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Going Fee-Free: Reimagining Member Satisfaction · Leaders in Lending

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You're listening to Leaders in Lending from Upstart, a podcast dedicated to helping consumer
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lenders grow their programs and improve their product offerings. Each week, here,
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decision makers in the finance industry offer insights into the future of the lending industry,
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best practices around digital transformation, and more. Let's get into the show.
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Hello, and welcome to Leaders in Lending. For those of you who
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don't already know, Jeff Kelner has passed the reigns of his podcast Microphone,
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and I'm honored to step into his shoes as the inaugural host in twenty twenty
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four. With that said, I'm your host Drew Megory and this week's episode
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features my conversation with Stacy Armiho, one of the winners of the American Bankers
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Most Powerful Women in Credit Unions as well as the Chief Experience Officer at Amplify
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Credit Union based in Austin, Texas. In this episode, Stacey and I
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talked through her philosophy of having a younger, more diverse demographic within leadership teams,
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as well as talking a bit about why she thinks PFI or primary financial
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institution, is a thing of the past and how organizations need to pivot their
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mindset around PFI. And lastly, we really dive into the thought of going
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fee free on all deposit products and how that translates to the balance sheet and
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income. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. And
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without further ado, here's my conversation with Stacy. Hi, Stacey, welcome
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to the podcast and thank you for making the time to join me today.
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Really appreciate it. Happy to be here. Awesome. So I think I'm
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going to follow suit in opening our conversation today as it's been done in prior
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podcast. So as a starting play, Stacey, I don't think many of
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us dreamt of being in the financial service industry when we were little kids.
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So can you give the listeners a little bit about your journey to becoming the
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chief experience officer at Amplify Credit Union. Absolutely, it is a non linear
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journey, like so many of the journeys of others. My background is actually
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in public relations and marketing, so I spent my entire career before I joined
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at a regional public relations and marketing agency in Texas, and so I had
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the chance to learn a lot of different industries. So we worked across a
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wide variety of types of companies, and I had a wide variety of roles,
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but mostly it was in areas like marketing and public relations and communications things
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along those lines. It also though, entailed things like strategic plan facilitation and
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interactions with executive teams, things along those lines. And it's interesting because I
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would never have guessed that could have qualified me to work inside a financial institution.
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But our CEO, in particular, has a really different mindset about One
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of his taglines is we're going to fix what's wrong with banking or we're going
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to die triin. That is sort of his overall outlook. The irony being
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he has been in banking as long as I've been alive. So we tell
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this joke during new employee orientation because it's actually true. He started in banking
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the year I was born, and so we have sort of a different perspective
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on that. But despite a very long tenure in one industry, he's sort
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of an innovator as he thinks about banking. And that's just there's so many
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things that we take for granted in this industry as truisms that really aren't especially
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in today's day and age and so he has a different perspective as he assembles
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the executive team about what areas do we need deep industry expertise, because of
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course you need some of that in some ways, and then what areas do
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we need brand new thinking? And so my role became one that was an
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amalgam of what was previously the Chief Operating Officer and the Senior vice president of
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Digital Transformation. Those two roles are now roughly what we consider to be the
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Chief Experience Officer, and so my responsibilities are fourfold. So one is marketing,
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communications and social impact, and that's see the world I came from.
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The second is retail, so in our environment that's our branches, contact center,
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and wealth management. The thirdest payments, so all the money movement and
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a none of the credit union. And then the worth is HR in training.
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So what we call talent theory there is to put the teams together that
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make the promise to the customer, the employee in the community with the people
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who keep those promises. So I spend most of my day sort of going
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across those and it's been going on six years now, it'll be six years
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this summer, and I actually officially consider myself a banker today, which is
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something I never thought I could say. Well, there you go. I
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know in many conversations that I have with people that are in the industry,
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the path to get to where we are at. Of course, you never
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think that you alluded to that. There's no way that I would have ever
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been able to get where I'm at with what I was doing in my previous
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life. So thank you for that. That's quite the laundry list of things
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that are on your to do list on a day over day basis as well.
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So one thing I wanted to cover is when we talked in the past,
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is one thing I found very very intriguing is you know, your philosophy
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on a younger, a more diverse demographic, and how an institution, and
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I think you called it should represent the audience in which you aim to serve.
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You we talk a little bit about your thoughts and your approach to that
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philosophy. So I am a believer that teams should never create something for someone
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without someone. So in I think organizations generally have a bad habit of this,
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but I think in particular in banking, we have a bad habit of
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this, where if you look at who is doing the creating. The people
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doing the creating are one the executive teams of any of the financial institutions.
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And then more deeply, you know, it's the product teams, it's the
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digital teams, it's the retail teams, it's the people on the ground who
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are coming up with the products. If we look at the demographics of each
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of those audiences and we compare that to the demographics of the customers they say
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they want to serve, there's a huge mismatch between those, and not just
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in age. Right, of course, we're not We can be designing for
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gen Z and decide we maybe need a little more experience that gen Z would
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possibly have in order to do that. That doesn't mean you have to have
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a one for one, but you can't have a team that is mostly homogenous
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in age, geography, gender, ethnicity, education status, background, financial
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status, all those things. The way we think about how our audience consumes
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and interprets information is not just so simple as a couple of demographic data points.
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And then we've got teams who are all in one geography, mostly they
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come from one educational background. Their lived experience, in a variety of ways,
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looks mostly the same and we believe they're going to create a product effectively
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for somebody that doesn't match any of those things. And it's interesting to me
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because as customers, think about ourselves as customers, and someone who doesn't relate
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to us in any kind of way says, here's what you need. How
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do we feel about that? As customers usually really not good. We usually
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feel very not good about that. But as institutions, we somehow believe we're
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exempt from that. So if we want to, like our industry says,
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we want to appeal to younger consumers. We want to appeal to underserved communities,
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we want to appeal to new demographics, we want to appeal to people
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that have different technology habits. We say all of those things, but our
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teams still look the same as they did when we were mostly doing business out
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of a brick and mortar situation and in a limited array of lending products or
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deposit products. And I think if we're willing to think a little differently and
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pull people in our organization in different ways, what we come up with is
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significantly different and a lot more likely to connect to our consumer No. I
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find that very fascinating. That type of approach is one I'm sure many many
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would disagree with. However, I agree with that, and I think something
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to expand off of that is in regards to the product stuff and let's talk
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PFI or primary financial institution. We both know that the conversion of PFI is
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something that is very very low in our industry right, something of the past,
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but that discussion, of course is still top of mind with leadership teams
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within the boardroom. But with the different generations, and you alliterated a few
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of them, so you have you know, Boom, gen X, gen
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Z millennials and gen Z of course now being that like new wave of how
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banking is done or how banking is going to be in the future. But
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with you think about the thought of the evolution of technology, what do you
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think that the consumer now thinks about how they are going to manage their money
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and their banking relationships. In correlation to PFI conversion, I think we have
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to consider who PFI serves. So of course banks want you to have a
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preferred financial institution, and of course they want to be the preferred financial institution.
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The reason banks want that is because usually banks are really good at one,
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maybe two things, and then the rest they're kind of just okay at
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And so they'd really like to believe as a consumer, you're going to get
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really excited about something and that's the reason you're going to choose. Then that's
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the thing they're really good at. That is the market they can win.
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And then they're going to hope you're just kind of lazy and if I just
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put this next to it, you're going to say, oh, okay,
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I'll take that too. Oh okay, I'll take that too. And those
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are the products that aren't really as good as all of the other alternatives out
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there, or maybe they're not as affordable, whatever the case might be.
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And we're hoping that that proximity is what gets you into that product. That
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whole philosophy serves the institution, not the customer. And any time that you
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orient yourselves around a strategy that pits your customer's interests against your institution's interest your
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customer is going to win, especially in today's tech enabled environment. So let's
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turn the clock back a little bit. Preferred financial institution used to have a
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customer value. It had a customer value when working across different financial institutions was
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so challenging, right, and so there was a true level of convenience to
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having all of your financial products in one home because that actually was beneficial to
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you. That is not true today, and that's definitely not going to be
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true in a world of open banking. So anybody who is not following what
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the CFPB is doing and isn't recognizing that, just the same cell phone companies
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used to rest on their laurels because it was just so darn hard to move
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your service and you had to give up your phone number, and that's really
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what people wanted was to keep their phone number. The minute you could keep
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your phone number and change providers, the world changed. We in banking better
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be ready for that because that is coming. And really, who wants to
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make money that way? We believe it matters how you make money, and
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do you really want to make money hoping your customer is too lazy to go
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find something that is better for them. I think we can be better than
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that. As institutions, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard and we
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can be better than that. So what does that mean? Though? That
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means we have to realign our revenue strategies, so we cannot rely on some
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sort of passive level of let's say, non interest income that comes from this
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ancillary product. That is part of our strategy to become PFI if we believe
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as Amplified does. Every product must live and die on its own merits.
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And that was a relatively controversial point of view when we started talking about it
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four or five years ago. I can't remember exactly how long. And so
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every product has to live and die on its own. That means if a
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customer interacts with us around that product and it's not the best product for them,
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and it's not compelling to our customer, then we shouldn't be in that
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business. No, that's not something that we should do. That means,
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as credit unions in particular, we have to be willing to stop doing trying
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to be all things to all people. I do think credit unions are getting
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a little better at this, But as an industry, we have a bad
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habit of trying to spread the peanut butter so thin. And we need to
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work across all these different areas and have all these products, and the odds
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that you have the resources to really win across all those products is next to
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mil and so get brave, narrow your product list to the things that you
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can do really well and then create partnerships like have the willingness to say,
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you know what, we actually really aren't good at student loans, but I
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can tell you who is, and let me make a referral for you.
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That is how you serve your customer by actually putting their best interests at heart,
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and not just in the nice, cheery way that we all put in
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marketing materials, but in the way that I can say from a revenue point
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of view, here's how I'm going to win by putting my customer's interest first.
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So if your institution is still trying to plan around and count on PFI,
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that is yesterday's conversation. That battle has been lost. That is irrelevant
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to today's customer. Rethink your strategy and do something new. No, I
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agree, the thing of the past where Grandpa opened bank account at amplify his
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children's than their children, that is a thing of the past to your exact
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point of everybody has everything at their fingertips and they're not going to follow suit
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just because mom, dad, so on and so forth did throughout their banking
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life. So I want to expand a little bit more on that of one
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thing that you talked about is making money. Like everybody within financial institutions,
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of course likes to make money, and of course additional products do bring growth
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and subsequently added income. Right, but everyone knows another component to income on
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the balance sheet is fee generation, and a lot of institutions generate fee income
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from product growth. However, your organization has decided to become fee free,
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do you have any insights on one the thoughts behind that, and then two,
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what are the benefits that that could bring of not having any fees on
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any type of your products? So I'm going to have to restrain myself because
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i could talk about this for hours. So the first thing I would say
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is where this idea came from. It actually came from some original customer research
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we did back in twenty eighteen. The question we asked was what makes a
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compelling checking in savings account because it counts at accounts an account. And it's
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interesting because we started asking this question before the liquidity crisis, and all of
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a sudden, we all really care about the answer to this question. And
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what we found was one of our theories was security. How important is security
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to a consumer around things like cybersecurity and whatnot? Yes, it's important.
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And two, I assume my bank has it. It is not a reason
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I'll buy it, is merely a reasonall leave. That was one thing that
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we found so and we already had strong security. We feel good about that.
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Numbers two and three that really jumped forward for us were rewards and fees.
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I mean, this is not surprising, right Am I getting rewards on
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my account? Or am I paying too many fees? We decided we did
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not want to play the rewards game. We feel like the rewards game is
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it is an arms race. In the minute some other institution offers point twenty
14:16
five more BIPs in rewards than you do, it's no longer a compelling offer.
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And so if what we're trying to do is create a sustainable, affordable
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level of funding for our lending operations, which is ultimately the endgame, rewards
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was not the way we felt like we could do it. So we looked
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at fees and said, okay, well, we already have a fee averse
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membership. So this was considered One of the weaknesses of our business model was
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that our members were already naturally relatively averse to fees. And when I say
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fees, what I'm talking about are any fees on any deposit product, So
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think monthly service fees, overdraft fees, checking the account fees, wire transfer
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fees, all the things. So we were going through this and we thought,
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okay, well avoiding fees, maybe we could promote our lower fees,
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or we can talk about how we don't have as many of them, et
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cetera. And our CEO said what if we just got rid of them?
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And we all laughed like that's actually how the meeting went, and we were
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like, oh, Kendall's having a bad day. But then it was like
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kind of couldn't get it out of our mind. So then started digging in
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like, oh, okay, how much revenue is this for us? How
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much fee income is this really for us? And Doug Doug Doug And fast
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forward a year and a half and what we figured out was we can give
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up this fee income. And this is not just so our industry. When
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we talk about fees, often people believe we're talking about just overdraft fees,
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and our case, we're talking about all deposit fees on all deposit products of
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any kype for any balance or any transaction behavior. We turned off ultimately fifty
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different fees, and in fact, it was actually a little bit hard to
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do from a technology point of view because all of our systems are designed to
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maximize fe income, right, because that's what the institution wants. And so
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we actually had to work with our vendors to sort of reconfigure a few of
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our systems so that they wouldn't charge our members' fees. And really our trade
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off here was okay, well, obviously customers don't like fees, right,
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this is not new information. But can they be compelled enough to an institution
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that never ever charges them and there's nothing the customer has to do to avoid
16:15
them. It actually really is free checking, which our industry has talked about
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forever and we're the only ones I've ever found that have it so. Free
16:22
checking, and our opinion is a checking account that will never cost you any
16:26
money no matter what you do with the account. That's a free checking account.
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It's not an account that comes with a thousand asterixes. So that's what
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led us there, and so it took us a while to figure out how
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to build that into our strategy. They are two wins we were looking for
16:40
out of this. One is obviously we wanted more low cost deposits. Right,
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if you can get more checking accounts, you getting free money that improves
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your net interest margin. This is whatever institution wants to have happened. Number
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two, we want value driven income for our organization, so interchange income.
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For example, if I can get you to open more checking accounts, then
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I can get you to activate more debit cards, and I can get you
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to transact on those debit cards. The interchange income I can get from that
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and what that can offset. So interchange income is value driven income. That
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is value to a retailer to be able to accept a payment and make money
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on what they do. As different from a monthly maintenance fee is not a
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value to a customer. That's a penalty that is not a value. And
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for us, similarly, the more liquidity we can get, the more loans
17:23
we can do. Our business model. We have originate cell service model,
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So that means when the market is working the way the market typically works before
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the liquidity crunch, let me put that caveat on it. When it's working
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that way, we actually can originate our entire balance sheet in one year in
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high quality loans, and we sell the vast majority of those to the secondary
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market, and we earn servicing income and gain on sale from loan investors.
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That's value driven non interest income. So why not realign our business models toward
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things where we only make money when our customer makes money. When our customer
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wins, we win. I know that should not be such a revolutionary idea,
18:03
but in banking, most of our business models are. We really hope
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our customer doesn't notice that they've left six million dollars on deposit in that checking
18:11
account that's making nothing, because that's super valuable to us, and we don't
18:15
want them to take that money and put it into an instrument where they could
18:18
actually get decent return on it. So we just hope they don't know lazy
18:22
money. Right, this is what our industry talks about. Let's build business
18:25
models that have a little more courage than that. Let's build business models that
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speak to our customer and what they want to accomplish. It sounds like this
18:32
type of approach to is the natural way of obtaining this PFI thing that we
18:37
talked about without exhausting any efforts. We hope, Yes, I'm interested in
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the approach leading up to this. I know you guys were laughing in the
18:45
boardroom when your CEO brought it up. Of a lot of institutions, this
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is part of their budget, right, They have fixed fee income that they
18:52
see trend over time and can make an assumption going into a new year.
18:56
What was that conversation like eliminating those fees? Where did you think you were
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going to recoup some of the income that you were generating from that And hasn't
19:03
been successful post two or so years of you doing so. So a couple
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of things. One is I would point to the long timeline over which this
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happened for us. Yeah, so we were discussing the findings of that research
19:15
at the very end of twenty eighteen, and we proposed this and got approval
19:22
at the board level in twenty twenty and we didn't go live with it until
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two two twenty two. So what we call fee free day now is February
19:30
second of twenty twenty two is when we went live with fee free. So
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that's a really long time horizon over which to think about this idea process,
19:38
the implications. We spent almost an entire year figuring out how can we replace
19:45
this fee income? What are the pieces we actually engage some consultants after we
19:49
had our business case put together to tell us what's wrong with it, because
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no one's ever done this before, and we're like, okay, if we're
19:55
missing something significant here. One thing that we said constantly is this is a
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one way door. You cannot choose to go fee free and talk about why
20:04
that is a moral decision as much as it is a financial decision or a
20:08
product or a marketing decision. You can't do that and then say, oops,
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this didn't work out the way that we thought from a financial perspective,
20:15
we're going to come back and start reinstating fees. So we were very deliberate
20:19
in how we decided to walk through this process. The reason we say it's
20:23
a moral decision is because one of the things we learned over the course of
20:26
that long due diligence period is who pays these fees? Spoiler alert, it's
20:33
not the people with money. The people with money in your institution are not
20:37
paying a dollar for any of these kind of fees. They don't overdraft their
20:41
accounts. If they do, it gets waived. They maintain balances that avoid
20:45
any monthly service fee, etc. That is not who's paying fees in your
20:48
institution. And we in particular, dug into who's paying overdraft fees, and
20:53
what we learned was roughly eighty five percent or so of our customer base never
20:57
used overdraft like it just wasn't even thing. Of the remainder the ten percent
21:03
is something like that used it. I would characterize it as designed. Yeah,
21:06
so a couple times a year, you know, something happened a couple
21:07
times a year. It's a convenience whatever. But a tiny portion of our
21:11
membership, I want to say it was around three percent delivered the vast majority
21:17
of overdraft income that our institution collected. And when you really dig into it,
21:22
what you realize is there are people who are using overdraft protection like a
21:26
line of credit. Like that is essentially how it's being used. And all
21:30
we would have had to do if we were really curious, we could have
21:33
just asked our contact center agents. They could have named who our top ten
21:37
overdraft users were, because these are the people who call every month and ask
21:42
can I get that fee waived, how can you help me, etc.
21:47
We're a credit union. Our mission is to improve the financial lives of our
21:51
members and the strength of our communities. That's what we're here to do.
21:53
I cannot justify that as a strategy and pretend that that's what we're doing as
22:00
a marketing idea. Right, started from this, how can we make checking
22:02
in savings more compelling? But if a caame a mission and so after we
22:04
figured that out, and then we're going through all the diligence, and we
22:07
said, well, okay, now we've realized this is just kind of wrong
22:11
to make money this way. So we're going to not anymore, and we
22:14
need to make sure that we can do that in a financially viable and sustainable
22:18
way. So what we're not going to do while we shift our business model,
22:22
we're not going to put the viability of the credit union at risk.
22:23
Right, We're not going to make some dramatic move and do something significant that
22:27
puts all the rest of our business in a difficult spot. We had a
22:30
couple advantages. One is this type of income was only four percent of our
22:36
total income picture for institutions of our size, more typically it's around twenty five
22:40
percent. So I mentioned our membership is already kind of feaverse, so this
22:44
was already a smaller bite of our income budget than it otherwise would have been.
22:47
The offset was those two things improved that interest to margin and interchange income.
22:51
Between those two things, we projected that we could actually offset the amount
22:56
of fee income that we would forego. And as it relates to results,
22:59
the most recent data that I have handy was we did it kind of a
23:02
full analysis at one year post fee free, and what we figured out was,
23:06
if our bed is we're going to grow checking in savings accounts faster than
23:11
we otherwise would have if we hadn't gone fee free, we said, all
23:14
right, here's how much we normally would have grown checking in savings accounts.
23:18
Anything above that baseline we're going to attribute to fee free. And where we
23:21
landed was we grew savings accounts five percent faster and checking accounts eight percent faster
23:26
than above baseline. Now, granted, let's remember the timing I mentioned.
23:30
We launched this in two two twenty two. Let's look at that liquidity or
23:33
crunch and what happened to inflation and interest rates over the course of that same
23:36
timeframe. So it was really hard to isolate exactly kind of what did this
23:40
change cause versus all those other environmental factors. But even when you strip all
23:45
of that out, what we said was this is going to be a slow
23:47
burd not a big bang. And I think that's really what we found it
23:49
to be. Is it actually takes us a long time for people to understand
23:52
when we say free we actually mean it, because our industry doesn't really mean
23:56
free when our industry says free. So we've we've learned it actually takes a
24:00
couple of exposures to fee free for somebody to go, oh, yeah,
24:03
I'm interested in that. And our environment has been a success and now it's
24:07
baked into our overall picture of how we approach things. So this is no
24:11
more a what are we sacrificing in what are we doing? It is a
24:14
here's our core products and the income that we can expect and how are we
24:17
going to maximize that? That is awesome, So kudos to you your team.
24:22
That definitely does fit the mission of the membership of credit unions. I
24:26
would love to be in the Amplify office on to to each day. I
24:30
mean, considering that's Groundhog today, you guys have overtaken your fee free day.
24:34
Is there like a combination of outfits that are worn within the branches to
24:40
have a little bit of fun? Okay, now there will be because that's
24:41
a fantastic idea. I'm glad I gave a good idea there, but thank
24:47
you, Stacey. I think this is a good spot to transition to.
24:49
As we've done in prior podcasts, I've always closed out the podcast with a
24:53
list of three different questions. I, however, am going to switch them
24:57
up a little bit and compare uson and to what Jeff once did is So,
25:02
since Upstart is technology company, can you talk a little bit about what
25:04
is the latest and greatest either application or type of technology gadget that you cannot
25:11
absolutely live without? Okay, I'm actually I'm going to pivot a minute on
25:15
this, So Okay, My actual technology I cannot live without is my fantastic
25:19
speaker, because I love music and I believe in maintaining your energy all day
25:23
long, and so that's my go to on the regular. But the tech
25:29
gadget that's on my mind, especially even as a banker, is it's actually
25:32
my son's. So my son is nine, and he has a VR headset,
25:37
okay, and it is fascinating to watch him play his VR headset.
25:41
And the reason it's fascinating is because he plays these games where you're connected to
25:45
other users, and our world likes to decry sort of children and technology and
25:52
AI and as if it is this, Oh my gosh, human beings are
25:55
becoming increasingly isolated and they'll never gain the social skills. Children will never get
26:00
the social skills they need if they are using that. And I sat and
26:03
listened to him play that game this past weekend, and I listened to him
26:07
negotiate and navigate conflict. I heard him ask for help, I heard him
26:11
intervene on behalf of others. I certainly heard him having fun. All the
26:15
things that you would have typically seen on a playground I saw him doing in
26:21
his VR game and even in a bigger way. And so as I think
26:22
about, like what's on my mind of sort of latest and greatest technologies,
26:26
it is where that will become an environment I think, at least similar to
26:32
the environments that we have when we pick up our phone and that is its
26:34
own environment in the future, where that's going to become an environment. How
26:38
are we as institutions prepared to engage. It's probably not the metaverse. Maybe
26:44
it is, and maybe it's some version of that, but I think there's
26:45
something more creative and interesting and practical. Yeah, I don't know what that
26:51
answer is, but that's what that's what's bubbling in my mind. I agree,
26:53
it is fascinating me too. I also have children, and I'm starting
26:56
to get to that stage of life work. I feel like pretty tech savvy,
27:00
but I see going to my younger children of how do I do this?
27:03
How do you work this piece of technology? When I thought I should
27:07
be the one that's known. So the evolution of that is definitely fascinating.
27:10
Question number two a little bit of a different direction. If you could switch
27:14
your job today with anyone for a day, who would it be and why
27:18
If I could change jobs, I would want to be David Green on NPR.
27:23
So he's actually not on MPR anymore. He retired during twenty twenty,
27:27
but he was a reporter on NPR for a really long time, and in
27:30
particular, he was what I characterize as the main street reporter. So I'd
27:34
listened to NPR in the mornings while I'm getting ready, and you hear,
27:37
you know, the news of the day, Here's what's going on from the
27:40
Fed, Here's what's going on in this community, that community, et cetera.
27:42
And his stories were always the main street version of that. So if
27:48
the lead story was something about inflation, you know, inflation is up,
27:52
he was going to interview the guy who runs the diner and say, tell
27:56
me about are you seeing these pressures in your business? What's your remain concerned
28:00
today? And so this idea of taking these macro level concepts but then finding
28:06
out what's really happening on the ground and is does that match what we're seeing
28:10
and is that a connection? And I always felt like that would be such
28:12
a cool job, is to be able to sort of take whatever's going on
28:15
today and then figuring out the sort of front row seat for the individual person
28:19
impact and then getting to tell that story. Well, hopefully I can try
28:23
to make a plug to David Green to listen to this, to get you
28:29
to be in his shoes for just a day on MPR. I would definitely
28:32
listen to that. So that's awesome. I'm down. Make it happen all
28:37
right. Last one, which this question will be similar to what we've always
28:41
done, and I'll end here with it doesn't need to be anything that is
28:44
consumer lending. It could be anything that you wish. What is one bold
28:47
prediction for the future. I think my bold prediction for the future, and
28:52
you know, I don't know if this is bold or obvious. So one
28:53
of our areas of business is mortgage lending. That's our biggest and most significant
28:57
area of our business. Anyone who's paying attention knows. The National Association of
29:03
Realtors was recently decided against as it relates to specifically the commissions that are shared
29:08
between seller's agents and buyers agents. And so the organized system of real estate
29:14
as we have known it for centuries, at least a century, is in
29:18
the process of being reimagined. I can't claim what the implications of that particular
29:26
decision or the follow on lawsuits which everyone has predicted and they're starting to come
29:29
out, will mean. What I do know is businesses that are rooted in
29:34
a thirty year mortgage and the century long method of organized real estate better be
29:41
paying attention because I feel like this is not going to be evolutionary change.
29:45
This is going to be revolutionary change. And so if you're in the mortgage
29:49
lending business and you're not thinking about what are the other products that I've got
29:53
besides you know, a traditional, conforming thirty year mortgage loan, and if
29:59
you rely on realtor networks as a significant part of your referral business to your
30:03
MLOs and others. Paying attention and figuring out what next looks like is going
30:08
to be really important. If we can learn anything from other industries that have
30:12
undergone similar transformations. I think what we can know is there's going to be
30:18
providers who will decide they are there for the interest of the customer and the
30:21
customer only in this case, that is the home buyer, neither the seller's
30:25
agent or the buyer's agent. And do you have products that are ready to
30:30
be there for the best interest only of the customer? And are you ready
30:33
to make that pivot. That's really what's in my mind interesting. I'll have
30:37
to follow up with you once the mortgage industry normalizes just a little bit to
30:41
see if that does happen. Yeah, that'd be great. Awesome, Well,
30:47
Stacey, thank you again for taking the time to join me today and
30:49
providing some really great insights. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Up
30:53
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