While new tech can be a positive, executive warns to be aware of the negatives
The mortgage industry of 35 years ago operated on processes that would be unrecognizable to anyone entering the business today. Loan officers worked with carbon copies, payments came in as paper checks, and appraisers had their photos developed at a drugstore before gluing them onto forms. These were the tools of the trade.
Fax machines replaced couriers, digital files replaced paper packages, and AI now sorts and extracts data that someone once had to touch by hand. For most in the industry, the direction has been obvious: faster, cheaper, more accurate.
Donna DelMonte (pictured top) has watched every step of it. As COO of OCMBC, Inc., she started in mortgage servicing, posting paper checks, and has since run operations across origination, underwriting, wholesale, and retail. She thinks the industry still has a long way to go, and she has a clear-eyed view of both what new technologies can do and where they can go wrong.
"When we look at the things that have happened over the last 30 years, we really have evolved," DelMonte told Mortgage Professional America. "I still think we have a long way to go because as we've evolved and we've come up with these things, I think there's a huge opportunity for us to look at the cost to produce a loan that ultimately helps the consumer."
The promise and the risk of AI
DelMonte is genuinely optimistic about what the younger generation will do with AI. They engage with it differently from their predecessors, asking better questions and building literacy faster.
"The younger generation, they're going to help us get there because they gravitate to the tech," she said. "The way that they're learning is a little bit different than the way that I learned. Now they're learning to ask the right questions with the AI, and their goals will continue to evolve."
People with her level of experience tend to be harder on new technology, she said. That is not resistance. It is knowing what happens when something fails.
"I think for people like me who have been in a while, you challenge some of the new technology because you don't understand how they came up with the underlying method," she said. "People like me are going to dig a lot deeper into the questions of how they work, what the model is, and what you are calculating? What about in this instance?"
DelMonte said the AI underwriting tools she has seen recently have improved significantly. Developers are hiring people who understand mortgage fundamentals rather than just building models from the outside in.
"They've hired people who understand the basics that started with completely manual," DelMonte said. "And then they've taken that knowledge, and they're building upon it. And so it is getting better and better."
Experienced eyes still matter
Even as the tools improve, DelMonte said there are things automation still cannot replace.
"There are some things where you just have to still put eyes on it," she said. "Not everything can be automated, so it's finding that right balance."
The subtler AI risk, she said, is not that technology makes mistakes. It can be steered toward a particular answer depending on how you ask the question.
"I could ask AI something five different ways on the same topic, and you're going to get five different answers," DelMonte said. "You can almost curtail your answer. So that's why I say the way that people are learning, you have to know how to do it manually and then couple it with AI."
In underwriting, that matters enormously. A wrong answer is not just an operational failure. It affects a borrower's ability to stay in their home, the quality of the loan file going into securitization, and ultimately the health of the market.
"We all need to be cognizant of what AI can do for us and what it can do to harm us," she said. "Things are changing. People are getting tech savvy, and some of it's positive, and some of it is not. We need to keep our eye on the quality performance to make sure your manufacturing line is running smoothly and cost-effectively for the consumer and make sure that we're not damaging markets."
DelMonte said that doesn’t mean slowing down AI adoption. It means going in with your eyes open.
"As leaders now, we just have to blend our operational expertise with the innovation that's out there," she said. "Regardless of our normal, traditional career paths, we have to adopt it. So it's a good thing."
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