Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Don Scott, CEO of Frank Mortgage. It is a new company looking to take the bias out of shopping for a mortgage and make sure that consumers get the best rate possible. Don talks about the surprising piece of feedback that he has received post launching Frank Mortgage. 

Episode Highlights

• 4.30: The market has a flaw in the way it's set up. The brokers are supposed to represent the customer, but we are paid by the lenders so that can steer a bias into the process and bias because it's not necessarily the same compensation between lenders may not be identical, says Don.
• 5.44: Some of the brokers out there provide wonderful service for their customers. But there is this inherent flaw in the way that business is set up. So, customers often enter the process feeling very uncertain and not informed, and they often exit the process feeling the same way.
• 8.51: Features matter as much as rate does to a lot of customers. It's always not just a pure rate decision and we can help them understand all of that, but then they ultimately can make their own decisions, says Don.
• 12.49: There is a customer adoption and acceptance that has to take place for this kind of product and ultimately where we get down the road is where we can ask the customer for less and go to direct source to get more information, says Don. 
• 17.00: Don explains how customers select products in the portal, how they move to the documentation stage and stages of approval with the lender.
• 27.24: At the end of the day, incentives are often designed to control that person who is the bottleneck or is that person is going to write that business, says Jason.
• 28.06: Raising capital is a major challenge that Don had faced while launching Frank Mortgage. 
• 29.36: As per Don there is a great opportunity to enhance the experience of consumers in the mortgage market and the feedback, they are getting consumers is confirming that it's very positive so far and they don't see the competitors that are in the marketplace.

3 Key Points

1. Don explains how the market has sort of turned into a Marcus. It's very focused on maximizing the outcomes from the brokers of the lenders and not so much for the customers. 
2. There is a lot of data scrubbing and a lot of back and forth between the broker network and lenders, but it's of time and resources, and with a digitized process like this, you can simplify that and deliver a complete file 100% of the time that has some algorithmically driven underwriting, says Don. 
3. Talking about feedbacks received from consumers Don says that they have heard in surveys that more and more consumers want to have online solutions for mortgages. So, they presented one to them and now Frank Mortgage is getting positive feedback about the experience. 

Tweetable Quotes

• "I have been around the mortgage market quite a long time, funded some of the medium and small sized lenders that are in the marketplace space know their businesses fairly well." - Don
• "It's not the customer that's paying us and so our economic incentive isn't always aligned with the customers best outcome." - Don

Resources Mentioned

• Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn
• Woodgate.com – Sponsor