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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 63 "pain points" those lender and servicers are encountering while doing business. Fannie Mae is continually launching pilot programs to test out new technologies or solutions, usually over a brief three-month window. "If it's something that meets our requirements and we feel is wor- thy of being rolled out or scaled," Stephan says, "then we would follow tradition IT methods to transition and roll out to production." For Fannie, Stephan says projects are prioritized if they show real potential to cut costs, help return on investment, or shorten the mortgage lifecycle from application to close. "We do not just say, 'Shiny new object, let's go run with that,'" Stephan jokes. "We really try to maximize the value for the startup, as well as the Fannie Mae team, to make sure that we are actually doing something of value which could have the potential to scale and lead to some- thing more permanent." When discussing JMAC's approach to innovation, Pham explains that many of their stakeholders are typically tied to their current ways of doing things. "We don't want that to continue, to keep doing the same thing," Pham says. "So the biggest focus is customer experience. Is the software easy to use from a customer-facing side, and then is it easy to use on an internal-facing side?" "Automate. Automate. Automate," says Caster. "It doesn't all come down to that, but that is the biggest piece. Make it as easy and natural for the client as we can. We're trying to look at our whole communications platform and trying to say, 'How can we make this better?'" Part of that is simply about taking a serious look at how people are using technology in other aspects of their lives and figuring out how to port those lessons over into day-to-day operations and systems. "When you talk to your family, you're talking over text," Caster explains. "You're not necessarily doing phone calls anymore. We want our clients to be able to communicate to us in the way that they do naturally." at isn't always as easy as it sounds. In a world saturated with social media, the most popular ways people communicate don't always lend themselves to the way the industry does business. "People used to use Facebook all the time, and now they're using Snapchat all the time," Caster says. "What's coming next? By the time you catch up, they're on to the next thing. When you want to try to communicate to cli- ents via the way that they communicate all the time, you're very limited on an option like that, and how to integrate it into your own enterprise applications and how you run your business." Ibanez says,"We have always done innova- tion at Freddie Mac, but we're making big investments and improving our Loan Advisor Suite for our customers. Beyond just the sourc- ing side, now we also need to turn our attention to reimagining the servicing side. We need to look at other technologies. We want to innovate and learn in a fast-fail environment." "I think the customer is demanding more touch points," Pham says. "ey're demanding more transparency. Our biggest challenge or opportunity is making sure that the technology is solving this problem and that our people are embracing it to help the customer." IT'S ABOUT THE DATA One thing all of the interviewed subject matter experts touched upon was the impor- tance of data—as much of it as you can get and as accurate as you can make it. "We need to know a lot," says Ibanez. "No matter what you do, if you are trying to deliver service to your customers, we have to have good data." But the nature of the mortgage servicing industry makes things a lot more complicated than that because this is an industry not only awash in regulations but awash in regulations that may vary wildly from state to state. "We're talking about an industry, where in all 50 states, and at the county level, the real estate and lending laws can be different, and the foreclosure laws (may be different, too)," Ibanez explains. "ings are done on different forms. e data is not standardized, so bringing all these fantastic, wonderful technologies and tools to a very non-standardized process is go- ing to be a challenge." at's the difference between having the data you need and not. "I think understanding our customers and segmenting them into greater levels of detail (is a focus)," Pham says. "Like our broker business, we could segment them into products and into size, but we're implementing marketing auto- mation. And marketing automation allows you to understand your customer from a marketing standpoint. So you'll send out your newslet- ters, right? ey'll click on it and you have that data point, and then you also have what they're doing on your website, and then you also have how they interact with you as customers. So by having all those data points, it allows you to be more tailored and specific to your customers." Machine learning and artificial intelligence have the potential not only to help sort that glut of 1s and 0s into useful, categorized, sortable data but to learn how to recognize connections and patterns that would take much more time and effort from a set of human eyes. "We think the artificial intelligence side of things is going to get automated before the data engineering part," says Ibanez. "ere are now tools moving in the direction of the democratization of artificial intelligence. Lots of progress in that area. A lot less progress in figuring out how to integrate all these disparate data sources and put together all the structured and unstructured data in a meaningful way so you're not just getting noise out of the AI. You want to actually find signals in the data that you can do something with them. at will be a big challenge." "It is all about customer excellence," Ibanez adds. "When I say you've got to know what problem you're trying to solve, it's not innova- tion for innovation's sake. is is about making customer excellence a reality, and quite frankly, helping us build better relationships with our customers. ey're the most important thing to us." COVER STORY INDUSTRY INSIGHT INDUSTRY INSIGHT INDUSTRY INSIGHT INDUSTRY INSIGHT

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