Our huge effort is GPT. But we also have our own point-of-sale system. We’ve always had our own loan application – we built it ourselves. We own it, we control it, and we tailor it for optimal use.
SW: What is your technical team like?
CB: My technical team is a hybrid. I have expertise here in technical analysis and then I hire some overseas developers to do the actual coding. But all other products are designed, executed and launched out of our offices.
SW: What makes your technology unique?
CB: Because I only have one client, I am able to do the most customized things that will be most helpful to our business. The success of our team is that we are very close to sales and operations. I wasn’t moved to some headquarters building. I get my best ideas from sales people and operations people. So I can work with users to embed their ideas into the NFM solution, and that’s why it’s successful.
Southern Weekend: How do you view security issues?
CB: We have developed a plan that places greater emphasis on business continuity. I mean, obviously, we have all kinds of things to protect ourselves and a lot of tools. But we put a lot of effort into making sure we can get back up and running quickly if something goes wrong.
SW: What keeps you up at night?
CB: I want to be the best in the class. So our new point of sale system, we hope, is better than anyone else’s. I’m competing against companies that are number one, two, three, and four, not companies that are number 25.
SW: How do you leverage artificial intelligence?
CB: We’ve been talking about artificial intelligence for some time, but in April 2023, I formalized a two-year plan consisting of a three-pronged approach. Therefore, the first one must be the GPT-LLM (Large Language Model) solution. The second area is, how do we build a system for loan originators? So, our loan app has [Microsoft] Copilot function. The third aspect is, how to introduce artificial intelligence into the manufacturing process?
We are invited by AWS [Amazon Web Services] Attend their events and introduce AI lending. We have our own GPT, which is linked to all our data and is proprietary, allowing access to the internet privately and securely – not because you have an account, but I have a private single sign-on directly from within my business.
But I also allow our company to have GPTs that contain company-specific content, so we can have our own non-QM GPTs, as well as GPTs that go into our HR, and I can ask questions to those GPTs. Therefore, I provide a proprietary, private GPT functionality on our SharePoint for users within my enterprise to ask questions about our own code.
We’ve taken this idea to the next level, where not only can you safely ask questions about our own content, but we can query and profile you at the same time. So I can ask a question: “Show me all the loans above 6% that I closed six months ago” and I’ll get my list. And then on that list, I can say “Oh, for this person, write an email to this borrower based on this data.” The product has been in production since November and people are using it. My GPT internal users average 350 clicks per day.
SW: What’s left on your two-year AI roadmap?
CB: We just released a new version of our online lending app that provides our loan officers with the Copilot feature, which doesn’t make decisions for the loan officer, but evaluates the application in real time and provides them with key information for them. Loans can be approved faster. And then we’re working on introducing AI-enabled OCR (optical character recognition) so we can use AI to compare files on the fly to capture content.
SW: What part of these new AI capabilities excites you?
CB: GPT. I was able to write the query correctly and ask it to give me a loan and then write an email. Or ask for a document and status update – it pulls my data from that document and sends an email about the status to the borrower or the referring real estate agent. I just saved 15 minutes. Our people are doing it now.
But I think the most exciting thing is the loan officers. You are submitting this content safely – you will not post any of it on the internet. And it’s not customer facing. But if I can make my employees 50, 60 or 70 percent more productive, that’s progress to me. I can do all this on my phone instead of using a computer
I firmly believe that the winners in this world are those who embrace these technologies. We hope to make this available to other lenders because our friends in the industry are asking for it, so we’re looking at that as well.
