In this episode, David Lykken interviews James Hooper from Quontic Bank, a CDFI that has fully embraced Angel AI to streamline its lending operations. James discusses how adopting Angel AI has significantly reduced costs, improved efficiency, and allowed loan officers to focus more on relationship-building while automating routine tasks. Quontic Bank, known for serving underserved communities, leverages innovative products like crypto-backed loans and a unique P&L product to help non-traditional borrowers. The conversation emphasizes the importance of adopting new technologies to stay competitive in the mortgage industry and highlights Quontic’s success in reducing operational costs by over $1.5 million in 18 months.

The Lykken on Lending program will feature our Weekly Mortgage Updates with Adam DeSanctis and his MBA Mortgage Minute, and then Les Parker’s TMSpotlight, a macroeconomic perspective on the economy with a music parody. That leads to Matt Graham of MBS Live providing you a rate & market update, followed by David Kittle, Chief Executive Officer @ Cypress Mortgage Capital, to discuss mortgage originations. Then we have Alice Alvey of Union Home providing a regulatory & legislative update, then Allen Pollack giving us a Tech Report on the latest technology impacting our industry. We also have commentaries provided by our Consultants, Bill Corbet and Marc Helm, Senior Executive Partner @ Transformational Mortgage Solutions, talking about Loan Servicing and the “Agencies”.

In this week's report, the Fed's first non-emergency rate cut since 2019, a 50 bps reduction, sparked modest market reactions with focus on the dot plot projections and labor market data, suggesting potential further rate cuts contingent on economic trends.

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Matt began as an originator in 2002. He fell in love with the idea of following MBS in real-time but felt that existing products were only scratching the surface. Thus was born MBS Live in 2007, the first-of-its-kind platform with real-time market data/analysis, and live chat with analysts, traders, and originators around the country. He is currently the Founder and CEO of MBSLive!

He's been covering bond/mortgage markets, writing commentary, alerts, and chatting with the live community every business hour of every business day ever since.

Matt also serves as the Chief of Operations for mortgagenewsdaily.com, where he is one of the industry's most respected mortgage rate experts, frequently quoted in the media. Mortgage News Daily's rate index is used as the definitive resource on day-to-day mortgage rate averages.

He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and son where he enjoys skiing, fishing, coaching youth sports, playing the guitar, and more DIY projects/hobbies than he'd care to admit.