AI will kill (some) mortgage jobs. One exec says that's a good thing

November 28, 2023 4:00 AM

Katherine Campbell, former chief marketing officer at AnnieMac Home Mortgage, is no stranger to jumping into something new.

In the 1990s, Campbell moved to San Francisco in the midst of the dot-com boom. After time with Wells Fargo and a series of startups, she ran marketing departments for insurance products and even gas and oil, eventually becoming a fixture in the mortgage industry with Assurance Financial and later AnnieMac. Today, Campbell is pursuing a new path through the launch of Leopard Jobs.

The new company is founded on the belief that artificial intelligence and technological innovation is changing the work environment. Leopard seeks to help businesses adapt to that reality.

"I do believe we're in the biggest work revolution that has ever existed, in large part because of the onslaught of AI and the sort of ease of access to that, so that it is not only capable of replacing we're looking at around 300 million jobs here in the next couple of years, but it is really what should happen," she said. "[We should be excited about this because] it takes away the mundane day-to-day tasks."

Campbell doesn't want those in the financial services industry to fear how AI will impact the back-end functions of a company. Instead, she's aiming to find a way for them to benefit from the technological transition that is taking place.

Her newly launched company is providing consulting services for companies struggling to adapt to a remote workforce. Also, there are plans to launch a technology sometime next year aimed at "the new generation of Gen Y and Gen Z and the way they want to talk about work and share work."

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What pushed you to branch out of a marketing position?

Long story short, my former employer believed it was going to have some acquisitions that didn't happen and so they weren't quite as big as they had hoped they would soon be. They wanted to have a chief of marketing, but didn't want to actually do all the things you need to do to rebrand and actually have a website. Plus it's such a struggle in the industry right now too, so we parted ways.

In the background, I've been thinking through this Leopard Job concept because I do believe we're in the biggest work revolution that has ever existed, in large part because of the onslaught of AI and ease of access to it. It is capable of replacing close to 300 million jobs in the next couple of years, but it is really what should happen because it will take away the mundane day-to-day tasks.

If we look just at the mortgage industry and how many mundane day-to-day tasks we have to do…that doesn't make humans love their jobs. Processors ordering titles and appraisals…they don't love their jobs. They love having a job and a paycheck, but that's not necessarily rewarding to human beings.

What makes this time in the industry unique in embracing AI technologies?

AI and the changing of the work place is a conversation that affects every single industry. The financial services industry is going to be dramatically affected.

Specifically, we'll see this when the market recovers and when companies have to decide whether they need to hire to the levels that they did before. But maybe you don't need to if you work right now to bring AI and other capabilities onboard. We know mortgage specifically has the capability to be significantly reduced from 30 days if you get that technology platform. We know there's many people working on capabilities, including tokenization of data from borrowers. Once data marries data, we won't really need people in the middle to get hard copies of data. Let's just log into your bank accounts. As that quickly evolves, when the market comes back, they won't even need to hire those people. So then what are people going to do with themselves? What are the new world opportunities that are coming along and plan the evolution.

So what I say is "tell the candle makers electricity is coming." We can easily look at the travel industry. We used to have to actually go to a travel agency and write a check [that's not the case anymore.]

What are the mortgage executives you’re talking to saying about technology and the impact it will have on the industry?

They are really struggling with how to measure productivity with a remote workforce and to create a culture of loyalty to a brand because we know when you're in a commodity like mortgage, maybe it doesn't matter if you work for Movement Mortgage, or AnnieMac. Maybe it feels kind of the same. The products are relatively similar. The process is relatively similar. It's still 30 days to get a mortgage complete, you know, it's not that different, so you want people to be loyal to your brand, but with a remote workforce that's hard to do.

Part of the conversation is re-establishing what KPIs [key performance indicators] make sense for different roles in their organization. If you want to measure productivity, what are the key performance indicators for productivity for a processor? How many files they got through or accuracy? What are the specific KPIs per every single role that you have? Sales jobs are going to be very different from production and operations jobs, but nonetheless, every single role can have KPIs that are no longer tied to time.

If you reinvent the relationship to productivity, then there is less pressure. Instead of relating it to an eight-hour traditional day ''if we can't see you, we don't think you're working' [we can embrace the position] that we are grown adults and just because we do other things – such as running errands – it doesn't make anyone unaccountable. [Executives] are not managing realistic expectations of productivity when they're trying to manage to time.

On other hand, how fast in this downtime can we take advantage of the technology that's really been available that hasn't been fully implemented? In 2020 and 2021, we were buying technology, but nobody really cared if it worked.

So as we build out the end-to-end solution on technology, take advantage of the capabilities of AI, including bots. So you had a conversation with the borrower that no longer needs to be had with the employee, so you're really pumping those bots full of knowledge. We don't need to actually pick up the phone and call the loan officer for [some] things.

How do you envision Leopard Job’s solving this dynamic?

We are working on technology. I can't release the information on the actual technology now because we're at a very early discovery and pre-development [phase] for it. So that information will be rolled out next year. But while that's being developed, the consulting side [is] helping executives establish KPIs and helping their workforce feel motivated and feel some sense of success in their role.

You expect artificial intelligence to have a notable impact on the mortgage industry. How so?

AI is still only developed within what we call artificial narrow intelligence and that is a single task, so the front-end of consulting with the borrower is in a very good place.

The back-end when we look at a single task, if we were to take data in an acceptable format that was immutable, which means it cannot be changed, we have title on the house instantly. We have all of the assets and income from the borrower instantly. We have the parameters of the product itself. What are the guidelines for the loans to be approved themselves? That becomes a single task. If you think of every single position that's in a mortgage process, anything that's single-task oriented, AI can replace.

How can mortgage professionals adopt and be more valuable than what AI can offer?

This is separating the job and the paycheck a little bit. We all get very concerned about how we're going to make money, but numerous new jobs will come out of AI. Someone has to run that bot, someone has to have the knowledge of the company to put it into the knowledge base of that bot. That is where operations teams, if they want to be useful, can say ' I don't want to sit here and order appraisals all day, but I understand how appraisals work and I can write a lot of information about appraisals.' This will help AI run better for companies because someone still has to do all of that.

Anything AI can do, typically a human being is miserable doing…The more AI takes over the dirty work and we elevate ourselves to only what humans can do, the more satisfaction people will have in their lives.

The good news is that no one's an expert in that yet. Nobody has evolved the mortgage to a completely digital product and [is an expert in] running AI tools. To be part of that earlier conversation, they should speak up now.

You worked in the mortgage industry for some time. What lessons were learned?

The bottom line is that if technology can, it will, so the thing is to write out either for your company or for your particular position every single thing that your company does or every single role and responsibility that you have. If technology can replace it, scratch it off and see what's left, because if you look at something like ordering title, underwriting the loan based on guidelines, anything that technology can replace, take all of that out. Just because we were one of the most laggard because of compliance and other other issues ... but the borrower is more than ready to adapt and engage with technology than the lender's are.

The takeaway is this: In 2018, I could have bought keywords through Google, which I did, built an incredible web experience and done all of that relatively inexpensively to capture business outside of the self-sourcing loan officer, because there wasn't much competition because nobody was doing that. But borrowers have been really insisting on searching and finding where they want to go for a mortgage, it is now very competitive online and those that wait, will be out.