Lykken on Lending

[David] Allen Pollack. Good to get you here and talking. Marc teed up a couple of segments, but you know what? I actually thought of you because I was in church on Sunday. The pastor goes, why are computers so smart? Again, the theme is Mother’s Day. Why are computers so smart, is because everything runs through a Motherboard, so there was the Mother’s Day.

[Allen] That was good. Very cool.

[David] Yeah, very cool. So anyway, that’s a bad joke. What you got for us?

[Allen] I’ll give you a joke. That is no better than your pastor’s joke actually mother’s in the joke. Okay, my bad. All right, let’s do it let me tee this off. In the UK there was a company called Jamie Thompson Mortgages and they hired a scriptwriter to come up with mortgage jokes and I found one that, I thought wasn’t too bad for people to never listen to me again, but good enough to get chuckle. All right, here we go. You’re ready to get yourself a mortgage when you and your landlady keep getting into a fight. My mom hates it when I call her that. So yeah, I’m sure a lot of moms are ready for their, you know what? It’s funny. On month for mother’s day, even though, a lot of people get gifts and do great things, picnics and whatever. I think most moms just want to be with their kids. They want all their kids in the same, under the same roof for one day, right? They can just have that as the kids get older, they’re happy enough. So, they probably don’t mind being the landlady. David’s just on the tail of everything that Marc just brought up. So many topics. Number one, I wrote it on one or two. I can’t even get to them all. So that was great content. I will say, Mark, you said one thing called redundancy as, and I’m not talking about the accounting side. There are software programs in ways to manage and protect your purse, but it’s not easy, right? So you came up with some great ones there, but in general, technology solutions and how complex and confusing our industry is right. Last week we talked about what? We talked about people that say that they have an AI solution when all they have is really just a feature that has AI. You can’t be an AI solution because you’ve implemented something with AI. So anyways, redundancy is important. Don’t be tricked. Verify what is that level of redundancy that you do have? And that’s the reason David, why consultants. And advisors are so important. It is just extremely important. You can’t do everything right. You didn’t sign up to be a tech company and you really need to find a way to bring in without having to hire all the overhead and expense of different diverse minds on the technology side. So having an advisor, having a consultant that can be project based, that has your best interest in mind is really a great way to protect yourself. Vendor contracts they’re so complex and there’s money up front and there’s time delays that you can cause, right? Not every vendor puts you in the driver’s seat. Sometimes they’re in the driver’s seat, but they want you to guarantee a certain amount of volume and there’s revenue for them and costs for you tied to that volume. It is complex and there’s a lot of moving parts. So, consultants, even a board advisor, those are the folks that will help you out. It’s actually why I now am myself, all of those things. I followed in the footsteps of Mr. David Lykken, because, I He has inspired me so much with all the different people that he works with. And that’s a true statement, David. But I do that for other people as well. And I don’t mean to make it sound like an advertisement. It’s just a proof point. I get to work with a lot of different people. I get it to answer all kinds of tech questions, help people with vendor contracts, that’s where you need to help. Don’t be ashamed to ask for that help. All right. So let’s move on to some other stuff, David. I’m going to switch back out of mortgage for just one quick second because Marc teed up all that good content. I went off script for a moment. I do want to share this. So everyone knows TikTok shop that’s so wildly popular. YouTube is now starting their own shopping platform. So we’re getting inundated with ads everywhere, right? Buy this, see this, buy this service, download this product. Get this. I saw a TikTok ad for Quicken Loans and so if you’re a mortgage lender and you’re wondering, how do you advertise on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok? It was great. There was a woman. On her face, she was on the screen and she had text on the side, which anyone that listening has seen any of these social media platforms, you know exactly what I mean. And she’s saying, Hey, what is the best payment that somebody asked her for a 300,000 loan? Let me show you in what she says and then she switches over and says, you can go to our website, quicken loans. It’s so easy. Fill out these six pieces of information. Look at this. You have personalized quotes and she spends a 15 second video explaining that You’re all within the guidelines of advertising something like that because it is to all audiences. You’re not giving away an interest rate and you’re not saying what the fees or costs are. You’re just simply advertising a brand, a generic brand that’s for everyone. Go look at that. If you want to see how Quicken Loans is doing it, everybody could do the same thing. If you’re a local, regional, national financial institution and you’re fighting against the non bank lenders, start advertising. You may already be doing that. I know for a fact Marketing and PR companies are already focused on social media marketing. The kids in college are learning that. So you could bring someone in that just came out of school with that knowledge. But I thought that’d be very interesting for the folks that are interested in that piece of it. David? Get this, really interesting, being creative, ingenuity, right? Marc, you talked about there’s so many solutions. Some do little bit of things here and there. Everybody’s looking for a different angle. Lodestar, really great company. If for most people know in our industry, that closing corp. was really the only place you can go, not the only, but the most popular brand, let’s call it for real time fees for your technology solution so that you can get an accurate. Quote out to your borrower. And then, of course, right before you send out the loan estimate or the closing disclosure, you’re reprocessing all the fees. You have local municipality fees, negotiated title fees. Lodestar is a company that does something similar, and they are a paid platform. Anyways, that looks they just did an integration and they’re offering a free rate calculator powered by SettleWise. So, it’s for all types of mortgage professionals and it seamlessly integrates with various LOS platforms already today, and it’s accessible online and via their API. So go check that out. Fees are so important. We want to have, make sure borrowers understand upfront what that cost is going to be, because that helps them negotiate whether it’s a seller buy down whether something else in play, down payment assistance. This is important. So hats off to Lodestar, number one, for what they do, but two for the SettleWise integration. So check that out. Also, David, talking about AI and underwriting. National Mortgage News just reported a new pilot program from Fannie Mae. They’re testing AI underwriting for faster loan approvals. If you didn’t think it was going on, it’s going on, right? So I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know the details. But AI underwriting Fannie Mae is doing a pilot prop tech integrations. So according to HousingWire, lenders are increasingly looking to integrate prop tech solutions to streamline the home buying process, especially online property tours and digital closings. I’m going to tell you why that’s important for the lenders listening. It’s most important because you have a captive experience. You’re bringing potential borrowers into your portal that you pay a lot of money for, and you’ve personalized this experience. If you can tie in the property information, If you could tie in the door so that it feels customized and personable. That’s how you want it to feel. You want it like somebody just walked into a luxurious furniture store and they have the bed that you want to buy and , they have glasses of wine next to the bed. You can lay down. There’s a TV screen in the ceiling. They give you the full experience, right? That’s what you want. You want the best mattress shopping experience possible. So, lenders are truly looking to integrate property information. So, if you’re talking to your vendors and you hear anything about it, it is a trend. It is going on. HousingWire just wrote up about it and it’s in some other places as well. And then David, two more quick things. Somebody reached out to me. Is it worth going to a conference? when I’m looking for technology solutions and the question came about based on my comment from last week, when I said, everyone just calling themselves AI now. And you remember before AI, David, all the press releases says that everyone’s the award-winning groundbreaking nationwide, number one, bestselling. It’s everything, all these anyways, got to love the PR companies. So anyways, is it worth going to a conference and how do you find vendors and what they really do? At National MBA, I remember walking up and down the vendor aisles, and everybody’s now taking data off of documents, and I felt I’m not saying it’s true, I felt like everybody had income calculation solutions, and everybody has OCR now. It’s a big mess, right? Who does what? Is a conference the best way to walk up and down vendor aisles, or is that really to have a quick meeting, because you already know who they are? I think it’s 50-50 right now. I think next week, maybe we talk a little bit more that David and we asked some of our co-hosts when everyone’s back next week to give some feedback, Marc, I’d love to hear some feedback and David from you today and Alice, but anyways, I think that’s a real problem we have. I think we have limited time between meetings. Vendors are charged a lot of money. And, when you walk in, sometimes you look at the candy or are you looking at the trade booth or are you looking at the people? how are you finding when everything’s a blur? because everyone on one trade show booth is trying to get all their messages out. So anyways, I think a really interesting topic and we can maybe break that down a little more next week. And finally, David, this is an awesome tip for chat GPT. By the way, open AI announced today. They’re new, they call it GPT 4 0, which can do voice texts and images together. They’re rolling it out within the next week. But anyways, if you want a great prompt. What you do is you say, please act and please do as an example, please act like a marketing expert in the mortgage industry that works with FinTech and PropTech. And please create me 15 bullets within seven days of news you can find online as to how I should market my product, which is this product. So again, it’s act like and do. If you include those two things in your prompt writing, you’re going to get a much, much better response. So that’s it, David, for today. Exciting.

[David] Really good tip. Thank you. We’re always, we’re using, constantly using the latest in AI and chat. GPT is just there. Of course. Now we’ve got what is the Google da Vinci or is it? No. What is that? William Gemini. Gemini. Gemini, which is . Both are, if you go pay for the pay paid subscription, it’s worth it for what they could do. It’s amazing stuff. Alan, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you. We could go on and on with some of the conversations, what’s going on in AI and I can’t get enough tips. I love it. When you give us AI tips, chat, GPT tips. Thank you.

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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.