Thursday Palantir announced it is entering the mortgage industry.

Yes. That Palantir. The company that built the AI infrastructure the US intelligence community uses to find bad guys and run defense operations is now pointing its capabilities at mortgage loan processing.

The company that helped find Bin Laden is coming for your pipeline management workflow. I do not know how to make that funnier than it already is.

We think what we do is complicated. And relative to most things regular humans deal with, it is. Qualifying income. Layered guidelines. Investor overlays. Compliance requirements that change constantly. Appraisal complexity. Title chain issues. We have convinced ourselves and each other for decades that mortgage is uniquely hard and therefore uniquely protected from the kind of disruption that has torn through other industries.

And then you look at what AI has already completely transformed.

Drug discovery. National security threat analysis. Military logistics across active combat environments. Protein folding problems that stumped the entire scientific community for fifty years. Real-time translation across hundreds of languages simultaneously. These are the problems AI has already eaten for breakfast.

Mortgage loan processing by comparison is Lincoln Logs.

It is a document collection and verification problem with a defined ruleset and a known output. It is rules-based, pattern-heavy, and highly repetitive. It is almost perfectly designed for what these systems do best. We just never thought of it that way because we were too busy doing it manually and calling it complex.

Palantir figured this out. Others will follow and they will follow fast because the market is enormous and the inefficiency is obvious to anyone looking at it from the outside.

Once these platforms figure out the mortgage buyer and how to sell into a highly fragmented, change-resistant, relationship-driven industry, the timeline for what comes next compresses dramatically. And they will figure it out. The money is too big and the problem is too simple for them not to.

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This is not your gramma's state MBA conference.

This is 3 days in Columbus with 5 keynote speakers, 21 breakout sessions across 3 tracks, 7 main stage panels, 5 meals including a plated dinner reception, two cocktail parties, and content that would make a national conference nervous.

Monday alone features Maurice Clarett keynoting on redemption and resilience, followed by "Ohio's Own" ... a main stage celebration of the women shaping Ohio mortgage lending.

Then the breakouts hit ...

Moderated panels on the post-CFPB regulatory landscape, the credit score wars, Non-QM as a profit center, the new Fed chair's rate equation, midterm election impact on mortgage, appraisal modernization, and servicing retention.

Breakout tracks covering AI implementation that's actually working, how to land and keep top LOs, competing against the mega nationals, using LinkedIn to build your brand, affordable housing solutions for Ohioans, construction lending opportunities, secondary market strategies, developing future leaders, and getting first-time buyers home.

Tuesday morning: MBA CEO Bob Broeksmit and Steve Richman on the market outlook. Then two more breakout blocks before we send you home smarter than you showed up.

Oh and a sitting state senator is speaking at Monday lunch. Casually. And a big name Sunday night opening keynote still to be announced ...

June 14-16. Columbus. OMBA members get the best rate. O-H!

Click here for more info and reg details.

Every superhero team has five members. Each one does something the others cannot.

Mine ...

🧠 Claude. The brain.

I describe a problem at 6 AM and by 6:03 I have a strategy, a first draft, three counterarguments, and a follow up question that makes me realize I was thinking about it wrong. Has never once said "let me circle back on that."

💪 Claude Cowork. It's the muscle.

It takes everything Claude helps me think through (strategy, planning, the "what should we do" part) and actually does it. Files get created. Tasks land in Asana. Session lineups get mapped. Outreach drafted. The conference I'm planning has 21 breakout sessions, 60+ speaker candidates, a restructured sponsorship menu, and a master planning doc that's 800 lines deep.

The pile of things I meant to do but kept not doing is getting shorter for the first time in my professional life. I do not fully understand how. I have stopped asking.

It's incredible and it there's one thing you do between now and Sunday night ... spend a couple hours making out with CoWork on a project thats important to you and thank me later.

🛡️ Superhuman. The shield.

I spent twenty years in a war with my inbox losing badly. Superhuman ended the war. I do not know how to explain what it feels like to process email instead of survive it. It feels like this, I guess.

♠️ Gamma. The suit.

I type a description of what I need. I press a button. A deck appears that looks like a real designer spent an afternoon on it. I spent six minutes. Nobody in the room has ever noticed. I have noticed every time.

🐝 Beehiiv. The home base.

My newsletter lives here. My list lives here. No algorithm decides who sees it. No platform can take it away from me. I own it the way you own a house instead of renting an apartment where the landlord can raise the rent whenever he wants and there is nothing you can do about it.

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I brought pizza and thirty years of mortgage war stories to Cleveland State University this past Wednesday night.

The Mortgage Bankers Association runs a program called Mortgage Banking Bound. The idea is simple and important. Get industry professionals into college classrooms and expose students to a career path most of them have never considered. Real practitioners. Real content. Real conversations about what this industry actually looks like from the inside.

Cleveland State has been running this program thanks to my friend Debbie Hoffman, who teaches in the Finance department and has been quietly building something special here in the CLE. And David Upbin, who does an incredible job managing MBA’s Education efforts.

The students get three hours of real mortgage content. Amortization. Adjustable rate mortgages. Specialty products. And the regulatory lessons from 2008, which is both a history lesson and a live case study in why the rules we operate under today exist.

The Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association is getting back to doing in person networking events around the state. We had a fun one Thursday night in Dayton!

March Madness, axe throwing, good food, drinks and people. New friendships & relationships being formed.

Kudos to OMBA President Adam Rose of Western Ohio Mortgage Corp. NMLS 9601 for setting this event up in his hometown! He was a huge part of the reason I took this role and it has been so fun working with him this past year.

More and more great things coming on the OMBA front. We're driven to redefine what a state org can be and mean to members.

In defense of The Irish Goodbye

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Mar 26 - Traditional Opening Day (earliest in MLB history)

Apr 2 - Jobs Report (March)

Apr 3 - Good Friday (markets closed)

Apr 4 & 6 - Final Four & Championship (Indianapolis)

Apr 5 - Easter Sunday

Apr 9-12 - The Masters (Augusta National, Rory McIlroy defending)

Apr 10 - CPI Release (March inflation data)

Apr 13-14 - MBA State & Local Conference

Apr 14-15 - MBA National Advocacy Conference

Apr 15 - Tax Day

Apr 23-25 - NFL Draft (Pittsburgh, first time since 1948)

Apr 26-28 - Texas MBA Annual Conference

Apr 27-30 - HousingWire’s “The Gathering” Conference

Apr 28-29 - FOMC Meeting / Fed Rate Decision (Powell's second-to-last as Chair)

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.'" - Bluto Blutarski, Animal House

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]