[David] Let’s get over to Allen Pollack. Good to have you here, Allen. I always love your tech updates and some of the unique things you report on. I didn’t mean that as a compliment.
[Allen] Thank you. GPT is my assistant in a lot of the content. So, with that being said, let me tell you some funny things GPT brought up for today’s podcast. The first one is a quote. GPT said, I asked ChatGPT to help me close more loans. It sent me a candle and told me to manifest better borrowers. Everyone’s into manifesting these days and GPT, I didn’t even ask it just said it set me a candle and told me to manifest better borrowers.
[Alice] Then it said are you supposed to meditate with the candle? I’m not.
[Allen] That’s what GPT’s suggesting correct. If I asked it for a playlist, it’ll probably put one together. It then said a tech startup just launched a smart toilet that tracks your health. Meanwhile, my LOS still freezes when I try and upload a PDF, sorry, to all the LOS vendors out there. GPT did that, not me.
[Marc] Hey, Allen, I want to tell you Allen, ChatGPT sent me a candle from my marriage too. I just wanna let you know that,
[Allen] That’s hysterical. The next one Swedish Company built a smart fridge that won’t open if it thinks you’re emotionally eating. It reads your tone and your posture. Imagine if it didn’t allow you to price loans more than the amount of times you’re allowed. So GPT’s got a fun twist on the mortgage industry this week. Let’s move into some mortgage news. So there’s a company called Title Wave. They are an AI mortgage startup. I’ve not heard of them before by the way. They partner with First Colony Mortgage and Mortgage Solutions to enhance the process with AI. Of course, what they’re looking at doing are a few very interesting things. They are offering immediate pre-approvals. They’re automating income and employment verifications and providing multilingual support. Now, those are things that everybody does, right? we automate these things and that doesn’t sound special, but what’s more interesting is the fact that they’re looking to find ways to increase with AI, not with technology that people are using, but completely with AI, the inefficiencies that we’re facing in the mortgage side. So another vendor using AI. I’d check it out if you’re interested. Then David, this one was more interesting. Service Link. They just unveiled these big enhancements to their EXOS closing platform, realtime scheduling, so you can now can schedule closings in real time. Instant remote closing eligibility. That’s pretty interesting. I haven’t heard that one before. Enhanced borrower experience, which right, everyone, all the vendors say that they’re doing that, so that’s good and support from various closing methods. However, EXOS just launched their inspect app that now allows homeowners to conduct AI guided home inspections using their smartphones. That is pretty cool. It’s using geofencing along with timestamping and privacy features to ensure accuracy. There’s a big push and a big movement towards going in this direction, whether it’s inspections, whether it’s homeowners insurance, asking you to validate different things. I’ve seen all of these already occur, so hats off to Service Link. That was pretty cool. The Mortgage Bankers Association, David, they just reported that the delinquency rate for mortgage loans on the one to four unit residential properties has increased to a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.04% at the first quarter of 2025. Here’s the thing that’s interesting. They break down. If you go read it again, you could just search for the MBA report on delinquency rates. They break it out by government and non-gov loans. But they talk about how there has been a continuous increase, which is a little bit concerning. This is an area we need some AI, we need some tech. And I know there’s one or two things out there, but we need to get in front of borrowers. It has to do with communication. There’s ways to help borrowers stay in their homes to I knew you were gonna say something, Marc, so I’m teeing it off to you. But clearly this is where we need technology. We don’t need another point of sale. We don’t need another CRM. We need to help borrowers stay in their homes in these tough times. And we need to look in our data and find the opportunities and opportunities as us, as mortgage companies as servicers to find ways to help maintain and sustain the quality of these loans, our portfolio, the business that we have and so forth. And before I get to the next topic, Marc I know it’s hot at the moment. You wanna chime in on that?
[Marc] Yeah. Let me let me make a comment on what you just said about I think’s important. Seniors and other mortgage holders nowadays are really paranoid about a lot of stuff and if they get in trouble on their loan and they try to work through things, I don’t know how all this information gets out, but they get barrage by people offering them a helping hand. It’s usually trying to rip them off. So I was talking to a gentleman the other day who has a loan and needs some help, right? And I explained what might be available to him, to his lender and he was gonna call them and I even offered to call his lender and get the right, find who the right person is from to talk to and whatever. And he told me something, he said, he said, it is so hard, this was a senior. But he said, this was so hard for me and my wife. We are in our late seventies and, we’re living on this fixed income and it’s hard to make ends meet. We’ve got this very small mortgage payment that’s left. He said the worst part about it is that we don’t know what telephone calls we get, what emails we get, what we get on social media like Facebook or whatever. What’s real and what’s a scam today. So we’re afraid to, we’re afraid to respond to anything because we’ve given up ourselves.
[David] Respond to anything. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. The warnings are keeping people from accepting the legitimate one. Was such a good point, Marc. Allen, we just released a podcast. I released a podcast about servicing, a new servicing platform that Angel l AI has released, and it is really interesting. I encourage, I’ll put a link to it in our listeners about how the, he’s reduced the cost to below $4 per loan per month to service a loan, and then how he’s using AI to keep people current. It’s really interesting. Fascinating. How AI can make such a difference.
[Allen] It just generically on, on AI, David, we talked a long time ago. Pharmacists are using AI, the speed to which you can have access to knowledge. Forget about AI making decisions for you. The speed of access to knowledge attorneys, law firms, everyone is starting to adapt to how AI can help them. They’re starting at a smaller scale, but it is everywhere and so if you’re not finding ways to implement or understand AI and look for small ways to make those small wins, you’re gonna be behind that. That is an absolute positive, factual statement, I should say. Not positive, but David. I wanna switch to the last topic for today. It was a really good article on LinkedIn, Michael Hammond. Many people in our industry know who Michael is. If not, you could just Google Michael and he will come up. He posts a lot of content, hit an article called Maturity Models, the Untapped Growth Engine Mortgage Tech Vendors Need Now, and this goes back to the entire conversation and topic about how tech vendors, some of them are just not well aligned. They either completely rely on conferences and buying people the seafood tower and a good handshake, and some of them rely on selling value and ROI and then some just sell vaporware, right? We that will never go away. That’s just the nature of the beast, but what was really interesting about his article is you brought up a couple things and why it matters for mortgage lenders and vendors and it’s just four points he had, and I just wanna say them real quick ’cause he was just spot on. One is it’s a framework that he mentions this Mortgage Tech Growth Maturity model. And it think of it like crawling, walking, running, and then scaling, right? You have to crawl before you walk. And what he says is that you have to align tech to the business goals. So instead of buying flashy tools, which we talk about all the time, right? Maturity models help you invest based on where you’re at, where you actually are. What is your business today? What do you need? Fixes the shiny object problem. So not every lender needs AI or all the shiny tools today, and we talked about that last week. We brought it up again today. It helps vendors sell smarter. Vendors need to just not pitch features, but they need to show you where you are in your journey and how to level up. Every vendor, and I’ve not only had been partners of a couple companies myself, but I’ve consulted for many. They all try and perfect the sale, and they all try and go to these awesome sales professionals that are not in the mortgage industry and they’re like, this is how you sell. This is how you send a follow up email. What, in the, I feel like the mortgage industry is so different. That doesn’t all work. There’s a problem. The mortgage lenders have 20 plus vendors that are involved in every transaction. Your generic email of what may work when you’re selling toothpaste is not the same as the mortgage industry and so you really have to understand what is the pain? what is that connection with that vendor? and if you don’t create that connection and they don’t connect back to you with what the true pain is, they have so much stuff going on, they don’t have time for you. So the vendors really have to start selling smarter, and I don’t think that’ll ever go away either and then the final one that Michael brings up is you have to enable better conversations with the C-suite and we all know how important that is. We talk about that all the time too. What is their budget? What is their mindset? Approach the sale and the connection, the relationship. Something that fits within with their mind is thinking don’t sell them something. Don’t sell them the electric bike if they don’t even know how to ride a bike. So we have to rethink this relationship and I know a lot of vendors are struggling right now. There’s gonna be continuous acquisitions, go check out what Michael wrote. Again, it’s called let me give you the exact name of the article. It is called Maturity Models: The Untapped Growth Engine Mortgage Tech Vendors Need Now.
[David] Interesting. Interesting. Very good stuff. Always in your report, Allen. Technology, the servicing one is what i’m thinking of one particular servicing company, the name escapes me right now, but they were a specialty servicer and what the key to what they did was is they got to know their customers and they knew them so well that they could anticipate whether or not the customer was gonna be able to make the payment based on certain things that they, and in the form of their contact they have with the customer. And I think that’s what AI can give us now, is the tools can give us the ability to measure where a customer’s psychic is at, where their stress levels are at, by just staying in touch with them. It’s a high touch and now the problem is that specialty service server, the cost to service per loan was so high, but now with AI you can have the same level of the high touch, but using AI, really exciting how this industry is being transformed. Thanks, Allen. Very good.
[Allen] Thank you.
[Allen] I have a quick question for Allen. Allen, do you offer coming in and doing that type of maturity model assessment because I’m a big fan of those. We did it for education, right? There’s the same type of thing on where are you in your development of your education program. Do you offer that service for someone who’s saying, I don’t even know what that means and I would like to know, am I a level one or a level five or whatever metric you’re using?
[Allen] I’d love that you asked that question, Alice, so thank you. And the answer is yes. I have been through the mud and I’ve been on both sides of the fence on that and I’ve even had professionals come into my own company, so I’ve learned from them. The answer is yes, and it’s a great exercise because you’re supposed to have that out of the body experience. That person, that consultant’s supposed to take you outside to look back in and help you reassess and understand where you’re at. And sometimes it includes talking to customers and sometimes it includes a hard truth. We’ve done that as well. Actually. Funny enough Mr. David Lykken was brought into one of my companies in the past and he actually did something very similar. So I did learn from one of the best as well. But the answer is yes. Alice, thank you for bringing that up.
[Alice] It’s such a valuable service because a lot of people, I think, envision where they are, but until somebody shows you no you’re at ground zero and here’s where you need to get and here’s how you compare to your peers. I think it’s a really, it’s an exercise every company should go through for many divisions within their organization.
[David] That’s, that was a great point. I did that a long time ago, Alan. So my I forgot about that. Thank you so much. Appreciate the shout out on that. And it was so much fun working with you back then and it’s even more fun, but you’re the guy that should be calling to Alice’s point.
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.