Here are a few takeaways from the first day of the Digital Mortgage conference. 

How Rate, Rocket Pro and Guild Mortgage maximize ROI

The major retail shop and the mega lender/servicers share a similar attention to detail regarding their processes. 

"It's your responsibility to make sure the process is baked out," said Rola Gurrieri, chief fulfillment officer at Rate. 

The company micromanages its Smart Underwrite process to watch where underwriters and processors deviate from the tech, she said. A common example occurs in income analysis, when AI doesn't understand when the borrower receives a raise. 

Gurrieri also suggested more fulfillment tasks are moving into the point of sale. Erin Langevin, senior vice president of production strategic initiatives at Guild, said fulfillment won't fully integrate with sales soon but Guild is closely tracking those advancements. 

"We have teams who just go branch by branch, user by user, training, mentoring and really getting them to put in the reps to actually adopt the new technology," she said. 

Rocket Pro won't mesh sales and operations because it has so much selling to complete, said Dan Sogorka, general manager. Rather, the challenge lies in weighing what technology solutions to pursue first. 

"The hardest thing is about prioritization. There's 100 things you can do," he said. "How do you pick the first five to do now? And that's the game right now."

Maintaining a human touch

Sogorka said Rocket's tools are enabling its bankers and brokers to use their "humanity and empathy" while letting tech do all the work. 

At Pennymac the face-to-face connection extends from the company to its broker partners. The rising TPO player has an open Zoom room during business hours in which brokers, who may be originating their first loan with Pennymac, can speak with mortgage specialists and share their screen. 

"Not only do we have to have intuitive technology, we have to have that human focus and do a little bit of hand-holding in the process," said Kim Nichols, chief TPO production officer at the firm. 

Mortgage industry veteran Jay Promisco urged originators to pick up the phone, as the industry's biggest players are performing far more calls per day. He was skeptical of what he characterized as an inundated vendor market, and forewarned of rapidly advancing AI voice agents and lenders seeking to get AI bots licensed. 

"I think artificial intelligence is still going to require people to do this business, but manufacturing alone, it'll be two years and things will look totally different," he said. 

Multichannel and multi-services strategy

Channel conflict is real, Nichols acknowledged. To alleviate concerns at PennyMac, the lender has an 18-month servicing non-solicitation agreement. It also has a Partner Signals program which gives originators a heads up when their client is in the market for a new home loan. 

"Recapture is a team sport," said Nichols.

Pennymac is a major success case in building a TPO channel, but not all wholesale ventures are built equal. Jay Boand, director of correspondent lending at PRMG, said some firms are today saddled with extra overhead in a wholesale channel they launched during the refinance boom. 

"You were just doing it to try and grab some extra business," he said. "Those people I think will come back around and potentially have the same problems."

Mortgage servicing rights holders may quietly get into correspondent lending, or launch a direct-to-consumer channel to defend their holdings, said Chad Smith, president and chief operating officer at Better Home & Finance. The executive echoed Boand's comments in cautioning around the strategy ahead of any downturns. 

"It's all about timing," he said. "I think it's pretty hard to compete with some of these great companies that are out there."