As a key player in correspondent lending, Chase maintains a complex relationship with independent mortgage banks, and Sean Grzebin CEO of Chase Home Lending Grzebin highlighted how the bank balances those connections. ” We’ll continue to invest in our digital capability so that we can take advantage of our advantage, which is the data. We have relationships with almost half of the customers in the United States, and that relationship gives us a tremendous amount of access into the things that they’re looking to accomplish in their financial lives. Through that, we get a lot of clues about ways that we can help customers on the mortgage side. We’re one of the few that has both amazing digital capabilities, as well as a physical presence, with about 1,300 folks out in branches sitting knee-to-knee with customers every day. We’re always paying attention to macro indicators and how they impact the market, how they impact customer behavior, and how they impact competitor behavior. It’s something that’s unique to 2024, 2025 that the interest rate environment has been really volatile. Sometimes it looks like it’s going to improve and go our way, and then some news comes out and it goes a different way. It is really about positioning for those episodes. I think that the big shift in our strategy is not so much a shift, but more of a focus on when rates drop for some period of time. Whether it’s a day, a week or two weeks, you need to be able to be very quick and responsive to the fact that that happened. The notional market size isn’t what it used to be. You have a lot of competitors going for even a smaller amount of units. Even though the notional market size looks like it’s kind of getting healthier. It’s still very competitive and very tight. More often than not, we’re getting a shot at the next purchase when the customers in our servicing book. I think that’s healthy and a good trend for us in our business. But again, we continue to look at all of the customers. The reality is anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million Chase customers buy homes every year. The opportunity for us is just very unique because of their otherwise relationship with the bank. I think retention will continue to improve as our capabilities keep evolving. We’re getting more ‘at bats’ than we have historically on the retention customer, is how I would put it. AI is going to be a pretty dramatic change for the industry, and not just at Chase. When you look at it and boil it down, obviously it’s relationships first, but after relationships, the manufacturing process is voice, documents and data. If you want to know what’s ripe for disruption from AI, it’s docs, voice and data. There is going to be a lot of evolution. The jobs are going to change. The relationships are going to matter over time, which plays nicely into our strategy with our customer base and how we’re trying to serve them. When you think about the process in general, it is just very ripe for that, because it’s very rules-based, which AI does better than human beings most times. Ultimately, if the documents can become digitized and it all becomes data, I think it can become very fast for customers, a great customer experience, and very efficient for mortgage companies through time. I think the loan officer’s value is the relationships they have and their ability to talk and manage anxiety through the process as well as present the best deal and the best terms for a customer. The winners in today’s business are the ones that do that more often than they do docs, data and chasing things. The successful loan officers today have a process whereby they rely on their back office to deliver the actual experience to the customer, and they manage the anxiety, they manage the relationship with a customer, and at the end of that, there’s a winner there. What you’re going to see with loan officers is not elimination, but the ability to scale way bigger than they’ve ever been able to go. You’re going to see that productivity ramp pretty dramatically. I see a lot of efficiency through the servicing process as well, through AI. In the secondary markets, it’s going to make a difference in terms of speed and execution. Every basis point matters. I think there’s going to be an evolution here that is going to be pretty seismic for the industry, is my prediction. When it comes to just nuts and bolts, we’re using it already in all of our processing. We’ve rolled out a large language model to all 14,000 of the employees that are in the home lending business today, and we’ve been using AI for all of our modeling for years. When it comes to core AI, that’s been in our DNA for several years. The use cases around voice are pretty robust. Particularly if they’re update calls or status calls, those are pretty easy for the machines to handle today. So there are going to be a lot of use cases around voice again, to make everyone more productive, to make the customer service process better. The machines don’t get fatigued, they can handle most of the actual use cases. It’s going to create scale for anybody that buys into it. We’re not going to be ignorant to anything. We’re going to look at every single thing that can make our process efficient. It’s very difficult to make money in an environment like we’re in right now, markets the way they are.