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The Signal

The Signal

De : Chris and Reuven
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The Signal is a weekly podcast hosted by Chris Grimes and Reuven Gorsht, exploring how AI, automation, and new operating models are reshaping high-stakes industries like mortgage, energy, healthcare, and beyond. Through candid conversations with founders, operators, lenders, and technology leaders, the show digs into what is actually changing on the ground — the workflows being reinvented, the bottlenecks being broken, and the decisions leaders are making as their industries adapt. Each conversation is designed for practical insight: what is working, what is still hype, and what the next wave of industry transformation looks like.Copyright 2026 Chris and Reuven Direction Economie Management Management et direction
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  • The AI Edge: Transforming Non-QM Lending

    The AI Edge: Transforming Non-QM Lending
    Sep 22 2026
    HOW DO YOU AUTOMATE UNDERWRITING WHEN THERE IS NO RULEBOOKHere is the kind of question Sarah Gonzalez was willing to hand to software. In the example she uses, a matrix calls for an 800 FICO on a million-dollar loan and caps the loan-to-value at 75, and the file in front of the underwriter arrives at 76. That one has an answer before anyone reads the file. Almost nothing else in her book does, because almost everything Logan Finance writes is non-QM, and there is no standard guideline set sitting there waiting to be encoded.Gonzalez is Chief Innovation Officer at Logan, and she has had to answer the automation question in production rather than on a panel.CAN YOU AUTOMATE UNDERWRITING WITHOUT AUTOMATING THE CREDIT DECISIONLogan built a tool called Aura. A partner supplies the baseline rules engine, and the rules themselves were written in-house and belong to Logan. That distinction is worth holding onto, because renting an engine and owning the rules inside it is a different asset from renting the whole thing.What Aura does is narrow on purpose. It reads hundreds of pages of guidelines so that an underwriter does not have to page through matrix after matrix, it reports what sits inside the box and what sits outside it, and then it stops. It does not approve anything and it does not decline anything. Gonzalez is strict about that boundary in a way most vendors selling into this market are not.If the tool is already reading the guidelines, does the judgment itself move to the machine within a year or two? WHY SHE DOES NOT START WITH THE ORG CHARTHer panel at the HousingWire AI Summit was about the future org chart, and her answer inside her own organization is that she does not start there. She starts with culture and with the experience she wants the customer or the employee to have, then asks which parts of that work can be automated and which parts require judgment.WHAT SHE WANTS FROM VENDORS, AND IS NOT GETTINGThe sharpest stretch of the conversation is not about her own build at all. It is about everyone selling to her.She arrived at the recording from a week of vendor demos. Her question at the end of each one was not about the model, it was about the implementation timeline and the implementation cost, and the answers kept coming back at six months and a price she thought the work no longer justified.WHAT YOU'LL TAKE AWAY- The automatable surface in non-QM is eligibility, not decisioning, and the two are worth separating in writing before anyone builds anything- A rules engine you rent with rules you own is a different asset from a platform you rent entirely- The honest return on an eligibility engine is underwriter throughput, and hers is 20 to 25%- Eliminating a task and eliminating a person are two separate decisions, and conflating them is a leadership failure rather than a technology one- If a vendor cannot tell you why implementation takes six months, that is the question to keep askingCHAPTERS(00:00) What AI can't do in non-QM lending(01:35) An operator handed the innovation job(03:29) Taking a technology role without a technology background(06:25) Automating a lender with no rulebook(09:22) Will judgment ever move to the machine(11:29) Why she doesn't start with the org chart(12:24) Eliminating task, not judgment(14:01) What the manager's job becomes(16:27) Why vendor AI still takes six months(21:18) Inside Aura, eligibility not decisioning(22:48) A 20 to 25% lift for underwriters(25:07) The right partner at the right costMENTIONED IN THIS EPISODELogan Finance, the non-QM lender where Sarah Gonzalez is Chief Innovation OfficerAura, Logan's eligibility engine, built on a partner's rules engine with rules Logan wrote and ownsHousingWire AI Summit, the Dallas event in August 2026 where the hosts met herThe Mortgage Collaborative, whose summit she had attended the week before recordingIDP and OCR, the document technologies she argues get folded into the word AIClaude, named as an example of what per-seat AI costs a mid-size lender without change management around itRE/MAX, Redfin and Rocket, named by Reuven as evidence the ground is shifting upstream and downstreamABOUT THE GUESTSarah Gonzalez is Chief Innovation Officer at Logan Finance. She has spent thirty years in mortgage, including chief operating and president roles at earlier companies, and now works on where technology genuinely changes how lending gets done rather than where it only adds a step.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbatangan78/YOUR HOSTSChris Grimes is CEO of FundMore.Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable.One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction.LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBECaptivate — https://the-signal.captivate.fm/Apple Podcasts — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-signal/id6805026259Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/59UmJswLjpRO5p7vUwr7hVYouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@thesignalreuvenchrisNew episodes every Tuesday.
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    27 min
  • Stop Training, Start Marketing: AI Adoption in Mortgage Lending

    Stop Training, Start Marketing: AI Adoption in Mortgage Lending
    Sep 15 2026
    WHY WON'T MY LOAN OFFICERS USE THE AI TOOL WE BOUGHTEvery conversation about AI adoption among loan officers eventually arrives at the same complaint. The platform works, the rollout happened, and the login numbers are flat. Lindsey Ricciardelli has a version of that story with a phone call in it.She had spent almost two years on the platform. The friction was designed out, the assistant worked, and compliance had signed it off. She switched it on for every loan officer, sent an email explaining what it was, and waited.Then her phone rang. A producer wanted to know who Casey was, and why she was calling his leads.Casey is an AI assistant. When a borrower's credit gets pulled, or the data shows a refinance opportunity, Casey calls them, and when they are ready she transfers them straight to the loan officer's cellphone. The loan officer on the phone to Lindsey had not read the launch email. Neither, it turned out, had almost anyone else.That call is the reason this episode exists. Adoption is usually handed to training: book the session, take the attendance, report the completion rate. Lindsey's argument, made on the HousingWire AI Summit stage in Dallas in August, is that training is the wrong department to hand it to. Getting a salesforce onto a new platform is a design problem first and a marketing problem second. What follows is what she built, what she left out, where the resistance came from, and why she still has no adoption number to show you.DESIGN THE FRICTION OUT BEFORE YOU MARKET ANYTHINGThe order matters, and she is direct about it: you cannot market your way past a design flaw. Before any campaign ran, the person building the platform spent months removing the reason a loan officer would bounce off it.The specific decision worth copying is what he did about prompting. The industry's answer to a salesforce that cannot get useful output from a model is to teach prompting, which means a course, a deck and a Saturday. Lindsey's team went the other way and pre-loaded the prompts a loan officer would actually need, so the interface became a plain-language question. You ask it the way you would ask a colleague, and the output arrives already shaped, because the work sits behind the box rather than in front of it. It helped that the engineer had been a loan officer himself and knew which questions were real.The word she uses for the target is one she brought from agency work rather than from software. In advertising, the aha moment is the point where a customer insight lands and the consumer goes "oh, I get it" with a small laugh. That is the thing being engineered. Not comprehension, not competence, recognition. Her claim is that a rollout succeeds or fails on whether a person reaches that moment on their own inside the first minute, and that everything upstream of it is design work.WHY AI ADOPTION FOR LOAN OFFICERS IS A MARKETING JOBOnce the platform stopped being the obstacle, the obstacle was attention. Loan officers are inundated, and Lindsey's assessment of internal email is blunt: people do not read it, including when a marketer wrote it. That is not a communications failure to be fixed with a better subject line. It is a channel that does not work, and the campaign has to move.So it moved to where the salesforce already was. Her team had spent years building an audience of loan officers who follow the company online, and the platform messaging went out through that channel instead of the inbox. Alongside it ran the mechanics any marketer would recognise: testimonials solicited from producers, a gift card for the trouble, and success stories pushed out repeatedly rather than announced once. A top producer who built something over a weekend was put on stage at the sales rally, and it was among the best-rated sessions they ran, because the person demonstrating it closed loans for a living.The most-quoted piece of evidence in her HousingWire talk was a loan officer who pulled six refinances in under 24 hours using the platform. She is careful about how that works as a marketing asset: the result is the incentive, and her job was to make sure everyone else heard about it.NAMING THE AGENTS, AND WHAT THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DOThe fix for the unread email was not another email. Casey got a face, a voice and a commercial, and a line telling loan officers to save her number because when she calls, money is calling. People started talking about her, which is the point at which an internal launch stops being an announcement and becomes something with a shape people can hold.The compliance work behind it is the part most rollout stories leave out. Casey has been through review and is trained on the fact that she is not a licensed originator: pushed toward anything she cannot answer compliantly, she offers a transfer instead. Lindsey's description of the testing is that they did a lot to try to break her. A loan officer who does not want her can switch her off, and the cadence, the script and the ...
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    36 min
  • Adopt AI or Take a Compensation Cut

    Adopt AI or Take a Compensation Cut
    Sep 8 2026

    Today we have a guest on the show! Abdel Khawatmi is an area manager at Paramount Residential Mortgage Group who started using AI because a note-taker showed up uninvited in a Zoom call and he liked the recording. Two years later he has a custom GPT sitting behind a domain his loan officers can just type, a call-grading project that tells him he talked over someone, and a rule that has nothing to do with any of it: build it, don't buy it.

    The part nobody asks him about is the cancelling. He describes the early phase as being a kid in a candy store, saying yes to everything, until a revenue manager asked what all of it was for and he did not have an answer. Four months ago he took a pass through the stack and cut it.

    WHAT YOU'LL TAKE AWAY

    - Why the fix for a loan officer drowning in tools is usually one fewer tool

    - The adoption mechanic that is not a training session, and what it costs him per loan officer

    - Where the line sits on a machine speaking as you

    - What he would do first on Monday, in the order he would do it

    - Why automating the follow-up sent him back to open houses and chambers of commerce

    CHAPTERS

    (00:00) Open

    (00:24) Meeting at the AI Summit

    (01:47) Eight years at PRMG

    (04:24) The note-taker that started it

    (06:22) Efficiency was the aha moment

    (09:40) A Tuesday, hour by hour

    (14:05) The art of delegation

    (18:27) Compliance and the tax return rule

    (23:38) Getting a region to adopt

    (30:05) Getting past the fear

    (37:01) Build versus buy

    (42:18) Monday's first step

    ABOUT THE GUEST

    Abdel Khawatmi is Area Manager at Paramount Residential Mortgage Group (PRMG), running offices in New Jersey and lending across several states. He was headed for law school before mortgage, holds a master's in risk and compliance, and has built his book on the files other originators pass on — self-employed borrowers, thin credit, layered income and unusual properties. He was named a HousingWire Rising Star in 2026.

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdel-khawatmi-79a511144/

    Got Mortgages: https://www.gotmortgages.com

    YOUR HOSTS

    Chris Grimes is CEO of FundMore.ai.

    Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable.

    One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction.

    LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

    Captivate — https://the-signal.captivate.fm/

    Apple Podcasts — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-signal/id6805026259

    Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/59UmJswLjpRO5p7vUwr7hV

    YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@thesignalreuvenchris

    New episodes every Tuesday.
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    54 min
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