Full Transcript is Below:
– Welcome into another edition of Tech Central. I’m Greg Sher from NFMTV, joined by none other than our CIO, Christos Bettios. Always good to see you.
– Great, nice to be here, Greg.
– Have you unpacked your bags yet?
– I have.
– All right, so you’re fresh back from the Digital Mortgage Conference, which took place in Las Vegas. Over 1,000 tech-savvy individuals showed up to talk about the latest trends and innovations in the mortgage business. Catch us up, how was it?
– Big success, all around. I think people were very pleased. The vendors were able to present their solutions, they had very focused panels with demos and lots of questions. Very engaging conference.
– And speaking of panels, we’re taking a look at a picture right now. You were on a panel! How’d you get up there? What was it all about?
– I was, I was invited to speak on a topic of innovation through APIs, which is a way for systems to be able to get data from third party sources, which is something that we leverage at NFM very much.
– Okay, so, David Silverman was there as well, our founder and CEO. Hi Dave, if you’re watching. We see a picture of you and Dave there at the conference. Did you get a sense for how he felt and how… Give us an idea how you feel NFM is stacking up after seeing what you saw.
– First of all, it was great to have David, and be able to engage with David around technology innovation. I know it’s something that’s very dear, close and dear to his heart. I think the two takeaways for us were that NFM is really at par with the technology innovation, whatever is out in industry. We have solutions that we build ourselves, solutions that we have actually embedded from vendors. So that’s the first takeaway. I feel like we at par. I think the second point is, which is an area where Dave was engaging is how do we adapt some of this innovation to work for NFM? I think we were able to show how these solutions. We’ve already have integrated those solutions, or build our own that work with our business model.
– Now let’s get into some examples ’cause I know one of the technologies that was voted best in class, we already use. Talk about it.
– That’s true. The Best in Show was a company called Finicity that pulled data from banks, and electronic bank statements. It’s a vendor that we have actually been integrating for a while and we have one of the most sophisticated integrations in the industry, according to Finicity. This is a vendor already in our pipeline, and we’re using every day. They had an amazing product that they showed with Freddie Mac for employment and income verification, which is something that we’re also pursuing as well.
– So, loan officers who come to mortgage companies these days, they wanna know are you equipped to do digital mortgages? Not that anyone is ever gonna take a customer from application to close without a conversation, but they just wanna know, do we have it? And like you to answer that question. I think I know the answer, but just how do you feel like NFM’s position currently relative to the bigger the players in the market?
– Like I said before, I think we’re really at par with all the innovation. We have the right culture, the support from David, from Jan to bring in the best solutions, and adapt them for ourselves. Specifically to your question about how we bring the technology to the loan officers, a lot of the buzzwords around digital technology gets lost, but what we really do have is the one that most lenders are investing in, which is robotic process automation, RPA. It’s one of the buzzwords in industry. With something that we’ve done, and I think our loan officers know it, where we actually do automatic notifications, dynamic messaging, dynamic needs so the LO can serve their customer better. We also have RPAs in our processing. We have automated tasking that happens in our post origination.
– RPA, means?
– Robotic processing automation.
– Okay, just making sure, just making sure.
– So we have it both upfront for our loan officers, and I think some are familiar, on our Borrower portal, in our Point of Sale system, and we also have in the back end in some of our operations.
– You’ve got a pretty big team here of real smart guys and gals. How much time and focus and energy do you put on a daily basis or weekly basis on keeping NFM ahead of the curve, technology-wise?
– It’s every day. I was invited to this panel by one of the industry experts, Craig Focardi, who wanted to hear some more perspective. All in all, I think is something that I do every single day.
– You’re feelin’ pretty good. You’ve got a little swag to your step here, post-Vegas. I see it, I see it. Don’t you see it? Look at this guy. Great to see you again.
– Thank you so much.
– All right, Christos Bettios, the CIO of NFM lending. You’ve been watching another edition of Tech Central. I’m Greg Sher, we’ll see ya again next time.