom GPT or used any engine or chatbot what you’re doing is you’re communicating with it. It’s taking the things that you ask for, and it’s identifying what it is you said, and it’s identifying what it needs to do next. So if you have, let’s just say that you had the input that said, I’d like to reach out to 21 of my newest customers, and that agent was connected to your LOS, your CRM and your Gmail. It will make a decision on its own as agents as to where to gather the information based on what it knows or it may go to all of them. It will also make a decision as to those agents what the content is. One agent will pass the content to the next agent. That agent will put that list together and talk to whatever tools you have integrated. It could be Google Sheets, it could be Microsoft Office 365 online, and then the next agent will take that and send it to MailChimp. And I make that example. That is a completely real example. Those are what AI agents do. And I, again, I maybe it was three sentences. I kept it really short, that’s good for folks to understand. But that final output was a culmination or a collaboration of all the little agents and tools that were automatically put together. You don’t have to script it and tell it what tool to use when and how to use it and how to communicate. These things work orchestrated. I’m using all the buzzwords from press releases now. They’re orchestrated, collaborate, and they do all the work. So anyways, if you’re building AI agents or you want to build AI agents, keep that in mind. Your mindset about what you’re weaving and putting together is different than if you coded RPA, where you have very strict if then rules as to what it does and what to do with the results. And of course, you could always reach out to any of the wonderful consultants in our industry, David, myself, or anyone else, and we’re more than happy to help you, but that’s what AI agents do. Okay, when you thought, David, that we were done hearing about new point of sale systems guess what? We got a brand new point of sale system. This is from the Rob Chrisman Report. The question it said, obviously they posted this content this new POS, but it says new POS? Are you tired of the same old solutions that over promise and never deliver? It’s time for something better. It’s time for lender full solutions. I read through it. And I love their advertisement. Here’s why. Instead of saying that their mission their industry leading, award winning, best of breed, all the keywords that we just don’t even want to read through anymore. You know what they did? They said, our new loan officer portal allows the lender to review the file before it is delivered to the LOS system. And it says your lending team deserves a solution that actually works and you deserve an affordable solution with proven top line growth. That’s it. No filler, no buzzwords. They got right to the point and if I was on the market to look for a POS, I probably would have checked these guys out just because of their advertisement. So good job to them. There’s another POS in the industry. Go check it out, folks. By the way, Lenderful Solutions it’s a division of National Title Agency Mortgage Information Systems, if you’re trying to figure out who they are. Alright, the Super Bowl is coming up. Every year we talk about the Super Bowl ads. I don’t think that there’s going to be a Tom Brady crypto ad. I did hear that the Chiefs were trying to get Tom Brady banned from the Super Bowl based on his comments about the referees, but outside of that, I’ll take a log of all the cool commercials and such. I’ll be traveling back from my daughter’s national cheerleading competition in Orlando, Florida with 9,000 other people, but I’ll have a report on the advertisement. But anyways this advertisement is from Maxwell. It’s such a cool company. I don’t know if they’ve ever been a sponsor of ours. If not, Maxwell, you should call us up. But separately their technology has just expanded. They have so much. They’ve got fulfillment, secondary. They’ve got point of sale direct tools. They’ve got so many great things. They say in general, they can shave over 13 days off of cycle times. But anyways, what I’m getting at the point why I mentioned them today is their advertisement said everyone’s gearing up for the Super Bowl showdown next week. Mortgage executives and mortgage executives. The real action begins a day after and many people miss the fact that after Super Bowl, that’s when we see the highest number of mortgage application start and actually, David for forever, even when I got in the industry in the late 90s. or actually early 2000s, even I at that time knew that the season kind of kicks off after Super Bowl Sunday. So, I’ll pause there because I’m going to go to the next item, but I’ll get your feedback on that and see if you agree
[David] Well, the Super Bowl. That’s interesting. I did not know that right after Super Bowl kicks off the most amount of house hunting activity. That’s been something for some reason. I did not realize that. It’s not surprising given that we all watched, wrapped up watching football. We don’t wanna go out and look for a new house unless it’s a That’s right dire need. Because there’s been so much football up to this point. My wife was saying this weekend, she goes, there’s nothing to watch. We got all the football games are we’re between everything then. Yeah. Collegiate is done. We’re have a week off and so wish we’d done this week anyway. Good. Interesting. Good stuff.
[Allen] Absolutely. David I’ll tee off this one quick little thing. I keep having this content. I want to talk about build verse by, which is so important in the beginning of the year for all of these companies, but I always have such other good content. So let me just tee it off for next week. And I’ll do this 1st next week for the folks listening. Build verse by and really there’s a couple, there’s 4 points I want to focus on next week. And I have a real example of costs that I want to let everyone know about so you can see the true difference of build verse by and the reasoning if you should think about that. But ultimately you’re looking at in a build verse by scenario in the mortgage lending industry. Let’s hone in on what we do here. In this industry, it’s customization versus control. That is such a big deal. Are you customizing because of your unique business needs and you want control or you just need control only total cost of ownership, right? Does it matter for you what this is going to cost you? Do you have the staff that needs the people? You may have that, but there’s total cost of ownership, speed to market, right? Do you have the time to build and mess around and change it and get opinions and build and release and do all that? Or you just need to get the market integrations, relations, all the things you need to connect with. It’s a big project and then are you future proofing and innovating at scale? So we’ll talk about that next week. Such a good topic. People always love talking about, do I build first by and we’ll use the example of a CRM for next week where everybody has made those thoughts. Oh, I could just integrate that to Zapier. I can just use Salesforce. I can just do this. There’s a lot of CRMs on the market. Do you build or do you buy? And that’s what we’ll talk about next week.
[David] Good. I’ll look forward to that. Thank you, Alan. Very much. Again, if anyone’s looking for a good consultant that’s in this space, couldn’t get better than Allen. That’s for sure.
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.