[David] So let’s get over to Allen Pollack. Allen, I tell you, technology we were talking a podcast recently with someone and recording one of our regular extra segments that we do and release during the week, and we were talking about the cost of technology. There’s been this feeling that it’s gonna drive down cost. It hasn’t done that at all, but- No way … talking about it and thinking about it, but I’m interested in your technology report today. Where is this going?
[Allen] The tricky thing about lowering costs is it’s not always… we just point at the vendor and say, “This great tech solution’s gonna lower cost.” And every organization’s different. It depends how you consider it, David. If you’ve got a lot of people doing onboarding, and I bring that up ’cause I’m gonna talk about onboarding piece of my what I’m gonna talk about today. I was lost for my words there for a second. But anyways if you’ve got a whole team of people doing onboarding and you can deploy AI to make the onboarding faster, even agentically, you’re gonna spend a lot of money either on a vendor to bring that in or a lot of money to build it out and maintain it. So now you have tech people or you have a new software solution, and it has to be integrated. So did you really save money? There is an ROI, and there’s a period to obtain the R- like anything in business. But there is no silver bullet. There’s no immediate way we’re just gonna all start saving money all over the place. And the other very challenging thing in our industry, David, is there’s a lot of costs and fees. Another thing I’m gonna talk about in a moment is the fact that, there’s a lot of junk fees. Or I shouldn’t say junk fees. It was in an article. That’s where that word came from. But there’s a lot of fees that the, hidden fees that the borrowers wind up having to pay for, and those fees come because of the cost of everything. There’s so many vendors in a mortgage transaction, and everybody is in everybody’s pocket, and it’s just the truth, and we all know it. You wanna do business and be integrated to a large platform, you gotta pay the price, and that’s gonna be 15, 20, 25% of your revenue goes to that partner. how are you gonna pay for it? So you have to raise the price to the lender or charge additional fees. The lender has to make their money somewhere. So many times the lenders are charging the borrower. That’s not every scenario, folks. There’s thousands of lenders in the industry, but there’s a lot of permutations of this. So the cost, David, it’s not a simple formula. It’s complex. And one more thing I’m gonna talk about today, actually is going to raise the cost. So when you look at your final cost on your balance sheet or your P&L, that’s, where things just continue to be challenging. Let me bring up a couple things today. Yeah. I wanna go over to something fun, though, for a second, David. I heard this commercial, and then I went and did a little investigation. Check this out. Chewy. This is the company that they’re actually here in Jacksonville, Florida. You can order, food online for your pets, all these great things. A lot of people put the food on auto-shipment. So when you have a dog that passes away, the crazy thing is you don’t immediately call Chewy and say, “Oh, my dog has passed away. I need to cancel that auto subscription of something.” So what happens is that you automatically get shipped your food again or- Right a box of treats or whatever it is that typically comes. Do you know that if you call them up and you say- Yeah … “I need to cancel, I’d like my money back,” what they do is they refund you the month that you forgot to call them. They tell you to keep the food or give it away ’cause they can’t take it back. And do you know what they do next, David? They send you flowers- I know … at their cost. I know. They do. And what they do is they force you, the consumer, to never go to another brand again. I know. And there’s some number, I don’t remember, of people that actually will buy another pet in some period of time, and you’re guaranteed to go back to Chewy. Oh, yeah. Man, you talk about, yeah, customer service. There’s so many ways that we can improve our customer service in our industry and get repeat business. That’s just one way another company deals with it.
[David] Yep. I experienced that with Chewy and the unfortunate passing inevitable and unfortunate passing of my three dogs. And I tell you, in every case, we had to cut back and they go “Donate.” And especially the last one where we’re done with pets. It’s really brilliant strategy on their part. But I think mortgage lenders- Yeah … we struggle with that because our costs are already so high and people are like, “Give something away? We can’t do that. We’re not a dog food company.” Oh.
[Allen] Just charge the borrower for it. How’s that? Yeah. But anyways, let’s talk about one or two other small things. Everyone knows I’m a huge Ole Miss fan. I have kids that go there. Last week was the big Ole Miss LSU game. On game day, they were in Oxford, Mississippi. There was a kid and everywhere the camera went, this kid was always in the back view. He had a sign he made. Literally looks like he took a handful of Sharpies and just wrote it and it said something along the lines of, ” Venmo me for tickets to the game and beer.” And people from all over the country have been Venmo-ing this kid. He made over $18,000 just with a sign from a bunch of Sharpies standing behind Pat McAfee and others for college game day last weekend. So that was crazy. So if you’re short money, folks, the tip here is go to Staples, buy some paper, some Sharpies, and go get yourself on TV. that’s amazing. Yeah. Love the innovation. Yeah. All right, let’s talk about Polly. They are a pricing engine in our industry. Yeah. Many people know what it’s like to get into a pricing engine and configure. You’ve got so many configurations. You’ve got secondary pricing. You’ve got your LLPAs. You’ve got a blend of investor products. You’ve got how you’re gonna manage your margins. You’ve got loan balance changes. You’ve got all kinds of stuff folks? Takes a while to get onboarded, and it takes a lot of people, and it takes testing. So Polly just pushed what I wish I had many years ago, and I brought this up a minute ago about onboarding. They just pushed their AI-assisted configuration. It lets new customers get most of the pricing engine set up done before even signing the contract, and it cuts the time to value dramatically. So- … that’s very cool, and, we keep hearing everybody about using AI in underwriting and, 99% guaranteed perfection and AI everywhere. How about this? Hats off to Polly. They’re doing it completely different, and this is another great use of where AI should be used, so I wanted to mention that today. Also, David I just made fun of automatic underwriting, but Gateless I haven’t heard their name in a while, but they just launched Smart Underwrite. Yeah. I shouldn’t say they just launched it, but their press release states they just did 1.2 million applications, 230,000 closed loans with zero buybacks using their AI tech. They call it the Smart Underwrite Process. It can generate, in minutes real loan files, fully underwritten, documents processed, income calculated, all the things that we would expect. So you wanna check that out, but they just did some really interesting things over there.
[David] Yeah, I was just gonna say, they also partnered with David Kittle, so my good partner, Les… arthur Prieston. So there’s an insurance policy behind that. And Arthur Prieston, shout out to the partnership and the foresight. There it is. Yeah, go ahead, tell them about it, Kittle.
[Kittle] Yeah Gateless, member of TMC it’s greater confidence in mortgage AI, independent technology evaluation, and insurance-backed protection from AZP, which is Arthur Prieston’s company. So he’s come up with a certification program of several standards that you must meet. They have the data on it, and they did this test with Gateless on their loans over an extended period of time to make sure that they could validate exactly what they’re saying. If there’s going to be an issue using AI in any section of our industry, and in this case it’s automated underwriting, and something goes wrong, and you select that particular vendor- Right you have insurance here through Arthur, through Lloyd’s London and Munich Re Munich, Germany. So he has exclusivity with this insurance. He’s got a, a 30-year plus track record and reputation of paying claims. Now you can have your vendors insured against their AI product, and it’s something that people need to look into.
[Allen] Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah. I actually can’t agree more. Back in the days when we were building Loan Logics, we worked with Arthur, and we actually were putting together a product with his Lloyd’s of London relationship to insure loans for our pre-close and post-close QC process. So it was Arthur’s definitely, he’s the guy, and he’s that’s great to hear that included what he’s doing over there. And if anyone wants a video of Arthur doing one of the funniest dances in the world, I’ve got it. He was there dancing at my wedding. Hilarious. And he wants us to delete it, so we may make that go viral, Arthur. So anyway. Very nice. All right. Couple more quick things, David. I’ll make them quick. UWM just launched what they call Chat UWM. It’s voice AI for the broker pipeline. So you can check that out. It replaces what they’re saying was their old In Touch mobile app entirely, and your broker can ask a question with their voice, and whether it’s expiring locks, loan status, guidelines, pipeline updates, or anything else, and it will automatically respond. Folks, MBA Annual’s in two weeks. I will be there as well. October 11th through 14th. It’s in Chicago. Yes. And we’ll see you all there. Biggest conference of the year. And let’s talk about one last thing here, David. Service Link, they just did a 2026 LO report. I’ll get into the details of this next week ’cause it’s bigger, but here’s what they did. They surveyed 500 loan officers and 1,500 recent home buyers, and I’m gonna jump right to the conclusions, save the details for our next chat. But the opportunity for originators to provide greater transparency More innovation on technology and in-depth education is there. So the reality is LOs do not realize that borrowers know more than they actually do, and borrowers want to s- work with a lender that says that they do have e-closings or you can manage the appraisal from your phone and these other things. So there’s still a gap in the conversation for borrowers that are coming to the table very educated. And with that, David, there’s so many great things going on in- Yeah … the industry. So many great things will be released at MBA Annual. It always is every year, and it’s an exciting time upon us.
[David] And you’ll be there representing the podcast. Kittel will be there representing himself. In fact, Mr. Kittel will be taking over and hosting the podcast while at the MBA Annual because, again, I will be on my honeymoon. I know there’s been a lot of times where I’m going, “I get a lot of trouble from everyone.” Teasing, teasing, but time, but Mr. Kittel will be doing it live from the floor somewhere there he will be doing it. So you can connect with him, Alan, as you’re gonna be representing the podcast, Absolutely. Very cool. Very cool. Thank you so much.
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.