Find out all about 'Rosie the Robot'…
There’s no need to build out your technology yourself when there are plenty of off-the-shelf or partnership options that are more than capable of doing the job. So says Brett Bivenour (pictured), chief technology officer of Nationwide Mortgage Bankers.
“Our experience as a tech team here at Nationwide is really about integrating and getting the most out of some of those platforms that we purchase, kind of off the shelf,” Bivenour said.
Melville, N.Y.-based Nationwide Mortgage Bankers is a residential mortgage lender (separate from Nationwide Insurance) with 500-plus employees conducting business nationally. Its divisions include FasterFi, a new technology-enabled digital first platform set up for consumer mortgage lending.
Bivenor joined as CTO in July 2019 after a stint as business technology manager at Union Home Mortgage Corp. in Ohio. His job includes oversight for both Nationwide and FasterFi, a division the company launched less than a year ago in the middle of the pandemic to address social distancing requirements. Borrowers can now use their phones to get real time interest rates and work with their loan officer to get mortgages done within days or less.
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Bivenour explained FasterFi is meant to be a separate consumer-facing brand.
“We made a decision strategically that we wanted to create a separate brand to [bring] a lot of those consumer experience technologies to the forefront,” Bivenour said.
At the same time, Bivenour is also leading efforts to improve technology at the company overall.
“The leadership team here saw a lot of opportunity to improve residential mortgage lending through technology,” he said. “That was a big part of bringing myself on and building a team that was focused on some of those business technology initiatives.”
Some of those early efforts have been wide ranging, including a partnership with fintech firm Blend that helps fuel the company’s consumer experience processes. Cybersecurity also drew their early attention in a particularly expansive approach, something that Bivenour said involved “multiple underlying technologies” and partnership with an outside firm to guide Nationwide’s undertakings.
Data and AI driven
Another element Bivenour has devoted time to involves a greater emphasis on business intelligence and data.
“We’ve really been focused on trying to shift as a company to a more data-driven organization,” he said, adding that that has involved establishing a business intelligence platform on the front end to deliver operational insight on how the company staffs and operates the business. That process continues to expand.
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A big part of that effort has been focused on turning to artificial intelligence (AI), which Nationwide began to weave into the company’s operations last year. The focus is on helping employees work more effectively.
“We use AI to help answer common employee questions,” he said. “Instead of an individual employee going to [his or her] manager to ask a question, who reaches out to a different manager across the department, [he or she] is asking our AI platform.”
That platform is named Rosie, or Rosie the Robot (below) – kind of like the “Rosie the Riveter” persona from World War II. She’s been in operation for about 18 months now.
“Rosie the Robot provides answers to all kinds of mortgage-related questions. If you have questions on underwriting guidelines for a specific product in a specific question, Rosie is there to provide an answer,” Bivenour said. “We’ve definitely seen some lift operationally from that.”
A partnership with AI tech firm Capacity helped make Rosie happen. The overall goal as her automation abilities develop is to help automate repetitive tasks employees used to do.
“Simple tasks that used to require an employee to do something very repetitive [like] opening a file and looking for specific criteria… that’s all done by Rosie the Robot now,” Bivenour said. “She has an email address and she completes tasks in some of our loan files. She answers questions [and] is there to really add efficiency across the organization.”
Using resources effectively
Whether improving digital and AI capabilities for customers or employees themselves, Bivenour said, the company tries to take a reasonable approach, looking at what is in the marketplace that can help rather than building it themselves.
“We don’t build a whole lot of technology from the ground up ourselves,” Bivenour said. “We instead focus on and have built a team around working closely with our business to understand business problems and then find the best-of-breed solutions that are available in the market to build upon.”
He admits that the company’s team may have times where it will have to “get creative” and build a custom system, or work with an outside firm to build a platform it needs. That’s not necessarily wise to do on a wide scale, however.
“I’ve seen a whole lot of other companies that become cautionary tales that tried to engineer something themselves from the ground up,” he said. “That gets really expensive trying to reinvent the wheel. For us, it just seems like a better approach to… stay nimble [and] really focused on strong partnerships, and approach technology that way.”
