Why Home Equity Lending Still Feels Broken - and How to Fix It

Marvin Stone (00:01.506)
This is Stewart in the Studio, the podcast where mortgage professionals stay ahead of the curve with expert guidance from Stewart’s thought leaders. I'm your host Marvin Stone. And each month we dive into trends, topics and tech to transform your business. Let's do this. Well, hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Stewart in the Studio. Today I'm joined by Stewart's own TJ Harrington and TJ, I'd like you to introduce yourself real quick.

T.J. Harrington (00:24.015)
Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you're at. TJ Harrington, SVP of Strategy for Stewart Lender Services.

Marvin Stone (00:30.822)
And we usually have Rich Kuegler with us. He's somewhere in the United States today traveling probably to a conference, but he'll be on the next episode for sure. And our special guest, Andria Lightfoot from FirstClose. Andria, give us a brief introduction and tell us who you are and where you are and what you're all about.

Andria Lightfoot (00:46.838)
Yeah, thanks so much. Andria Lightfoot here in the beautiful DC Metro area, and I'm the head of client success for FirstClose. I will tell you, I am a longtime listener, but first time caller. And I have been in this business well over 25 years on both the community banking and independent mortgage broker side, as well as on the software side and technology.

Marvin Stone (01:07.062)
Awesome, that's great. So I have a passion around home equity, which is today's topic. And because that's where I started my career was in strictly in home equity, one application after another. Definitely that was pre the modern era where we didn't have all this cool technology. But today, TJ and I talk all the time about how the technology that's available hasn't really made large scale home equity lending

all that much better. so TJ and I are going to kind of set the table here. one of the things is home equity is booming. I mean, it's just booming right now because we keep waiting for rates to go down and, keep waiting and waiting. And in the meantime, we're doing a lot of home equity business. but TJ, maybe you can talk about some of the pain points, you know, where, the deliveries, you know, maybe point of sale is good, but delivery is bad. Maybe it's the other way around. what kind of hit the high points there?

T.J. Harrington (02:00.192)
So it's a couple different things. Number one, we're seeing still despite some cracks in the market slowing down in sales, we're still seeing strong home equity. Consumers still have a ton of equity positioning in their property and we see from a lending perspective all the players in the world looking to get in home equity to provide it as a service. You have your typical IMB is looking to be innovative to drive home equity, trying to drive digital strategy around home equity of community banks and credit unions reaching out to their customer base saying, let us help you attach that.

touch and tap into that home equity to make your life's lives better. And you see servicers saying, hey, we want to do a credit enhancement. We want to add a home equity line from a retention play. The data shows that when you have a first mortgage and a home equity with a servicer, that tends to slow roll off. You tend to preserve your MSRs. And what we see in a lot of instances there is just not having the capability of being able to spin up the product quickly enough. Because Marvin, as you alluded to, the typical solutions we have today for first mortgage don't always work for home equity.

too cumbersome. Home equity is a very margin thin product. You've got to do it fast. You've got to do it in the cheapest fulfillment way possible. And so you just don't see the ability to invest in it as well. Right. This this kind of boom came upon us. There was not a big tech. No one has tech budgets. No one has resources to throw at this. Not even the big banks. And so what you end up with is a situation where you're trying to grow and scale a very low margin commodity in a great market where you can make it oodles of money and help a lot of consumers.

but you just don't have the processes, which I think we'll talk with Andria about the solution FirstClose, I think is a great segue, but really it's the pain points around a lack of disciplined origination, specific product for home equity, lack of workflows and technology, the work of driving kind of integration and product selection and home equity side of the business and not running it through your first mortgage platform because that's too cumbersome and just costs too much.

Marvin Stone (03:48.974)
So we've just, now we have to unpack about the 20 things that you pointed out that are issues in the flow, which is a great segue really. And Andria, we did a brief intro, but tell us a little bit about FirstClose. We've seen Housing Wire Awards, we've seen you guys keep reaching new milestones all the time, huge volume, you're a great partner with Stewart. So tell us a little bit about the FirstClose story and kind of unpack that a little bit before we dig into all the things that individually that TJ pointed out.

Andria Lightfoot (04:17.656)
Well, FirstClose has been around for over 25 years ourselves with our founders, Tim and Ted Smith. And interestingly enough, we don't do first trust mortgages, although in our namesake, know, we say FirstClose, but we really will get you first to the finish line of closing with our order management system optimization. What that really means is that any order that you need on your home equity deal essentially is going to come through the FirstClose system. We're talking flood, valuation cascades, title, E&O insurance.

We run the whole gamut all the way to closing and recording. And that is how we started the business. That grew over time from just a couple of customers to now over 250 clients. And most recently in the last couple of years, we're doing exactly what you're speaking to, which is trying to optimize that customer experience on the front end for our members, credit union and bank partners, because nobody wants to do a home equity loan with paper in the branch, right? You don't want to walk in and say, hey, what are your rates today?

and then be fumbling around with a teller trying to figure out how to qualify. The other piece is we're not a first trust optimized business, right? So a lot of point of sale platforms are inundated in the space relating to first trust business. That's wonderful, go get them. But in this HELOC hot market in particular, the HELOC hot market that FirstClose is optimizing is really to say 38 trillion, I know it's contested, tappable equity.

is sitting out there and we have this, you know, what 7.2 interest rate roughly for HELOCs on average came out of the Fed just a couple of months ago. That is an incredible rate when you think about the increase in consumer debt in a household is going up and up at what 25 plus percent. The consolidation play just makes sense for any of us that are sitting on those 3 % interest rates. So, so many banks and credit unions not only just our existing core customer base who knew about us,

way back when are coming in and saying, how can you help us optimize in this HELOC hot market?

T.J. Harrington  (06:16.172)
So great that you guys are purpose built for that as well, right? That's kind of the focus where you guys are the right arrow in the quiver for solving for home equity versus trying to repurpose something else. I think having the workflows and kind of the way you manage the file flows and product selection is really something that enables the lenders to be optimized.

Marvin Stone (06:36.002)
Yeah, perfect point because one of the things that I learned about recently in conversation was there's a credit union out there who said, no, home equity loans take us 60 days. So and part of the problem, know, TJ works very closely with the loan origination systems and we all do across Stewart. Stewart has a number of them. But the LOS is really, like TJ said, really aren't purpose built. And so what happens is in order to go fast

you would have to build logic inside the LOS and that's such a speed bump. I've got a laundry list of questions to talk to you about, but the borrower expectation is this should be easy. I think there's a huge gap there. TJ, you've worked on the consumer experience side of this the whole time. Talk about that.

T.J. Harrington  (07:24.91)
Yeah, I cut my teeth on home equity at Bank of America, gosh, 14, 15 years ago. And that more than that, I don't age myself, but that experience again, started out with kind of hammer and chisel on stone tablets, right? And there was experiments with faster title products, with different signing experiences, the idea of dragging consumers into branches to have them sign, just some really archaic things that just did not work.

the right way. And you still see that with some consumer banks who want to drive the foot traffic and cross all opportunities. But there's better ways to do that with IPen. There's better ways to do that with RON. There's better solutions in the market. But but even on the front end besides the actual closing experience the actual processing time particularly if you're a bank customer or credit union customer you have your checking account there you have your car loan there you tend to be a life cycle customer. They should have that data available. They should have.

your roughly your income calculations and your DTI and your assets and ability to pay. They should be monitoring the first lien mortgage that they holding for you and knowing what your equity position is. And so it should be the easy button. The problem is it's not. The data doesn't transfer. It doesn't. It ends up being as Andria said a very manual process because it's not the systems the data and exchange exchanges. There's not the workflow and even.

Again, the vendor panel you use for first mortgage is not always the vendor panel or the product selection you use in the HELOC space. And so even from a cost to fulfill standpoint, you can't reuse the train tracks from first mortgage. And having a separate set of purpose-built rails, I think, is the key.

Marvin Stone (09:00.134)
perfectly well said. so that really kind of points to the fragmented ecosystem is, you know, here I've been as a lender working on refis and purchase all this time. Like you said, Andria, the first trustee market is totally different. And now I've got to go have a completely separate vendor set for, for the home equity loans. So that's that fragmented ecosystem. And then to try to string together a fast, process with all these disparate vendors. I mean, Andria, you must talk to

people trying to get in this home equity side of the business who are pulling their hair out, trying to figure out how to go fast, not only with the fragmented network, but a different fragmented network than they're accustomed to. And they do so many things sequentially, whereas you guys have this waterfall approach. So, I mean, those are the things. And then I think, you know, we'll get into title challenges. That's a whole nother thing.

Andria Lightfoot (09:50.286)
Well, I have to not to double down on the pain points, but when we're talking to our customers, not only is it that long 60 day turn time that they're really trying to push for faster turn times, it's that in the fragmented ecosystem they're working in, that processing setup team is literally chair swiveling to manually place orders across that disparate ecosystem. I was with a customer a couple of weeks ago in upstate New York and

I asked the processing team about how long is it taking you to place an order, even with your seasoned crew, who's very much focused on home equity. And we're talking 30 to 45 minutes between placing the original order, running it down, going back, checking on your pipeline. It's just not scalable to be able to get that P &L right size for these, let's be honest, thin, margin product that they keep in house.

But the good news, the silver lining that I keep seeing that just gets me excited about this market opportunity is that when you install good technology in the right ecosystem with the right credit box in mind, I have to call that out while we're chatting about these other technology pieces is having come from your banking side and having my own portfolio to service. I fully understand you can't just walk into the head of risk and say, we're doing away with all valuation products. Like that's a little bit too much cart before the horse.

But certainly it doesn't make sense to keep using that first trust rail and evaluation space, even in a title space. This is a time to really partner with great title providers like Stewart and say, what can I do beyond a full ALTA? This feels a little expensive and slow and overcharged for what I might need in the HELOC space. So in combining all those pieces and coaching our customers through, we're able to just lock in that efficiency for them

and still let them choose their own adventure without being too tight in terms of the standardization we offer.

Marvin Stone (11:41:05)
Right. Right size to the risk.

Stewart Lender Services Promo (11:46.01)
Home equity demand is rising, but delivering it fast, accurate, and at scale? That's where things break down. Stewart Lenders Services brings it all together. One streamlined home equity solution. With centralized title services, you get everything from instant property insights to full ALTA production. Stewart Snapshot delivers property and ownership data in seconds, helping you qualify borrowers at the point of sale. And when you need more depth, human research reports with nationwide coverage to carry you to closing with confidence. On the valuation side, Stewart Valuation Intelligence delivers a smarter cascade of solutions. From AVMs with inspection-based options to desktop and full appraisal solutions, all aligned to risk and built to reduce cost and cycle time. Stewart Lender Services, your single source home equity partner. Built for speed, built for confidence, ready for what's next.

MarvinStone (12:45.966)
30 to 45 minutes to place an order manually. And we'll talk about FirstClose, but how long does that take in the FirstClose system?

Andria Lightfoot (12:54.006)
it's push button technology. I'm going to date myself. I like to say it's the set it and forget it. We go in and our order management can be automated against LTBs, FICO's and other loan characteristics. Even in our configuration bundles, you're talking one push button technology that will order across all those products, flood, valuation, credit, title, et cetera. Like I got you covered. We're talking less than 60 seconds and the time it takes to pull up the screen and hit our button.

Marvin Stone (13:19.476)
Great point because the lender gains so much just in purchasing power and in scale from the FirstClose system in which we're going to get to. But I want to hit some other pain points first so that we really make sure that anybody who's not in first in home equity today kind of understands the landscape. So TJ, you're expert in a couple of very many areas, but a couple really specifically is around the pain points in title and valuation. so

you know, title's always a long pole in the tent. It's like, you okay, I've got a property report or some other product that's not a full ALTA. It's not insurance. So dealing with that and then, the valuation side, you know, how does that work? Because so many people are used to just, want the standard UR AR appraisal, you know, give me the full thing. Very expensive. It takes a long time to get that. So hit those real quick as pain points and then we'll move on.

T.J. Harrington  (14:07.542)
Title's interesting because I think there's a whole there's a whole range of products right from as Andria alluded to on the on the most conservative side you see the full ALTA product and that is you know the full title you see in first mortgage it is heavy it can be spendy you know we try and provide discounts and kind of the centralized rates where we can but it still can be overkill depending and really we see that as a certain dollar breakpoint to where the risk is higher so it's maybe larger HELOCs more complex HELOCs private wealth or other items.

Then going down the pole, see proprietary product. have a great help product, Home Equity Loan Policy product that's great. We have uninsured search products with a wrapper products, the E &O wrapper. Shout out to my friend Mike McIntosh at Impact for the wrapper product. Then you have your uninsured search and data side running the gamut. One of the things that we do here at Stewart that's a little bit unique is we work with our partners like we do in FirstClose to say, what are your underwriting and credit risk guidelines? Where do you see those breakpoints

that maybe a heavier product is more appropriate or a lighter product is more appropriate? And then are there any risk factors that maybe would result in a turn down? So we see lighter loan amounts, say 150,000 and a HELOC, and there's some curative issues. And only those curative issues might derail the process, cause it to be a turn down or have it fall out. We're able to say, hey, we can crack that open, do some curative work like we do in first mortgage, and then say, hey, we can put an ALTA on it. Certainly it's below the amount that you'd normally justify for it.

but if we're doing deeds to fix a legal description or a missed interest or other heavy curative items, that's a way of kind of rescuing it. And we monitor that very carefully. And I think the similar idea exists in the valuation space where there's a waterfall as Andria alluded to. I think you can skin the cat with less expensive products flowing down depending on your risk guidelines and having a partner like FirstClose that understands those metrics and those ideas, being able to flow down

to where you need to. Let's say the confidence score on an AVM comes back poorly and you can't seem to find the right model to fit, or it's a unique property, or it's a complex property, or the property type isn't the type that the consumer told you it was, which that never happens ever, right? The idea of being able to pivot by having a partner like FirstClose kind of manage the execution. So we see that today. And without some sort of orchestration or understanding, I think you're...

T.J. Harrington  (16:32.942)
you push the button to do that 40 minutes worth of work to get your product ordered. It comes back, you've got to review it and go, oh, it's not right. It doesn't fit the box. Oh, go fetch again. And you play go fetch until you find the right product set. With a technology partner like FirstClose, all of that's done for you. And so really the pain point Marvin, I think is you have these credit risk guidelines, particularly if it's a portfolio product or worse, you're going to the secondary market and having to match with the takeout. You're having to do the broadest base and

it can lead you to be more conservative and maybe incur more costs than you need to. But I think if you have an orchestration partner like we do in credit for Informative Research, you end up with better results.

Marvin Stone (17:14.05)
Yeah, so well said. There's so much, there's so much goodness here. you know, just especially TJ and I just came back from a conference where we're talking about, you know, workflows challenging for, LOS administrators inside these shops anyway. And so, you know, again, like we said, you know, here's your partner set for that you're accustomed to for first mortgage. And now you've got to meet completely new partners in many cases for these new products, understand the new products

try to understand which ones are instant products and which ones, know, synchronous versus asynchronous, because you can validate quickly on some of them. Then you have to go figure out the integrations, which could be different across each one. Then you can start in building your waterfall that you're talking about here. So you guys do all that on the backside. So you have kind of a turnkey, easy button solution here. So now, Andria, I kind of want to give you the floor and just tell us about what modern home equity workflow looks like for a lender

starting from scratch. You walk in and talk to a lender. I think you're integrated with a lot of the major LOSs. So what does it look like when they choose to work with FirstClose instead of building the DIY project?

Andria Lightfoot (18:19.502)
Yeah, I think first you need to hear that standardization is not our enemy. Oftentimes it's, well, if I'm going to come in and standardize it, I'm not going to have any kind of variability that TJ was speaking to in terms of the credit box. I think the beauty of FirstClose is really that we can come in and help you standardize each of these workflows while still maintaining some flexibility to make the deal happen. And if you're, you know, a 25 HELOC shop or a 2,500 a month HELOC shop,

we're able to scale with those processes. So first I'd say, let's eliminate the rekeying, the data entry, the old days of typing, look, we're in the age of AI, this has got to stop. So being well integrated with the LOS to have exact information back over to disseminate to all of these orders with the touch of a button, that to me is table stakes right now. The second piece is that you need data and docs to come back into the LOS. And to your point, we're working very closely as partners with

Temenos, and ICE, a MeridianLink consumer, and MeridianLink mortgage to ensure that there's quality data as well as documents imaged back into your system for underwriting, for delivery, et cetera. And I'm talking all the way down into the legal investing. This is like the really exciting part. The legal investing comes back over without you re-keying it. I know a lot of folks that I'll just see schedule eight. It's like, that's fine. That's a method. But we're very proud of the quality and the

volume of data objects that will go back and forth between those systems. So, and you all made it to recording. We're talking every single product that sits into the FirstClose suite is already taken care of for you in terms of the technology integration and again, quality and uptime. Once I have those kind of two key components in there, the input and the output, now it's really about how do I make sure I have order status? What's my visibility into tracking down pipeline management?

And we've even gone a step further on that as well in the way that we communicate notifications to that operations team managing the orders and the communications between partners like Stewart and our end customers. You're able to sync in our platform to say, hey, what's the status of XYZ order? My support team is even running down orders that might go askew outside of our typical turn times. So our team is on it for you to chase down those orders as an extra pair of eyes and hands.

Andria Lightfoot (20:43.758)
watching that pipeline move through. And that's how we're able to claim, you know, taking folks from that 45 day rough HELOC process down to 10 to 14 days, because I checked this, this is verifiable. I'm going to be on record. Stewart is at a day and a half or less on a property report itself. So you mentioned the long pole is sometimes title. Think about that. If you were doing a HELOCK and it was in less than two days, easy out of the box, 90 % of the time that property report.

is gonna fit the credit box for a HELOC. We're not moving to these full longer, sometimes seven to 10 day cycles, right? So be thinking about the way your data is coming in and out. That's a solvable technology product, but I really love the way we come in and partner to watch your book of business with you and help you connect and communicate with your partner ecosystem.

Marvin Stone (21:35.264)
And it's a, it's such a great partnership for, for Stewart because.

you we want to help lenders and very often lenders just don't have the tech and you you say eliminating the rekeying that also eliminates the miskeying, you know, where we back in the day, one of my favorite stories was somebody keyed in the home equity lender I was working with. They accidentally stuck their finger on the zero key a while and this person wanted a $10 million home equity loan, which you know, was incorrect, it went going through the pipe and nobody caught it until much later. So.

So we talked about accelerating the pipeline and kind of the automated decisioning, that waterfall flow. It's still the LOS is still the system of record, which is good. that's because that's where everything belongs from an audit trail, compliance standpoint, et cetera, and the automation. But the one thing that when you sit with a lender, I want to understand how do you translate their credit box, their lending guidelines

for their home equity programs. How do you translate those into the workflows? Is that a consultative process or do you, how does that work?

Andria Lightfoot (22:44.11)
Yeah, that is actually a service that we include as part of implementation. I'm a big proponent of you've got to work with folks like yourselves who've been in this industry and who have actually done the loans. Our head of client success started at Chase in the HELOC space. Our head of professional services has come out of multiple SaaS and software companies only in the mortgage vertical over the last 15 years. for me, first it's got to be, I've got to be able to talk the language when I show up with that customer. You're not re-teaching me HELOC or Mortgage 101.

The second piece of that is the technology is very easy to use and understand. So even though we are hands-on keyboard work to do that configuration, once we've established it, it's an ongoing success-based conversation with you as a customer. How can I help you understand like what's working? Is this going fast enough? What are your turn times? Are we seeing anomalies? You know, we set up maybe a cascade that said, here's a configuration bundle that will work for us based on a loan under

$200,000, know, LTD under 80%, kind of your plain Jane vanilla, but are we seeing an outlier? Could we put in a curative process, a deed prep process in behind a typical property report and allow that to just flow naturally to the next best product for that bundle together? I would say, honestly, the thing that's kind of surprising is that when you have someone who can speak the mortgage underwriting lingo together,

And the technology is very simple and elegant, but simple in terms of the way that we will configure for you. We are turning on customers in less than 30 days, up, running, active, hundreds of orders flowing through their system. To me, that's proof of the success of the partnering on building those configurations for you.

Marvin Stone (24:26.242)
Got it. Makes perfect sense. So I'm going to hit on two things real quick. And then I know we're getting close to time. One is we didn't talk about closing much. you know, TJ, if you could just hit closing is our sweet space here. You know, Stewart, so we know a lot about it, have a real passion around it. TJ, if you could just hit real quickly on, you know, wet closings, hybrids, IPEN, RON, the full acronym suite. Yeah.

T.J. Harrington  (24:48.654)
That's the full, it's the full Monte. I will say, unlike First Mortgage where you have such a restrictive environment around RON, you really have a much broader suite of services available from a signing perspective. So we do have available RON, IPEN, hybrid and wet ink. And we're very lucky at Stewart to own both the technology of NotaryCam and then own Signature Closers. So we have this combined work effort where there's technology and the muscle behind execution all in one place.

And so really it's choose your own adventure. It's how do you wanna close? We have the intelligence to tell you how you can close in a particular jurisdiction. We always see problems like California, Betty Sue at the window. It's always my villain in the Registries of Deeds stories of wanting to see something different even though RON might be approved in the state or another state where you present the signed security instrument on RON and they get a rejection. We know about that. That's something that's part of our operations. We deliver that intelligence.

But the idea of being able to have fluidity and choosing the consumer, being able to choose the ability to schedule at a time that's convenient anywhere they want in the whole country is pretty amazing. And with home equity, you know, being a little bit more freeform from a risk perspective, not being tied to Fannie, Freddie, FHA, VA guidelines, you really do have the ability to pick. And I tell you, the NotaryCam experience has been fantastic. I've signed things for myself on NotaryCam and it's been great and super easy.

So I tell you that the ability to execute in a variable manner and home equity has been great. And we've been fortunate to acquire and build out some of the best options in the business.

Marvin Stone (26:25.1)
Yeah, it's it. You know it is. It is great to have that closing experience in our DNA in so many ways. And you know as Stewart Lender Services, obviously obviously a very large centralized shop. You know we do a lot of business all over the place with mobile notaries, but we also have as part of the Stewart family. We have about 500 branches around the country where we have. You know we're just we're just down the street, so we like to say around the corner around the clock around the world because we have you know a lot of operations supporting

the consumer experience. So that leads me back to the consumer experience where we should have started this whole conversation. And that's where we'll wrap it up. That's where we'll wrap it up. But talk about the consumer experience. This is an area that home equity lenders or people getting into home equity really struggle with because some of the point of sale systems are very first mortgage centric and don't work well for home equity. So we'll hit the consumer experience real quick and then we'll kind of wrap things up here.

Andria Lightfoot (27:20.45)
I want to differentiate a topic here on customer experience in terms of what an intake form is, which is essentially I took the old PDFs and the pieces of paper from the branch. And we've seen a lot of companies just recreate those same 1003 fields on a prettier wrapper. I think the thing that I want folks to hear as a takeaway from FirstClose is in the HELOC space in particular, because it's a product that's more akin to a credit card, an auto loan.

Think about what you're seeing in those spaces that customers are now demanding from a shopping experience. That's what FirstClose brings to the table in HELOC. Oftentimes I'm having conversations with credit union members or banks and they're saying, oh, we've got a point of sale. It's just giving me a 1003 and it's like, but what's the cross-sell motion in a 10 minute application? I want to be able to get your member off the street and back into a product in-house and the cross-sell motion.

I can do it in under four minutes with a full AVM, soft credit pool, and a shopping experience driven by your decision engine. And we work with a variety of product and pricing engines. So think of the way you go on and now you shop for a vehicle or a credit card rate, and you're doing the comparison and you have different goals relative to interest rate and loan amounts. That is embedded in the FirstClose experience. And it's very quick. Often in demos, I will actually time test us to go look.

I will show you speaking at a slow pace, how quickly we can get to a decision that I know I have a home equity volume of, know, just a note rate here in the house that I can take 100,000, 200,000 with confidence on that number, as well as a teaser rate, a published rate. This isn't just a flat rate sheet sitting on your website that, you know, only updates every other month, right? So this is real live competitive analysis

the way the big boys are doing it in the top 10 banking tier, but we're able to help scale that and put it in your back pocket.

T.J. Harrington  (29:19.406)
And Andria, that experience, that four minute to five minute shopping experience brings parity for those lenders with the big boys that are doing the digital HELOC. So you write the big B2C plays where they're not going to name any names, but the folks that are really specialized in building a platform, the digital first. So being able to have something turnkey where these companies are looking to go public and looking to do these things where the technology is valued at an astronomical amount. And lo and behold, the first

FirstClose brings that turnkey to the table. So it's impressive and I think it really does bring that shopping experience to consumers in a meaningful way and really brings parity between providers.

Marvin Stone (29:59.982)
Yeah, I think Andria can promise them the FinTech turn times and the speed and the efficiency. I'm not sure about the capitalization, you know, the evaluations that they may see.

Andria Lightfoot (30:13.262)
But it will be so pretty though at the same time.

Marvin Stone (30:16.334)
It'll be so much better. You'll save all that pain of the startup world. But they did. That does mean and kind of all joking aside is that allows a credit union or a local community bank or an IMB sticking their toes in the water with home equity. It allows them, FirstClose allows them to compete on an even footing with all the fintechs out there. So it really is remarkable, you know, to the way you guys have put it all together. Andria, any last words before we start to sign off here?

Andria Lightfoot (30:44.622)
No, I'm going to actually double click on TJ's piece here on closing. If you have listened to this and you're thinking, RON, I don't like to get into that space. I will tell you, we love sending our customers to partners like Stewart, who will coach you through what you need to know with technology that will slot you into the right county, state, zip code, whatever that ecosystem looks like. I'm a big fan of e-closings. So if you haven't tried it, maybe that's a takeaway. Call FirstClose, we'll get you some help in that space.

T.J. Harrington  (31:12.174)
And I will say, Mr. Brian Webster, the president and number one guy at NotaryCam, he has a whole strategy around digital mortgage for HELOC, the ability to take that security agreement and turn it into a digital asset and making it a true E-note that's sellable in the secondary market with the e-vaulting. Call Brian Webster on that if you're interested in hearing more about it.

Andria Lightfoot (31:32.717)
Love it.

Marvin Stone (31:34.144)
Yeah. And just as an aside, Brian has a long history with e-closing and really can talk about more than just RON. So, you know, definitely reach out and talk to Brian about that. And Andria, thank you so much for spending time with us today. This fantastic to have you on as a guest and really appreciate all your insight and all the history you bring to it. So if somebody is really excited about getting into the home equity game and game without all the pain, where do they contact you?

Andria Lightfoot (32:02.552)
FirstClose.com, we have a link there and we'll call you right back within a couple hours. We would love to meet and chat.

Marvin Stone (32:09.771)
Excellent. TJ, any closing comments?

T.J. Harrington  (32:11.916)
Marvin, I think we've covered it. Thank you.

Marvin Stone (32:13.866)
Okay, sounds good. of course, Rich Kuegler will join us next time. And everyone, we thank you for joining us for another episode of Stewart in the Studio. That's it for Stewart in the Studio, where mortgage professionals turn for fresh thinking and real world solutions. Find more episodes and insights at stewart.com/lender. We'll see you next time.

Disclaimer (32:32.62)
This podcast is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the speakers. It should not be considered legal or business advice and listeners should consult their own advisors before making decisions.