Lending Leaders
Tech and the Future of Mortgage
10.06.2022
Community
For this week’s episode of LLL, Jim interviews Mike Yu, CEO and Co-Founder of Vesta. Together they discuss technology, the role of loan officers in a changing industry, and projecting what the mortgage industry’s future might mean for vendors and lenders alike.
What got you into the mortgage industry designing your own LOS?
Like many, Mike’s journey to the mortgage industry was unintentional. He started at Blend, before which he had never thought of working with mortgages. After years of contemplating designing a new LOS that could meet the demands of a next-gen tech stack, he designed Vesta.
Vesta was an opportunity to reset how a lot of recurrent work was getting done. There was a dearth of new technologies that permitted lenders to truly innovate, he believed. Even more so then than now, legacy vendors dominated the market. There were new companies like LodeStar popping up, but not quite to today’s extent.. Increasingly, Mike was drawn to the idea of wholly resetting the traditional mortgage tech stack by building something of his own.
What is the danger of not switching to a newer tech stack?
It’s all about where the industry is going. It’s headed in a certain direction: more technology-led, with multiple software vendors working together to form a diverse tech stack. At least a couple of things are inevitable:
- Everything will be driven by data
- Lenders will need to have structured, automated analysis
- Because computers can do both of the first two, LOs will need to focus on customer service, reaching the customer digitally
What is the LO’s role, and how does tech make that easier in the near future?
There’s a sales component, but it’s all about how you can make the customer comfortable. How do you strip away extraneous stuff like asking the borrower for documents or checking on Zillow to make sure the property is there? That stuff shouldn’t be manually processed. Tech strips away menial stuff, so the LO can focus on walking borrowers through the process. At the end of the day, LOs will stand or fall on CX, which tech vendors can’t help LOs with. Systems like Vesta and LodeStar can empower LOs and give them back so much of their time, but the ball is still in the LO’s court.
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