Industry executive says a one-person shop can now operate like it's open 24/7
Small businesses have been leveraging artificial intelligence tools to help scale in a way that previously required building large staffs of employees.
This is true in the mortgage industry as well, as solo brokers and originators have used technology to level the playing field with much larger competitors in the space.
A recent AD mortgage survey noted that 82% of the mortgage professionals they surveyed expect AI and automation to be the biggest driver of industry change.
That gap has started to close between solo shops and large brokerages and retail lenders. A broker working alone can now follow up with a prospect at midnight, price out a loan on the spot, and still be the first call that borrower makes the next morning, all without adding a single employee.
Erin Wester (pictured top), chief product officer at Optimal Blue, said AI-driven tools are becoming one of the few growth levers available to a broker who has no intention of scaling up their headcount.
"Let the AI do the work for you," Wester told Mortgage Professional America. "There's a lot of vendors out there doing things like customer engagement, and you can kind of duplicate yourself over and over again."
Becoming a 24/7 operation
Wester said that the duplication effect is what allows a solo broker to maintain the kind of constant presence a much larger operation would normally require.
"You can basically have that CRM-like component to bring your customers in, and then use tools like Loansifter to price them out quickly and accurately and hopefully get that business," she said. "It's all about making yourself available everywhere and anywhere, and AI definitely helps there. That is a certain growth lever that it's amplified."
For a broker, that availability no longer has to come at the cost of actually being reachable around the clock in person. Before, an independent originator would need to be physically available around the clock to answer questions from their borrower.
The hard part for brokers is finding the right technology to help scale. In the midst of convention season, it isn’t unusual to walk into a vendor room and find a dozen new companies who have sprung up since the last event.
Wester said they help those who work with their platform sort through all the new tech.
"In our Comergence platform, we've got a great link for a solutions center, for brokers out there that are maybe looking at the tech vendor landscape and feeling a little bit overwhelmed," she said. "It's a great place to start."
Data literacy is a competitive edge
Wester said the next advantage available to independent brokers involves understanding the data already sitting in their own systems.
"The more you know, the better you can compete," she said. "A lot of that is not just things like margin and margin protection and margin competitiveness, which are very important. It's also around volume trends, staffing patterns, where your users and employees are spending the most time, and how you reduce those friction points. All of that ties into getting more business, or decreasing the cost to originate."
She compared the current moment around AI-ready data to an earlier shift in mortgage technology that also took time to click for most of the industry.
"It feels a lot like APIs back in 2015, where it felt so nebulous that it was hard to wrap your head around what that was actually going to do for you," she said. "Everybody knows now how that's helping them integrate or build something custom. The same story is going to be true with AI-ready datasets here in a couple of years, if not sooner."
That shift, she said, puts real responsibility on technology providers like Optimal Blue to make the tools approachable rather than assuming every broker will adapt on their own.
"It's our responsibility to evangelize and to stand behind the technology we build with real-life use cases and real-life success metrics," she said. "A lot of it too is just listening. We have to listen to our customers. That's gold to us. That is really what makes us who we are, because we support so many customers."
She said the scale of Optimal Blue's own customer base, which touches 35% of locks nationwide and 40% of hedge loans, is what makes that feedback loop meaningful rather than anecdotal.
"We have a very large gallery of folks that no one else does in the capital markets space," she said. "If we're truly listening, we should be able to build anything twice as fast. That's what we're hoping to do."
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