[David] All right. Thank you. Let’s get out and talk to Allen Pollack here. He is with us on an Tech Update. Allen, I was gonna send you this article. This is an interesting article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday the 6th, and the article is Facing AI Apocalypse. Once hot software companies race to reinvent themselves. Generative AI is steamrolling the once booming industry known as Software as a Service, SaaS. You have to turn and you have to burn the ships and start from the ground over up. I read that article over the weekend and thought of you. It is really interesting. But I’m looking at SaaS. How many major providers do we have supporting the mortgage industry in a SaaS model? And is it possible that generative AI is gonna steamroll them and we’re gonna see some of the big ones disappear?
[Allen] The answer is yes, and yes, but I think the Wall Street Journal needs people to click so that they can get paid for the advertisements since they’re not delivering newspapers anymore, because it’s the same story that we hear everywhere, right? Yeah. We all know it. There’s nothing that doesn’t have AI built into the news article or the story. Let’s be honest, the old monolithic platforms are stable, and they’ll be around for a while with interoperability with AI and connections to the industry. The platforms that are driving the old SaaS model… it’s funny, you always do that, David. You bring up something that’s very well in line with what I have listed for today because two things I have today- Yeah, it’s good … are perfectly aligned. So clearly you’re thinking about me more than I realized. But, Anyways yes got off the phone with a friend of mine who’s been at Tidal Wave since they started. And he just came back from a, 16-day trip in Portugal. And he’s like, “I’ve never had the opportunity to go on a long trip because I’m always busy, and I realize this AI thing…” He didn’t say it like that I’m paraphrasing. “This AI thing is getting more popular and taking off. Our revenue and our company’s growing so fast. If I don’t do it now, I’m never gonna have the time to do it.” That’s how popular everybody’s trying to lean and gain more exposure with AI and these agentic experiences. So let me go through the report because there is so much stuff everything’s intertwined with what you had to say. But I just wanna go back to the conversation with Ishba earlier on and I wanna say, almost playing devil’s advocate ‘ cause there’s so much news and press and everything around that. For all the brokers out there, do you think this scares the brokers and makes the brokers wanna go to platforms that have less tech, less flashiness, and it’ll steer them the other direction, or no? No. Okay, good.
[David] I think it’s more it’s he who has the best tech and can help the brokers accelerate through making products.
[Allen] He who has the best. That is so true. All right. I wanna give credit to-
[David] Can I put a plug in for you, Allen? ‘Cause I, folks, I saw what Allen’s doing with Sensei, his new company. You’ve got to pay attention to it. What you’re doing, Allen, is just groundbreaking, really good stuff. Oh, thank you. We’ll talk about that separate at a separate point in time, but yes, continue on.
[David] Absolutely. Yeah, I appreciate the plug, David. I gotta give a credit where credit is due. Rob Crisman always has funny jokes. He’s the king of them. W- especially tied to the mortgage industry. But there was one that he had it was either today or this week, and it had to do with AI, so I’m gonna read it. This is credit to Rob Crisman. He said, “In the near future, AI is going to tell a woman that she is wrong and to calm down, and that, my friend, will be the end of AI.”
[Allen] And that, my friend, Rob’s got such … He- where he gets his sense of humor, where he picks up these jokes, it’s just amazing. Oh, he’s great.
[Allen] All right. Yeah. Let’s get into some of the news. So this is a company by the way, called Mosaic. Nice name. It’s M-O-Z-A-I-Q. Been around for a while. That’s right. So they’re an agentic AI that actually ran a wholesale lender to two billion, so check this out. They describes themselves as the leader in agentic mortgage AI, right? Their loan assist platform uses intelligent agents that automatically complete loan fulfillment work and only escalate to a human lender as defined or where there’s exception needed. One data layer, one orchestration engine, and one LOS integration. It’s not a bolt-on. And what they’re saying is for this one customer, meaning that’s what they had, the loan store went from 10 million to more than two billion in monthly originations in roughly 24 months using the Mosaic platform, cutting their loan costs, per loan by the way, folks, to 40% less, and appraisal review time by 80%. So check that out. Mosaic, M-O-Z-A-I-Q. And then talking about AI, and this goes into a little bit of last week, David. If you remember, you gave me that article about Amazon letting people choose their own AI platform. Yeah. NCino just launched their own MCPs. Okay, I’ll tell you in a moment what MCPs are. But they just launched a conversational interface that lets the point of sale administrators and loan officers control the platform through natural language using their preferred AI tool. Meaning you can integrate or turn on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, to use the MCP that nCino just launched. MCP, for those of you that don’t know, it’s a model context protocol, and these MCPs, just think of them as little integration points, and they allow you to integrate and do things. They’re predefined behind the system, meaning in nCino of what you can do. For example, a POS admin, through a chat interface, can onboard an LO. They can add licenses. They can restructure organization hierarchies all through one conversation. And for a loan officer, this is available today, folks. For a loan officer, through a single conversation, they can check loan status, triage pipelines, manage borrower records, trigger income and asset verifications, run AUS, and the list goes on, folks. So check it out, but the fact that you can bring your own AI is absolutely groundbreaking. Nobody has done that yet, that I know of, that I’ve heard at least. I’ll pause for a quick comment before I move on.
[David] Yeah, that is groundbreaking. That is. I don’t know of anyone else doing that. Kudos.
[Allen] Yeah. Kudos. All right, let’s talk about this one, which is great. Total Expert. They just said they are declaring the end of the CRM era. Really? And that was in Tuesday’s Crisman Report, August 5th. What they said is that they are replacing, or we, the industry is replacing the traditional CRM model with a platform that combines customer IQ. So this is their AI assistance, their- … journey orchestration, and their lead management, and they say that they, the platform, all of these components, folks, the platform absorbs the work people don’t like to do or can’t do consistently, like follow-ups, nurturing, and so forth. And they now bring the human in only at the right moment that it requires. And they do have a top 10 lender that’s using the new platform, driving over 1,000 new HELOC originations in just six weeks on the platform. So Total Expert is doing a lot of different things. I think I talked about them two or three weeks ago about an AI calling feature they have. If you’re not up to date on all the things they have, you wanna go check them out. It’s an unofficial plug for them. They’ve got a lot of great tech, and they’re highly focused with AI and being able to understand where your customers are. Those signals is what they call them. David, check this out. Last week your article talking about different places that you can go or the different AI models that Amazon was allowing people to bring to the table. So I made a comment last week. Somebody reached out to me. They reached out about a couple things. One of them is the originator tech and the relationship between the originator and the borrower. Yeah. But this was the best one that they reached out to me on. I wanted to bring this up. The comment I made was, “IMBs that win won’t have chosen the best model. They have built the most flexible operation.” Yes. Yeah. So that, that’s, that was my summary- Yeah … of your article. So at the end of the day, folks, it doesn’t have to be IMBs it’s any lending institution. The folks that win, it has nothing to do with choosing the best AI model or the best vendor. All the vendors are great. It has to do with building the most flexible operation.
[David] Yeah. And focusing on cost. It’s … I think the thing that I’m seeing, I’d be- hate to be a owner of a software company, development company right now because you said how quickly it’s moving, especially with the articles. It’s just so rapid. They got to be reinventing themselves because of what is available through generative AI. Good job, Alan. Anything else?
[Allen] No, that’s all for today. There’s so much news. I could go on and on, but I know that I’ll get the what is that on Stage? You get the the big hook that pulls you off stage. Yeah. So I’m gonna get one of those if I keep going. But I do wanna talk about Sensi because I was- I’ve been thinking about it ever since you gave me a demonstration of it. And- Yeah … I do want … Yeah, just i- in concept, if you explain it to our listeners what this- what Sensi does. So we keep communication personal. So how often are you communicating with your customers and borrowers or with brokers? And it’s just a lot of emails, right? I’ve got an AE on, on the wholesale side that says the brokers just keep asking the same questions, but it’s in their email, it’s in their text message. Or you get borrowers that you create somewhat of a relationship with them, but then throughout the process they may deal with many people, or after closing they forget about you. So what Sendzie does is we create the human element of that communication throughout the entire customer journey. Very different than a CRM. We call ourselves a customer experience platform, and it’s not just about communicating through video and audio, but it’s also about managing sentiment and engagement and doing all that in one place. And so if you’d like to learn more, you can always go to our website. It’s Sendzie, S-E-N-D-Z-I-E.A-I, or you can reach out to me, and I’d love to show you the platform. Yeah.
[Allen] Encourage our listeners to check it out. Good job. Kudos to you, Alan. Always on the cutting edge of everything. Thank you. What’s happening out– That’s why we have you on the podcast talking about that very topic.
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.