How CrossCountry Mortgage Saved $10 Million Annually with Truv's Verification Solutions

Tom, thanks for joining. This, uh, it's been an incredible partnership, and, uh, you don't get to pick the brains of, uh, somebody who built out the largest retail lender in the country every day. So I'm very grateful you're here.

Well, thanks for inviting me, Kirill. I appreciate it.

Thank you all for joining today's webinar. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Melissa, and I am the Senior Field Marketing Manager here at Trueve. Today we will be taking a deeper dive with Cross Country Mortgage to learn how they eliminated $10 million in annual verification spend without slowing loan speed or increasing borrower friction. So today we are joined by Cross Country Mortgage's Executive Vice President, Corporate Operations Support, Tom Journey, and Troove CEO and co-founder Kirill Klokov. Little bit about Tom. He is a seasoned mortgage operation professional with well over 25 years of dedicated experience. CrossCountry Mortgage is a major national full-service mortgage lender that offers a wide variety of loans, products for home purchases and refinances across all 50 states. Um, a little bit about Kirill Klokov. He is the co-founder and CEO of TRUV. A consumer permission data platform that provides financial organizations with income and employment verification solutions. He is also leading the company's mission to revolutionize how financial institutions leverage open finance solutions to empower consumers and scale businesses. So for the remainder of the webinar, I'm going to take myself off camera so you can focus on the people that you really want to hear from. But I'll be monitoring the chat and the questions for anything that comes through. And at the end of the session, we will have a live Q&A. So to kick off our webinar today, I'm going to start with a poll. So what is the biggest operational challenge you face with income and employment verifications today? Give everyone about 30 seconds to answer.

Oh, what do you think it's gonna— what is gonna be the winner?

I'm surprised everyone's not hitting all of the above, uh, but I'm not surprised about the, uh, results there in the cost category either.

You might have biased the, the survey.

Oh, give it another couple of seconds. And I will share. All right, Kirill, take it away.

Thanks, Melissa. So I guess all of the above seems to be the problem. So high cost fees, uh, hit rates, conversion rates, turnaround times, borrower experience is not that great. So, um, Tom, tell me a little bit about, uh, I guess your journey and why you decided to even look into this problem? What prompted the first conversation with us?

Yeah, I get solicitation all the time. I see emails, vendors, things like that. And there was just something about Tru. And something had to give on the VoE front, quite frankly. Costs are continuing to go up year after year. Our volume goes up, so our usage goes up with it. And I was just very intrigued about the approach that you guys took to it. And, you know, similar to your competitors. You're not just a VoE vendor. It's really a tech platform. And I was just really impressed by it and saw the opportunity. So thought it was well worth piloting.

Yeah, I guess if you were to look at the journey with your current vendors or the vendors prior to TruFleck, What was it over the last 5, 10 years? And I guess what was the point when you thought that this has to be looked into and dealt with?

Cost was the major driving force initially. Now, if we look back over the options that we all had in the industry over the last, you know, 5, 10 years, the players haven't changed much. The cost has. So, you know, we need these things. You know, a BOE is a vital part of the loan package. It's unavoidable. And years ago, the cost was nominal. There was always a cost. That's always a consideration. But it just seems like the last handful of years, it just went up exponentially. And given our usage and, you know, I see our billing and things like that, you know, it just was, it was just easy to say, let's look at alternatives. And just so happened that information about Troove came across my desk and, you know, it went from there.

I'm also curious, you said all of the above, right? So cost is the most common concern, right? That usually starts the conversation. What else did you see that made you think about looking?

Just the, you know, when we're talking about, you know, some of the other players out there as far as VoE vendors, cost aside, and that was absolutely a major contributor to us getting to where we are today. But it's not the only thing. When we look at our experience internally with some of the other options out there, it really is a gamble. You know, when I click that button, I might get a return record. I may not. If I get one, it might be what I'm looking for. It might not be. The only guarantee when I click that button is that if I get a record, I'm paying for it, whether I need it or not, whether it's useful in the file or not, whether it helps me make the credit decision or not, I'm paying for it. And that, that was one of the, the huge benefits in my eyes to True. You know, I, I tell the system what employer I want. I know I'm getting the information I need because it is different than tapping into just a database of what could potentially be aged information. It's real time. It's borrowers getting into their payroll provider. So I know the information that comes over is accurate. It's current. You know, I'm getting W-2s and pay stubs as well. That was a huge benefit, not even something I realized at the onset. But so from that perspective, you know, that's a real close number 2 to the cost was the fact that I can drive what I want. And if I don't, and if it's not out there, you know, and most times it is, but if it's not, I don't pay for anything.

I think we partnered, I actually found that email that I sent you. It was an automated email, but it was some marketing promotion. I believe you responded and that really started the conversation. So going into a partnership like this, what do you expect from a partner, right? What are you looking for in terms of product, in terms of partnership? How is it so far?

It's been fantastic. And I'm not the tech guy, you know, I have the conversations and I look at what the benefits are to the company and things like that. When we're talking about integrations, that's somebody else's bag here, but I still get to see the struggles sometimes when it comes to integrating and getting, you know, your tech folks talking to our tech folks. And I will say that Troove has been as seamless as anything, you know, and when we were in pilot, there was absolutely some things that we wanted done differently. You know, some customization, some experiences we thought could be improved on. And, and I, and I mean this sincerely, there is no vendor I work with that would've been able to implement those changes as quickly as you guys did. And it was clear, not only did you implement it quick, but you listened to our, our feedback because you implemented exactly what we wanted. So it was just, you know, checked all the boxes right from day one in that partnership.

Thank you. Thanks for saying that. That's music to my ears. I was, I was partially involved in that and it was mostly a Truth team. So we have an incredible customer success and product organization. So I'll pass that along. You're the top one retail lender, right? So obviously you didn't launch it for everybody everywhere all at once. So how did you think about the pilot and what was your go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, we certainly, given the size of our company, the number of branches we have and employees that interact with these vendor services, we did not just roll it out. We didn't just flip a switch and give it to everybody. We had it implemented into our operating system. We selected some folks out at the branches to pilot it. Everybody jumped on it. You know, sometimes when I'm reaching out, I was like, hey, will you do us a favor and pilot this or that? We get a little pushback. You know, they don't want to deal with the pain of going through, providing feedback and things like that. But when I gave them the quick overview of what TRUV was, getting volunteers for the pilot was no problem. So I think we put it in pilot for a few weeks. I don't remember exactly how long it was. You know, and sometimes, you know, we kind of say, look, let's pilot for 30 days. Something like that, 45 days really to work out the kinks. I think we ended up rolling Troove out to the company much quicker than anticipated because of how smooth the integration was and how good the experience was.

How did you select the branches? I know you're very much branch-by-branch focused. So I remember talking to folks from, I believe it was in Ohio, like a few times, uh, just to collect the feedback.

Not to cut you off, but like I said, it was easy. One of the things that I get, I get calls every month when the, you know, P&Ls come out and things like that, talking about costs. And so I knew who out there was really laser-focused on their VOE costs. And so when I, you know, so those are the folks that I wanted to start with because they had a vested interest in in reducing their cost, and I felt confident that they would be higher users of the product.

I respect our competition, right? If the competition had the product at very low cost, maybe Truth would not exist today. But that's not the reality. You know, when loan officers usually start with Truth, it's always the friction of, you know, I want to— I want the click of the button.

It's you.

You hit it, you get the report back and you move on. So I hear this from loan officers a lot where like, well, there's friction. I have to reach out to borrowers. What do you hear in the field for the first couple of months when we're doing the pilot?

There is no doubt that, you know, we didn't get 100% adoption day one. We don't have 100% adoption today. We're still having conversations with branches about the benefits. But we certainly hit resistance. When we're talking about some of the other options out there, you don't have to engage the borrower. I can click the button and kind of, like I said, hope I get what I need. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. If I don't there, maybe I'm gonna move on to another vendor and click that button. And again, same thing, but I'm already paying this first one. So the charges can rack up, but even still, sales folks are creatures of comfort. And instant gratification and so forth. Knowing that and understanding that, part of our very early conversations were right away, what are the next steps? You know, it wasn't like, okay, let's pilot it and see if this is really for us. Like, I felt almost immediately this was gonna be one of our best options as far as employment verification goes. So we started having the conversations about, okay, what can we do next? What, what can we do that doesn't exist? You know, the integration, like I said, with our operating system, no problem. But from our POS standpoint, our borrower-facing portal, that integration didn't exist. You know, we've implemented some steps to get it in front of borrowers very, very early in the process. We've got some plans to improve that integration, but I think I think over time, this is the future and I equate it to automated assets. Now you go back to when we were going to start asking people to start putting in their financial institution credentials during the application process. Same conversations. Oh, my borrower's not going to want to do that. I'm not going to ask my borrower to, you know, this, that, and the other. But the experience is very similar. And our success rate on that front, because it's, it's a, a more mature or age process with us, something we've had in place for a long time, it's just second nature. Nobody questions it. And I truly believe that in the future, that's, that's what the true experience is going to be.

You mentioned the success rate. I know that bank— everybody logged in, in their bank accounts in one of those apps, right? In the lending process. I think we posted that. So it's, it should be out there. What was the Europost login success rate?

For true, true. You would have to give me those numbers, especially if you posted it out there. Kirill, don't put me on the spot.

I think it was 70%.

I think that, yeah, once the borrower, you know, engages, and that is, you know, certainly things that as a lender we could do better is setting the expectation because you're right, you know, borrower engages with it, the vast majority of the time we're getting something that we need. But a lot of borrowers still, they just don't know what it is and they're a little hesitant. And so We have to continue to, you know, set the expectation up front with the borrower on what that experience is going to look like, what the benefits are. Again, we're getting pay stubs and W-2s along with it, which is pretty unique to Trueve. And if borrower doesn't have to go dig through a box and find their old W-2, you know, saves the borrower step. Or borrower doesn't have their W-2, so now we have to go order them with IRS transcripts, costing more money. So just setting the expectation, I think, will improve that number. So even where we are in the process, you know, having implemented it in the spring of this year, I think it was, give or take, there's a lot of room to grow and improve.

Right. You also mentioned that collecting the documents— I, I hear a lot of potential customers asking like, how's data quality? Is it similar? Is it different? Is it Worse.

Better.

Tell me more.

It's better. We kind of touched on it a little bit earlier that, you know, it's, it's up-to-the-minute information. It's accurate information. The borrower's tapping into their payroll provider. It's where the alternative is. I'm going to a vendor that might be tapping into a database that maybe that information isn't as current as it could be. And I'm certainly not getting W-2s and pay stubs. Through those other channels. So I, you know, I can't think of a way to get fresher documentation, probably fresher than what the borrower might have on.

Sounds about right. So let's go back to the pilot, right? So we had multiple kind of legs of it, right? Since we started almost a year and a half ago before we went live. So we had the first, the slide and go live small group. You mentioned that you always had an idea of like what the end result would look like, and you thought that this could be a good outcome. So if you were to just, you know, fast forward to today, what's a good— what good looks like? Where is it implemented? Are people using it? So tell the audience about how it works today.

Yeah, so today, you know, we pride ourselves at CCM on giving different flavors to everybody. You know, we don't force people to use one service over the other, at least not on the VoE front and on some other fronts. You know, so letting or giving them the information, the tools they need to be successful with it. We did all of that, you know, but again, adoption was a little bit slow. There was definitely some resistance. So we knew we had to continue to make it easier and easier. For the branches aside from cost savings. That was, that was a super easy conversation to have, but showing them and explaining the benefits. So like I said, we don't— integration didn't exist with the POS that we use today, but we did have a few things that were in our control to automate some notifications to the borrower. So we've implemented that and you could see an enormous spike. I think we did that the beginning of September, a huge spike in obviously our orders, but also our just returned verifications in general. And our future state will be to implement that directly into the application process. So today, you know, borrower goes through their application and after the fact they get a notification to go ahead and interact with, with Trueve and log into their payroll provider. What we want to do and what we plan to do is, you know, as they're going through the application, they get to that employment section, their first option, it's not going to force them to do it. We won't make people put their credentials in, but we are going to present the option there. And again, comparing it and similar to Automated Assets, which we've had a tremendous amount of success with. So that's the future is to get it front and center during the application stream. We think as big a spike as we saw in the beginning of September, I would expect, you know, triple that probably. And I know we haven't really talked about it, but, you know, one of the big benefits is, of course, reps and warrants, which we get with TRUV. And there is a time saver, you know, sales folks tell me, well, I don't want to, you know, make my borrower do it, do anything extra. That's why we've implemented it into the application process and we're continuing to improve that. But the intent and the hope is that really when that file is first opened by the loan officer, borrower has applied on the web, they have the stubs, they got the W-2s, they've got the VOE, and that's, you know, that's a huge, huge chunk of the file right there and a lot less work that they have to do. And that's, and there's a trickle-down effect to that. The more information we have up front, the smoother the whole process is once it gets into operations.

I think we discussed this over the last 6 months or so. It's like the more automated, the more upfront it is, the better it is for everybody. We tell all of our customers the 5-star experience is when loan officer doesn't even need to click a button. They just open and the data is there. It somehow magically appeared there, right? And for you to do that, it has to be, I guess, in point-of-sale system, it has to be automatically ordered from loan origination system. So by the time you get to the file, the data is affordable, but also it's high quality and it's there. So you don't need to do anything. I guess on that point, right, it's, uh, what was the shift? Because I remember we were getting quite a few support tickets about how does this work. And once you automated and put it up front, what was that shift in, you know, the support and overall perception of of the technology when you rolled it out?

Yeah, I think, and again, you know, hindsight's 20/20. You know, if I can go back, I would probably try to explain better to folks internally here that it isn't like, you know, the vendors that we all know and love today or did, you know, it's different. It's a tech platform. It's not, you know, you're not just tapping into a database and there's more to it. And there was, you know, there's a learning curve on everything. And during the pilot phase and up until we got this implemented into our POS, there was the manual steps of going in through services and placing the order. That's happening, you know, sometimes well after the application process. You know, borrowers are now getting a text, an email, or both. And maybe we're not doing as good a job as we should in giving the borrower a heads up that, hey, by the way, I'm going to, I'm I'm gonna be sending you a link by email or by text, and this is why and what you need to do with it. So I just think there was some confusion, you know, and there's, you know, we get a lot of flexibility with the Truth platform as far as settings and so forth. So we had to tweak a little bit of that, and, you know, 'cause it doesn't hang out there forever. When you place the order, if the borrower ignores it, that will sort of cancel out or close out. So I think there was just some internal confusion about those things. So being more transparent about truly what it is, how it compares to what we've been doing in the past, and really the best practices, which I think we've honed in on now.

You mentioned reps and warrants, Tom. I mean, you were one of the customers that actually did share a lot of data with us, and we learned a lot from it because you opened up the kimono and said, look, let's look at this together. And this doesn't happen often. And I think one of the best part about it, when I was a little surprised, is that the reps and warrants rate was actually higher than the incumbent.

Yep. That's right.

So tell me a little bit about what you measure, because I don't think everybody understands how to look at reps and warrants the way CrossCountry does, right? But also, what did you see when you look at the data?

So don't ask me the behind-the-scenes tech stuff. Like I said, I'm not the tech guy. But yeah, the truth of the matter is, you know, we— the information ports into the system where it needs to go so that when we run LPDU, we don't have to manually enter some reference number or anything like that. The TRUV integration takes care of everything there. So it is just a matter of making sure that you're running AUS and reviewing those findings, you know, the results. As far as the way the findings present themselves are no different really than the alternatives other than we're seeing it more often. And yeah, TruVe, we're getting TruVe reps and warrants more often than we do with other providers.

I think, Alyssa, didn't we have one more poll around like the success rate? I wanna talk about when nothing works, what does cross-country do and how you think about the process of the user journey documents or verifications. Yeah, so when relying on instant databases, what percent of your attempts ultimately fail and require manual fallback? Let's see if folks can vote. Oh, interesting. All right, let's give everybody 30 more seconds. I also find interesting because I don't come from the space is when I learned what this verification really is, and apparently there's multiple products, which is active and active employments, and sometimes you, you get the data for, um, why not? That might not be that useful.

Sure.

So we, we probably should have mentioned here, how often do you get useful data that you don't have to fall, uh, fall back and require manual verification? Tom, what was it for you when going into the process?

I, I will tell you, look, the reporting's difficult on it, so it's not easy to kind of give you a solid number. My guess is about 28%. Is what we were seeing with, with some of the competitors. And that's, that's my recollection. I didn't make, I didn't make that number up. It's been a while since I looked at it, but, you know, at the time it was 28. And like I said, Trueve outpaced that almost immediately.

When you think about instant verifications, right, it's, and you say that it's hard to measure. Can you tell me why? Because I think that's one of the challenges is everybody looks at the bill in the end of the month. And they're like, "Oh, that seems to be pretty high. What am I supposed to do about it?" But then when we ask, "What's your success rate?" We get from very low to very high.

Yeah.

And it varies so much and it really depends on what, how people measure it. So how did you think about this problem?

Yeah, so I mean, cost aside, and the reason that the reporting is difficult is that there's times where, like you said, we're ordering a service, and all I can see from a report is that the service has been ordered. I can't really tell easily if that was useful or not, you know. And then I could see a loan that has verifications run through two different services, which is an indication that, you know, the first one failed. Maybe, like you said, there's active employment, there's inactive employment. If I'm going after their current employer, but I get an old inactive employer, Again, I'm paying for it, but that's, that's not beneficial to me. The reporting will show that I've ordered it, doesn't tell me whether it was useful or not. So then I go and order from another vendor, and maybe it's there, maybe it isn't. So there could be multiple VOEs on a file, multiple bills coming in on that file, and at the end of the day, I've still got a processor making a phone call to an HR department and trying to You know, email or fax a form to be manually filled out. Or with, like I said, with Trueve, it's, it's a little bit different. You know, I've got on my application, I've got 5 employers. I've got, you know, 2 current jobs. Maybe I got 3 prior jobs. I'm all good on the prior stuff. I don't need that. I just need 1 VOE for one of their current jobs. Well, that's what I ask for. And that's what the borrower logs into. That's what I get back and that's what I pay for. None of the other things.

So I guess let's talk about the impact then. So $10 million a year. When you spoke to Dasha, Dasha's been working with you on, on this project for many months, right? I was like, are you sure that, that sounds a little high.

So it sure does. It sure does. Uh, and you know, like I said, we, we've had this going since the, uh, spring and we've, uh, made some improvements that we implemented in September and we've still got a few steps to go to, to really polish this thing up. But, uh, those are real numbers, you know, and they're potential numbers. I won't necessarily say we've saved $10 million this year, but the potential is absolutely there. And, but what I can tell you is the savings that we have realized are significant— millions, millions. And that's, that's a real savings.

Yeah.

And I guess, uh, to get to 10, because we didn't, we're were not live full year, we just analyzed whatever.

Yeah.

It was, well, the word, the same.

Yeah.

So it's not completely made up. It's just analyzed what we, we saw recently. Yeah. I think if you were redo the project right again, start, let's, let's go back in time and we start it again. How would you, how would you go about it if you were to give recommendation? Because there's, there are other lenders on, on the call. How would they go? How would you go about relaunching Troop?

I would, I would follow a very similar path. I would just tweak how we approached our branches about it and how we explained it. Like I said, from an implementation standpoint, tech standpoint, I couldn't tell you where you could improve there. I mean, when I would get on the calls and say, hey, look, this isn't really working for us. This is what we'd like. Like the next call, the work was done and, and, and it wasn't taxing on our internal folks. You know, sometimes when we're working on certain things, there, there's a, a heavy burden on our internal tech folks. That didn't exist with Truve. You guys really did all of the heavy lifting. Yeah, and again, so, you know, maybe I would have recognized all those things. If I could go back in time, I would have told you all of these things day one, you know, rather than take the time in pilot for these things to kind of come out organically. But really, I do think the only thing that I would really improve on would have been the way we set expectations with our branches and how they should talk to their borrowers about what it is, what the benefits are. Yeah, I like it was seamless, a pilot and launch as I've been involved with here over the past 6 years.

I guess you spoke a couple of times of setting the expectation. How would you, what would you tell if I were a loan officer today at a branch?

Yeah.

How would you explain what the Latrubes? Sure.

I would tell you, I'd say, listen, you can't just go in and expect your borrower to, you know, click on some link and put their payroll provider information in. You know, I wouldn't want to do that if I'm a borrower, even knowing I'm in the loan process, even knowing that the email or the text is coming from CCM. I want some reassurance as a borrower. Call me, let me know, hey, Tom, look, you know, You don't need to send me your pay stubs, W-2s, or any of that, but I'm going to send you a link. All you got to do is log into your payroll provider, whether that's, you know, ADP, Workday, or maybe even your company's portal. If you log in, click a couple buttons, I'm going to get everything I need on your income and you won't have to send me anything additional there, just like we've done with your assets already. You know, it's— A lot of loan officers think this is that they're asking the borrower to do an extra step and that they want to, and I understand they want to limit the impact on their borrower, but I think the folks that have really embraced it realize that it's got the exact opposite effect. It's not a negative impact on the borrower. It's absolutely an efficiency pickup. And in this day and age, everybody use tech, you know, this isn't 25 years ago getting a mortgage where you're, you know, you're waiting in line at the fax machine. Folks are used to these sort of things. And I think those folks that have that conversation with their borrower, their success rate is tremendous because that's the bottleneck. It's getting the borrower to click that link.

That's true. That's true. I guess, I mean, we have a few minutes and I want to get an opportunity to answer some Q&A questions. But what's next for our partnership?

Well, I know there's, you know, there's other things you guys offer and we've touched on those a little bit. So maybe the sky's the limit. You know, I don't want to overcommit here on the call, Kirill, but, you know, I think this is— this has certainly been a success story and that makes it much easier to continue the conversations with TruVive about some of your other offerings.

I mean, we would appreciate the opportunity to partner on other innovations that we rolled out throughout this year. We earlier got certified for assets and documents. I mean, it's truly the goal for us. When we talk internally, we say, well, we are here not to do payroll income and employment verification. We're here to solve the lender problem, right? Which is just, I don't care how you verify, just I don't want to do any of that work manually first. And second, it cannot be extremely expensive. And I feel like, again, I'm not coming from the mortgage industry. It seems like the prices are going up again on credit. And, you know, I see all these LinkedIn posts from folks. I guess the opportunity, what's true is, won't go into how much, how we set up our partnership, but I think the opportunity is, it's truly is a cost factor and a saver for a lot of mortgage lenders. So if somebody is on this call considering it, then 2026, that's definitely an opportunity. On the product side, Tom, I think we can, or we promise we'll do a lot of integration improvements. So I hope that that would actually streamline and make those $10 million real versus estimated or analyzed.

Well, like I said, just, you know, as good a partnership as we have, you guys got your seat at the table. So, you know, I mentioned at the very beginning of this call, I get solicitations all all the time from, you know, AI and this, that, and the other thing. And I, I don't respond to most of it, but you guys have proven yourselves that, uh, you're good to work with. You deliver on all of your promises and then some. And, uh, yeah, so I would have no hesitation to continue those conversations.

Awesome. Thanks, Tom. I guess we have a few minutes for questions. I'm not sure how this platform works. This is the first time we're using GoToWebinar.

I can read them out to you.

Can you hear me okay? Yes, you can read them out. Let's do it.

I'm like the voice of God here. You can't see me, but I'm still here. All right. The first one that came in, how is Trueve integrated into Cross Country Mortgage's verification workflow today?

Oh, today in our POS system, we have ways of sending requests to a borrower. More as a follow-up. And so we've automated that. We've taken the human aspect out. And so after a borrower completes their application, they get a follow-up request to go ahead and log into TRUV. That's how it is today. And that's, that's the limitation that we're working through. And it's not on the TRUV side of things, but it's something that we're working through to get it integrated directly into our application stream.

Awesome. Next question. How long did the actual technical rollout and implementation take?

I would say from our first conversation, and I, and I don't have my calendar in front of me, so, so don't hold me to all of this, but I would say that from our first conversation to us placing our first order, maybe not fully in the pilot, was, I bet you it was in a week and a half, 2 weeks, something like that. It was quick. And a lot of it was just about, you know, kind of talking through what it is and, you know, scheduling demos around all of our busy calendars and things like that. And it could have actually gone quicker, but it was quick. It was definitely quick from my recollection.

That's great. Next question. And if you have any questions, make sure to enter them in the questions portion. It should be in like the upper right-hand corner. We've got a couple more, so. How do you handle borrowers who are hesitant to share their payroll login credentials during the application?

Well, first of all, we never ask them to share them with us. They're not sharing them with us. They're not sharing them with Trueve. It's all very secure. So they're just logging in directly themselves to their payroll provider and authorizing the information to push through. And so we do explain that there's absolutely information security around all of those things. We still have borrowers that don't want to do it. We're not going to force them to do it. I don't think there would be any reasonable expectation that we're going to be able to get any kind of employment automated verification on 100% of our files. Our goal is to get as many as we can, but we go old school at times and pay stubs, W-2s that the borrower sends in, and calling and getting an employment verification.

Next question. Do you offer TRUV to all new applicants, whether they are just shopping or have a contract?

If they complete the application, they, they have the opportunity. Yes, 100% of the time with some logic built in where, you know, obviously we've got loans that don't necessarily document income and things like that. We are not asking for income documentation on programs that don't require it. But once the borrower gets to a certain stage in that application process and submits it, 100% of the time.

How do you encourage sales teams to use Trueve more?

So the cost is the low-hanging fruit. That's the one that at least gets them to listen. But again, all of the things that, all the benefits that we talked about on this call are things that we try internally to relay to our branches as far as the benefit. And we found that, you know, folks that have tried it, like it and they continue to use it. It's getting them to try it, you know, it's getting them out of their comfort zone and what they've been doing for years and years. We want to grow with this, with the industry and things like that. Times are changing, you know, things progress quicker than I keep up with sometimes. Again, it's just really sharing with them the benefits of it so they can see it for themselves and really experience it.

All right. One or two more, and then we will wrap this all up. How does TRUV stack up against competitors when it comes to having their employer available to sync?

I think they— I forget, it's over 90% of employers out there are available because, again, it's tapping into the payroll providers and some of those— Kirill, you could probably explain it better than me. But there's also available— I can go out to their website. I could type in the employer. It's going to tell me if it's available there, you know, so I'm not spinning my wheels. And there's a confidence score within our system that's going to give me an idea how confident it is that I'm going to get what I'm looking for as far as an employer hit. But I would say that there's more employers available through TRUV than any other vendor that I work with.

I would like to add that you mentioned the confidence score. So if you order manually, you can actually see a green checkmark saying, yes, we think this employer would work fine. A lot of times the processors or loan officers wouldn't order if they are not confident it's going to actually check out. So you don't, you don't waste time of the borrower. You don't waste loan officer's time. But then in the automated system, it almost doesn't matter if it doesn't work, the borrower just moves on and moves on and I mean, forgets about it as soon as they try and it didn't quite work.

The confidence indicator was a big benefit to us when we were still sending it out manually before we added it to our POS. Because you're right, you know, there's, there's a time commitment involved of sending that link to the borrower, waiting for them to engage with it. The results are fairly immediate after that. But if the confidence was low, you know, the system's pretty transparent about that.

All right, we will wrap this up with one last question. If we didn't get to yours, I have them all down. We will make sure to follow up with you. But our last question of the afternoon: before you changed anything, what was the moment you realized verification costs had become a real problem worth fixing?

For me personally, it was feedback from our users. As far as cost, again, I keep coming back to cost, but they just, they continued to go up so significantly. So we, we had to look at different ways to do it. And, you know, the truth is, Tru doesn't change what we did. It just changes how we did it, you know? So, so we haven't, you know, turned our process on its head or anything like that. We're, we're still doing all the things we did. We're just giving them an opportunity to, do it more reliably with a much more cost-effective way to do it.

Yeah. And I, and I think it's, uh, I, I know we're over time. I just wanted to say how grateful I am for, for the partnership. But I mean, the webinar is fun and nice, but it's, it's really a journey to how we got here. It's, uh, how much work your team across country have done to implement TRUV, the TRUV team, and overall the partnership We're very grateful you guys are a customer, but also the partnership goes both ways. It's hard to find the partner who would actually invest and spend time with you. And, you know, we're all tech folks. We don't come from mortgage necessarily. We learned a lot from CrossCountry and how you operate and the rigor you brought in asking us to fix, you know, all the things we have to fix over the years. It's been An incredible journey. And thanks for, thanks for being a partner and a customer.

Yeah. Well, and thank you. Thank you. And you know, that is what a partnership is. You know, it's not a one-way street. I never, I never look at these things that way. I'm happy you guys were able to benefit, but I will say that I'm sure you guys didn't benefit nearly as much as we did.

I don't have $10 million to save yet, but we'll, we're working on it. Thanks again. We'll have this recorded and we'll share it with everybody who joined or registered for the webinar. See you next week on our regular calls.

Thanks again, Kirill, for having me. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Thank you so much.

All right, have a good one.

Bye.