Seeking the Truv Podcast

Foreign.

Welcome to Seeking the Truv, where we explore how successful companies and business leaders use data to make confident decisions. Hosted by Darshana Shetty, VP of product at truv, a one stop solution for income and employment verification.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Seeking the Truth podcast. I'm your host, Darshana Shetty and with me I have our favorite co host, Richard.

Hey, what's up? Thanks, Darshana.

We have a very special guest today, Tim. Tim is CEO of Be Smarty. And welcome.

Tim, good having me on. Darshana. Richard, thanks for hosting this.

Tim, if you don't mind, give a introduction about yourself to all of our listeners and tell us, tell us, you know what, what, why you, why you are here today.

Yeah, absolutely. So Tim Nguyen, CEO, co founder of B Smarty, founded the company as an idea in 2007. This is right when New Century went under and had this crazy idea to use source data and make the consumer experience better. Fast forward to 2016 is when we actually got the product life. But I come from a very entrepreneurial background. Born here, raised here in Southern California, been basically grew up in real estate, mortgage my entire life. Left college early, got in the mortgage space and never left. I tried three times, I've tried, but it keeps on pulling back each and every time.

Awesome. Thanks for the quick and quick introduction. We're here today because our companies are working together and our goal is very kind of in line. We want to serve our customers better together, but we wanted to learn about developments at Be Smarty. We're almost at the end of our integration. Tim, tell us a little bit more about what is important about this integration for your customers. What is important for Be Smarty? How do we kind of make this better for borrowers?

Yeah, I think I could best answer that by just kind of sharing what Be Smarty is really, you know, what we do every single day, what our mission is, Right. We really look at providing value in three different ways. The first is to deliver just a beautiful consumer experience, right? It needs to look good, it needs to feel good, needs to represent your brand, your baby really, really well in the, in the marketplace. That's number one. Number two, it's all about the relationship with the real estate agents, especially in this purchase market, you know, that we're in and will be in for the next two to three years. So really making those connections more seamless, easier to refer business back and forth. And number three, it's automation of data and processes, right? Providing real roi. Right. A fancy pretty app, a fancy beautiful you know, application, those are all great, it's all table stakes. But then you got to make that do more for your back office, do more for your loan officers, do more for your borrowers by removing redundancies, automating things that you do again and again and again so that you can take that time saved, right. And really focus back on what's most important and that's your customer, your borrowers. At the end of the day, the more work we can do on automation more than you can go ahead and make relationships and connections happen. So with that as a foundation for what we pursue here at B Smarty, we're super excited with integration with truv. The ability for us to take source data, drive into the application workflow to minimize work for the borrower, increase data integrity for the lender, increase, and then move that downstream to back end processes all the way to even secondary markets. Right. When you think about getting it, you know, back by Fannie and Freddy, it all starts at the very beginning. So if you can build in the true model, give that bar a better experience, give the lender a better experience, reduce the risk, it's going to make for a better manufacturing process end to end.

And so just to dive into that a little bit from the borrower's perspective, if you're, you know, be smarty, current customer, or maybe somebody looking at be smarty, how would you describe the experience for the borrower for this integration with Truth?

It's seamless. It's really the easiest way. It's, you know, we have a saying at Be Smart we call it, you know, we say we want to turn borrowers into data verifiers, not data providers. And Truth helps us accomplish that goal. They key in their credentials, we pull down the data, job is done. So you're helping us persist the mission that we deliver to our borrowers and our lender customers. So the experience, you know, they expect to be safe, secure, obviously seamless, easy to use. And that's for the consumer. Now for the originators and for the lender, you know, business is a little bit more complicated, right. Ability to really dig into that data, apply that data across a loan data set and then apply that data and that workflow across a life cycle of a loan because it's just not here, right. You might have to refresh it at the end, you might have to refresh in the beginning, you might have to do a new one. We add a secondary co borrower to it.

Right.

Business is dynamic, manufacturing loans dynamic. So really taking that product not just find one home for it in the point of sale, buying multiple homes for it in the point sale and driving that data and efficiency downstream into the loan origination system.

Quick piggyback question I just wanted to ask. You were getting me thinking while you were talking. How, how high is the bar now from the borrower perspective in terms of the experience and now from just a competitive standpoint with say other pos's out there, just in terms of like what is that? Love that level of expectation.

Oh, the bar has been definitely been raised dramatically. You know, if you look at consumer apps just in general outside of our space that we use every day, whether it's Uber or whether it's Amazon, you know, these are multi billionaire companies building the best apps in the world, serving, you know, tens of millions of consumers every single day. So that is the bar we compete against. There is no competing just against within our own ecosystem. I think you're just short sighted if you do that. You got to look at the big guys because that's what consumers are used to, that's what originators are used to. And they're saying to themselves, why isn't my app and mortgage that easy? Right? So the bar is high and the bar, you know, it keeps on getting higher. You know, AI is a big topic. You know, maybe we'll talk about that here today. We got some plans there as well. But you know, the bar, it's experience, it's data integrity security. Consumers demand the best of the best.

Awesome. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about how Be Smarty is unique. There are a lot of POS solutions out there and I know you probably.

Had a right from the first call, first contact to get a paid appraisal compliantly. Days, Right. For most people it'll take them multiple days.

Yeah.

And we do that by automating all the data and the processes and the source data available to deliver conditional approvals in 10 minutes, deliver lights up disclosures in about two minutes thereafter so people can zoom through the process quickly. Now this power also gets put in the hands of originators, right? So as an originator, if I was a loan officer and I'm using the software, I can get take that bar off the street in about 20 minutes. I'm apping them, I'm running product and pricing, credit aggregating fees, life out disclosures, collecting appraisal card. So the by time that I hang up and the next lender calls this borrower, sorry, I'm already committed to lender X. So that's the big differentiator, right? It's the automation, data and processes, consumer experience and the ability to connect with realtors and so forth. That's all table stakes.

Is that all automation or do you have many people like it's workflows. How, how, how do you think about that?

Automation sounds really cool, but it's really challenging and if you do it wrong, it's really bad. Yeah, and admittedly we did it bad in the beginning. We automated too much and we learned really quickly, like you can't automate everything. And even if you could, you shouldn't because the value of the relationship between the originator and the borrower matters. You got to give them touch points. You gotta let them find and dig for information. You gotta let them build a reputation and serve that borrower. So really, automation for us is about automating those things that are mundane. Right. The real skill of selling and advising and consulting, that belongs to the originator and I hope it belongs to the original for a long time because there is this threat of AI coming in and you know, that's a whole new topic, the whole new webinar, you know, that is a threat to the loan officers, right? But I think really good loan officers who understand how to help the consumer serve the consumer, understand, you know, that person's direction in life, they're going to do really well. They can be a focus their attention on that rather than doing paper pushing, number crunching.

Excellent. Well, we really value this partnership, Tim. And I think lenders are going to be very excited about what's now available to them. What would you give that? Just give me like three bullets for a lender listening about why you think they should be super excited about true of and be smarty in this new integration that we're releasing and we're going to be talking about this live. Everybody who's listening, just so you know, on a webinar next month, hopefully with a mutual client that we'll be able to pull in. Go ahead, Tim.

You know, the first thing I would say is the people behind it. You know, I'm very proud of the culture we have at Be Smarty. I've gotten to know the folks at TRU and really happy and proud that we're working with a culture like at True. So we got good people, just good knowledgeable people that work together well, want to do right by the consumer and the lender. I think that's the first good start right there. Right. The second is the technology and the product. Is it up to par? Can it Scale. In both cases, I think the answer is yes. I know for us, you know, we, we do about 90,000 applications per month, even this market. I know the volume that you guys do, I won't share that. But you guys have scaled, you guys know how to solve this problem and you do it really, really well. Right. So I'll just leave with those two things right there. Great people, you know, doing the work and a great product that could actually scale and produce results. You put those two together, then, you know, it's not much we can't do, you know, if we don't. As long as we try.

I love that answer, Tim. And I just want to let everybody know he's talking about Darshana and the rest of the company, not me for sure.

Tim, we talked about AI a few times. You mentioned AI a couple times now. So let's actually dive deeper. How is be smartly using or planning to use AI? We are doing couple of things ourselves. But I'm always curious and very excited to listen to other innovative solutions that, you know, companies such as yours are using. So please, please educate us.

AI, I mean, you know, I think it's first thing for people to understand it. It's, it's here, it ain't going anywhere and it's getting better fast. It is really mind boggling. Just go get a free ChatGPT account, give it a spin. It really is an amazing thing. So for our organization, I'll start there. 2023 was the year of just consuming AI. There's a lot of great AI platforms already built. We started in marketing and legal and then we were starting to move now to code writing qa. Right. The engineering aspects of it all. And next year we start our journey on building an AI product. And I want to, I don't want to let that count out of the bag yet. We've not shared that but we rest assured we're working on something in the AI realm or not just going to use, you know, chat GPT product and build a chatbot. Right. That's, that's all over the place. Right. So that's a great segue. We're going to use it a little bit more creatively and I'll give you a clue, actually it's a customer for life strategy. How do we use AI to retain the customers and re engage with that customer? If you think about the stats, I think it was, forget what year this was. About 18 or 17% of of consumers will go back to the original lender that lasted their mortgage with that's horrible.

Yeah, terrible.

That's what's one. That's one heck of a leaky bucket. And we got a leaky bug. You got to pour a lot more water in there to build that, you know, water supply up, right? So that's a big problem. So that's where we're going to use AI to really tackle that customer for life strategy. Now, in terms of AI overall, I look at AI as like semi, you know, superconductors, right? The chips, intel, amd. Let them do that hard work. Let Microsoft and Google and Facebook, they're going to do all the hard work. You think a little company like Beast Sports can be a build AI? Probably not. There's going to be someone out there that proves me wrong. Some kid in his basement. I hope it happens. That's, that's the beauty of the world we live in. But it ain't going to be us. It's not going to be the majority of companies our size. But what we can do though is leverage what they already have, right? We're going to let Microsoft and G, you know, Google tackle the, you know, billion dollar, you know, the multi billion user market, the communication, the chat, right? Let them handle all that stuff. What we're trying to do is, you know, I think the winners in AI could be the ones that build it into a niche industry where they know the industry, they know the players, they know the market, they know ins and outs of it. They can apply very specifically to an industry, so you can get a very broad solution, apply specifically to produce a very specific outcome to a large sector. That's where I think the magic is going to happen. To that end, I've made a couple AI investments recently. One in customer experience, another one I can't share. But you know, these are very targeted niches and so that's where we think the value is going to be.

Just to piggyback on that question, Tim, if you were to look at our industry, right, software industry or tech in general, what are some of the jobs that may get redundant with AI? If you can think of any.

Let's just take a look at the broader economy for a second. Yeah, every single job is threatened by AI. Let's be one bedroom, two people, two kids might have jobs, the parents will have jobs, they might hustle on the side, but they're not really making significant money. Most of kids don't, can't find a good job. Maybe one or two of them work for Google or software company or whatever they do in finance or banking or whatever. And they're making really good money and they have to take care of the whole family, right? That has happened for many, I mean, look at many, look at all the other countries. Look at villages in Mexico for example, right? You have a small group of siblings or cousins, aunts, uncles, whatever that are the breadwinners. They take care of family. 10, 12, 18 people. I don't know if it's going to get to that level, but if as AI catches on, the government has to put some level of regulation so we can't just rip everyone's job. But will jobs be impacted? Yeah, it will. I don't know how else to say it. I think Nvidia CEO said it best. It's not AI directly that's going to take your job. People who know how to use it is going to take your jobs. So I got my kids, I got an 8 year old, 5 year old boy, I got them using Chat GPT now, right? They're playing with it, they're chatting with it, they're trying to tell jokes, they're creating jokes for a minute, getting, you know, they're, they have this idea and they have chatgpt draw a picture and they love it and they tweak the picture and they, they tell stories with it and then they share the stories of mom, dad and draw a comic book. The point is I got to get those tools in my kids hands early because if they don't know how to use it in 10, 15 years, they're going to be, you're going to be big trouble.

You know, Tim, I just saw this stat that there's 1.8 death deaths per minute in the world. Oh no, no, per second, I think, in the world. And there's over four births. And so when I put those kind of, you know, statistics in line with what you're talking about, with how many people are working out there and then all, of course, all the AI that's going to be replacing all of these jobs. It's an interesting picture our world's going into in the next five, 10 years.

You know, it may not be bad, right? Because I do believe that when people are free of the basic necessities in life, they can become more creative. You know, some people might sit there and just smoke weed all day, hey, that's gonna happen. Okay? But some people actually will say, hey, I'm gonna go create something, I'm gonna go draw something, I'm gonna go design something. I'm gonna, I'm gonna discover something no one's ever discovered before. Right. Because they're curious and they're kind of bored because basic necessities are so easy to come by.

I hope your recent investments in Cyberdyne systems really pay off in the future. Cyberdyne from Terminator, remember? But Darshan, I think on the, on the questions of AI, I mean, I do actually, for anybody listening, would love you to maybe, if you can give a little teaser about some of the AI that we're playing with right now at True. Because I think it's super exciting.

Yeah. And we are doing. We are using AI across the board. Right. Like Richard, you know, on the marketing front, we are using some AI to get better leads. And how do we kind of quantify those leads? We are definitely using AI to write up some of the emails that we are sending out. The blogs. Like Tim mentioned, we don't have a dedicated huge product marketing team. So we use AI to write some of our blogs and articles. And then obviously Richard takes a pass, I take a pass. We make sure that it's all teed up, reviewed and good to go before published. On the engineering and product side, we do have some. If you are aware of the waterfall, right, the last step of the waterfall is the HR outreach. Again, don't want to kind of open the kimono and make a big announcement here, but what we are doing is we are using AI. Instead of having a call center and building out a huge call center, we're using AI to kind of talk to the HR admins or the payroll teams. Right. So essentially as a last step of the waterfall, if you're not able to use borrower permission or consumer permission data, which is true, score product or use any of the other steps, Doc upload did not work for you. You just cannot complete the verification. You can use this HR outreach, as we call it, where we will call on behalf of our clients, where we'll talk to the payroll team or the HR admin, get the details and it's done. You know, it's AI actually doing the talking and we have good prompts and it works well. So we've tested it out. We are using it in pilot and we want to scale it. We want to, you know, launch this. So this is something that's. That, you know, the teams are working on one of the many cool things that we use AI for. Engineering teams are using it in various forms, shapes, and it's, it's just made the team more productive, in my opinion.

So I think, Darshan, I just want to throw that out there. It's so cool. Like, really cool. The call the caller is so cool. I don't, I don't know when or when that's going live, but, man, people have no clue. No way.

Is it actually a voice or is it.

Oh, it's any voice you want it to be. It can be Tim's voice. That's what's so cool about it. It's really good. And people have no clue when, when they're talking. So it's. That part kind of has implications for our whole world, right? I mean, but anyways, Tim, I want to take this in a different direction. This is a Beast Marty direction. You have had some big developments here at Beast Marty, big initiatives. And one was a reintroduction. So a reskinning of your POS application, Bright pos, the launch of your new native mobile app, Bright Connect, and a whole refresh branding rebranding. So why don't you tell me about why did you do this? And, and kind of like the, the, the. What am I looking for here? The, the motivation behind this, you know, Be Smarty.

So we process a lot of volume, we have some really big customers, but our brand recognition is really poor to be straight up. And it's a, it was a factor of how we, you know, went to market, right, where we put our focus and we really focus on relationships like with, with Truv and others, you know, like you guys, other vendor partners, the whole reintroduction for us. Isabelle said, hey, world, let's be smart again for the first time, right? And as we dug through this, right, of course there's a logo. We're going to keep the name, we're going to change the logo, we're going to refresh the look and feel about the usability of our application and our tooling. But when we really dug into it, right, Be Smart is really good at one thing. Historically, it's the automation, data and processes. Our look and feel or experience, consumer experience was subpar. Now we're lifting that all up. The mobile app is not something that we have before. Now that it's going live, that's. We're lifting that all up for the first time. This is, I think, really important for everyone to understand. For the first time. You don't have to choose between the three key value props. Do I go with automation? Do I go with a beautiful look and feel? Do I go with a mobile app? Well, now you can have all three. You have a great experience across mobile, across web. Your borrowers will enjoy it. You're going to be proud of the brand. That it represents. It's going to automate all the data in the back end like you're used to from Be Smarty so they can do less and produce more.

That's great. Thanks Tim. Thanks for being here and sharing your insights with us. Last question for you. What are you most excited about for 2024?

Oh man. Business or personal? We'll stay focused on our business today. Just getting back to business like Norma know 2022, 20 was actually a pretty good year for us. I mean we, we, we grew quite a bit. 2023 was, you know, we grew just very little, but we still grew. But every deal, everything was dog fight, everything was a battle. I just want to be able to execute that vision in a more predictable environment. I think we don't need a low interest rate environment. We just need a stable interest rate environment. If it's going to be a six and a half percent market, let it be a six and a half percent market. It can be a six and a quarter market. Let it be a six and a quarter market. We just need some level of stability. So I'm looking forward to stability which allows us to plan for the long run, get back to thinking about innovation again, like building out the AI customer for life strategy for us. So those are the things I'm really just excited about. Getting back to business is normal.

Perfect. Thank you for joining us. It was great to have you on Seeking the Truth podcast. Thank you.

Thank you Darshana. Thank you Richard. Thank you foreign.

Thank you for listening to Seeking the Truve. You can keep up with the latest on our podcast@truv.com podcast or wherever you get your pods. We'll see you next time.

Sam.