Pentiv executives say productivity beats faster origination, with technology that strengthens mortgage professionals
The latest mortgage rate news released by Freddie Mac on Thursday afternoon reinforces the continued headwinds the rate environment is providing mortgage brokers.
Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed-rate mortgage remained at 7.40%, the same as last week, which broke a seven-week streak of rate increases.
With rates remaining elevated, mortgage brokers continue to look for ways to generate business at a time when home sales are slowing down. Many are turning to AI and new technology to help navigate the current market.
Some brokers worry that new technology will cut them out of the process, and the company behind a newly announced platform says its approach goes the other way.
Usman Maher (pictured top left), chief financial officer and chief strategy officer at Pentiv, the new operating brand of Pineapple Financial Inc., said the company is aiming its AI tools at the brokerage.
"Mortgage brokers can't rely on a return to the boom origination era that we saw previously," Maher told Mortgage Professional America. "Rates are elevated. We have difficulty in home affordability for younger buyers and older buyers across the board. And margins are getting a little bit tight."
Focusing on productivity
Plenty of companies already pitch AI to mortgage lenders. Maher said what sets Pentiv apart is the part of the business it targets.
"Pentiv is focused on the distribution layer of mortgages, so the brokerages and the professionals who own the customer relationships directly," Maher said. "Better is sort of focused on the loan file and the origination process, the underwriting and the funding process. We are working directly with the brokerages and professionals to make their workflow management better and more productive and help them with revenue generation."
Maher said the tools are built to fit alongside what a brokerage already runs, and he described what they are meant to tell its leaders.
"The company's not asking brokerages to replace their origination systems or become a different type of lender," Maher said. "It's intended to work across the existing infrastructure that they have in place currently. But it's more to answer questions like, who should we be recruiting? How can we make our agents more productive? Where are we losing business?"
Brokers are seeing fewer deals, which raises the question of what a new technology company should build first.
"Where we think that we are focusing is on the productivity aspect of it," Maher said. "As opposed to making the originations faster, we are identifying opportunities where brokers are still able to make money."
Finding new clients was the second-biggest concern, at 49.8%, in a July AD Mortgage survey of more than 300 mortgage professionals, behind market volatility at 54.1%. Respondents also named CRM follow-ups, data entry, and document collection as the tasks they most expect AI to take over.
Anthony Georgiades (pictured top right), board director and advisory committee chair at Pentiv, spoke to the worry that technology will cut brokers out.
"There are so many components of the puzzle here in the process that actually really require a human and human interaction, whether it's having certain compliance guardrails, whether it's effectively reaching out to a prospective borrower," Georgiades said. "You can't just come in and replace everything with AI. But what you can do is empower those humans to have that information in front of them at the right time, at the right moment.
“Giving people the tools and the processes to really push these things forward versus completely displacing it, which I think is a misconception."
What Pentiv is launching
Pineapple Financial, which is based in Toronto and trades on the NYSE American, announced the Pentiv launch Thursday. Georgiades said the company is targeting customers across North America, and that he and Maher are based in New York.
The company also named Maher, a former senior director of strategic finance at SoFi, as its chief financial officer and chief strategy officer. Its shares will move from the PAPL ticker to PTIV on or about Oct. 26, and the corporate renaming is subject to a shareholder vote.
Pentiv's first two tools, a recruitment agent and a retention agent, already run inside the company’s existing software. The recruiting tool helps brokerage leaders identify and prioritize mortgage professionals to recruit, while the retention tool flags at-risk customers and suggests outreach.
Brokers are hearing from plenty of technology vendors right now. Georgiades described where Pentiv fits.
"We're not coming in, we're not trying to replace you," Georgiades said. "We're trying to better you, literally, right? Trying to maximize their revenue-generative activities, which ultimately impact us."
Pineapple Financial will remain the test bed for new tools before they reach outside brokerages. The company plans to report adoption and results from the two tools, and from outside brokerage pilots, in the coming quarters. Maher framed the launch around where brokers’ income comes from right now.
"Every dollar of commission really counts," Maher said. "So we're trying to find tools that could help empower these brokers to find different areas of opportunity, and find either new ways to make money or use the existing books that they already currently have to generate more revenue from the customers that they have and just overall be more productive."
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