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29 November 2024 November 2024 » C O V E R S T O R Y Michael Keaton SVP, Subservicing Business Development, Onity Group Inc. Q: How do you envision the mortgage servicing indus- try evolving in 2025? What key trends do you anticipate will shape the landscape? I anticipate that mortgage servicers will begin making more use of AI, and I hope AI will be used to accentuate the homeowner's customer service experi- ence. We've all used voice bots on the phone and chatbots on the web. I used a chatbot recently when I had an internet outage. It asked me some questions and then put me in a queue to speak with an agent. My request was categorized, but it didn't fulfill or resolve the reason for my inquiry. I believe AI done right will take that a step further. It will determine the conditions present on the loan, it will listen to our feedback, and then it will synthesize that combination of informa- tion to diagnose the problem and fulfill the request. When AI is done right, both the homeowner and the servicer come out ahead. Q: How are you and your organi- zation working to meet those challenges? How has your strategy evolved over the past year? For over a year, we have been testing and training our voicebot and our online chatbot, both with the goal of using these tools to answer homeowner questions more quickly and enhance homeowner satisfaction. Both are in production, and we anticipate greater homeowner adoption of these self-ser- vice tools in 2025. Q: How are you preparing for potential economic down- turns or fluctuations within the housing market? What strategies are you implementing to mitigate risk? We continually monitor the perfor- mance of our portfolio, as well as our subservicing population for trends large or small in delinquency and vacancy, as well as foreclosure timelines in judicial states. Everyone wins when we avoid foreclosure. We are constantly working to create and test new types of loss mitigation plans to help preserve homeownership. Sharing my personal opinion, based on 32 years in mortgage subservicing, I'd say we need to keep a close eye on FHA delinquency trends. Credit card balanc- es are at an all-time high. This will start to put a strain on the younger genera- tion of homeowners. These homeown- ers typically have the smallest down payments—on homes purchased at the peak of the market. Micro-changes in FHA delinquency may give us a sense of broader impacts on delinquency overall. Jason Kwasny Chief Servicing Officer, Servbank Q: How do you envision the mortgage servicing indus- try evolving in 2025? What key trends do you anticipate will shape the landscape? I tend to look at this question in two different ways. 1) How do I believe it will evolve, and 2) how should it evolve? Historically, absent some "black swan" event such as COVID, I'd expect the mortgage servicing industry to continue to evolve on the "slow to adopt change" pace it has always been on. There will be a continuation of the consolidation we have seen over the past couple of years, and there might be some small Historically, absent some 'black swan' event such as COVID, I'd expect the mortgage servicing industry to continue to evolve on the 'slow to adopt change' pace it has always been on." —Jason Kwasny, Chief Servicing Officer, Servbank EXECUTIVE EXPERT EXECUTIVE EXPERT