By KIMBERLEY HAAS
The co-founder of a company that provides technology-enabled mortgage services and fintech innovation for the financial industry says artificial intelligence will be an essential tool moving forward.
Souren Sarkar, who is the president at Nexval Group in Miami, started his career in the technology space at Bayview Financial in 1996. After rising through the ranks to become the company’s chief technology officer, he pivoted and started companies that focused on mortgage outsourcing with technology, as well as labor outsourcing to India, where he was born.
Today, Nexval has several large operations in India and Sarkar says people who work in middle management there all have over 15 years of experience in U.S. mortgage banking.
Sarkar said the mortgage industry is reaching an endpoint with cost savings when it comes to labor outsourcing, so that is where artificial intelligence can come into play.
“Everybody’s woken up to the capabilities of it. And that is quite understandable,” Sarkar said.
At the same time, it is becoming humanly impossible to monitor all of the rules, regulations, and requirements for compliance. Sarkar explained that typical documents released from organizations that oversee the industry have changes sprinkled throughout them.
“They do a very poor job of highlighting some of the changes. This is a great example of where not only is AI not replacing humans, it’s essential,” Sarkar said.
Sarkar said generative AI is challenging because now they are tasked with teaching machines to think and learn like humans.
“As you know, generative AI works with commands. So instead of writing code, you actually give commands to the system to write some sort of code. But you have to know very specific commands of what you’re asking for, because if your commands are not good, it’s going to be garbage in, garbage out, you’re not going to get the right output,” Sarkar said.
“If we bring this to the mortgage industry, you essentially need a mortgage expert who knows command engineering to train the systems, how to get the work done.”
Sarkar said finding people who understand both the technology and business side of the mortgage industry is difficult because the technical landscape is changing so quickly right now.
“Yesterday it was workflow automation. Before that it was essentially database innovation and now it’s AI, right?” Sarkar said. “I feel that you have to come from the technology side and then learn the business rather than come from the business side and then learn the technology.”
The appetite for AI and machine learning is there industry-wide. According to Peter Ghavami, vice president of modeling and data science at Fannie Mae, 73% of the lenders they surveyed in 2023 want to use technology to improve operational efficiencies.
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