“I got my best friend a fridge for her birthday. I can't wait to see her face light up when she opens it.” Birthdays, and years, pass. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, its population is aging steadily, with the median age rising from 35.6 in 2001 to 39.4 in 2025, reflecting a broader shift driven by lower fertility rates and longer lifespans. While women still outnumber men at older ages, that gap has narrowed significantly as male mortality has declined faster, leading to a more balanced gender distribution among seniors (especially among those 65 and older). At the same time, the once-prominent baby boomer bulge is gradually fading as that cohort ages, while younger age groups are thinning due to persistently low birth rates, reshaping the population pyramid, and slowing overall growth. These structural changes carry meaningful implications, including increased pressure on healthcare systems and the working-age population, as well as evolving social dynamics such as more balanced partner pools in later life and longer multigenerational relationships, underscoring how demographic shifts are quietly redefining the country’s economic and social landscape.
Saturday Spotlight: Kastle
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“The most deployed AI agent in the mortgage industry”
Kastle is an AI platform built specifically for mortgage lenders and servicers to deploy AI agents across their operations. FDIC-insured banks and large IMBs use Kastle to automate customer interactions in sales, customer service, and collections with fully compliant AI agents.
Kastle is already integrated with major systems of records such as ICE MSP, consumer direct CRMs, and all major contact center platforms. Kastle is backed by some of the largest investors in Silicon Valley including Y Combinator and Emergence Capital. Since launch, Kastle’s AI agents have handled millions of borrower calls and processed more than $300M in cash transactions for mortgage lenders. The company has also won top industry recognition, including the Digital Mortgage Conference Innovation Challenge and LendingTree’s Innovation Summit.
Lenders are building their AI workforce on Kastle using natural language.
Current use cases include agents for AI Customer service agents to resolve borrower inquiries across voice, email, and webchat, AI Collections agents to reduce delinquency rates, AI Loan officer assistants to generate warm transfers and automate manual follow-ups, and AI Quality Assurance Agents to automate manual call and document QC. Kastle’s platform allows lenders to modernize operations, improve borrower experience, and implement AI in a safe, compliant, and cost-effective way.
What we are most proud of is how deeply we partner with our customers.
We see ourselves as an extension of their AI team—spending time onsite, working shoulder-to-shoulder, and aligning around outcomes. In our early days, we even moved the entire company to Tempe from San Francisco to help a top five mortgage lender go live, and that same ethos of customer commitment continues today.
If you are looking to reduce your cost to fund and service loans, connect with us to design a one-year roadmap for successfully deploying AI across your operations.
(For more information on having your firm’s extracurricular activities, employee growth, and your charitable side featured, contact Chrisman LLC’s Anjelica Nixt.)
Are Detroit’s Housing Problems Indicative of the Nation’s?
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Access to quality affordable housing has been challenging for many in the Motor City for a long time for several reasons. To better understand the historical as well as current dynamics of the Detroit housing market, Chicago Fed staff investigated the challenges and opportunities on both the supply and demand sides by analyzing data from public and private sector sources and by hosting a day-long convening with local experts. In this article, we summarize some of the key findings from our data analyses, as well as related information and insights shared by speakers at the June 2025 event.
Battle to Retain the Borrower
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Here’s a note that I received from an LO. “Rob, my sales manager keeps telling us to retain and encourage our relationship with borrowers. What’s the latest out there?” Good question.
In his latest CX Tip, STRATMOR Group Director of Customer Experience Mike Seminari addresses a theme that continues to surface across the industry: Who owns the borrower? Building on perspectives recently shared by MISMO president Brian Vieaux in the Chrisman Commentary, and by STRATMOR Senior Partner Garth Graham in a recent podcast, Mike points out that control of the transaction, the MSR, or even the data doesn’t equate to lasting loyalty. Lenders should rethink their role beyond the moment of origination and focus on delivering consistent, thoughtful value over time.
I also turned to Josh Katz at Knostra, who replied, “The industry has been selling LOs the same retention story for 20 years: drip campaigns, rate alerts, automated check-ins. Borrowers tune it out and the top producers I talk to already know this.
“What actually keeps a client coming back is trust. And trust is built in the moments between transactions. Knowing their kid just started college. Remembering they mentioned a kitchen renovation. That kind of follow-up feels like it came from a person who actually pays attention, because it did. The LO just had help remembering.
“The tools getting traction now work less like a CRM and more like a Chief of Staff. They quietly capture context from everyday conversations and nudge the LO to reach out when it actually matters in the borrower's life, not just when a rate drop hits or a transaction is in play. That is how you stay trusted in the years between deals without adding more work to an already full plate.
“That is what we built Knostra around. The LO owns the relationship. Technology should deepen it, not replace it. The LOs who win the next decade will not be the ones with the biggest database. They will be the ones their borrowers trust most when it is time to buy again.” Thank you, Josh.
Compliance & Regulations… At the State Level
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As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other federal financial regulators pull back from some areas of supervision, state regulators are stepping up to fill the void in many respects. Reportedly staff have flowed from the CFPB into the states. Dodd Frank Update took note of multiple expert perspectives on what some states are doing to align their efforts.
Any large lender would rather deal with one regulator than dozens of smaller ones… it just increases their costs, and therefore the cost to borrowers. “State regulators have been working to address these concerns through collaboration and industry engagement to establish a standardized network by which they can share information and data about their supervisory activities and align their efforts.
“Nanci Weissgold, Esq., co-chair of the financial services group at Alston & Bird, LLP, facilitated a discussion on this topic with attendees at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Compliance and Risk Management Conference in Washington, D.C., during a session titled, ‘State of the States – Navigating Regulatory Shifts in Housing Finance.’
“The purpose of such a network is to provide consistency for the benefit of service providers and regulators conducting state-level supervision across the country. It also allows state regulators to more easily combine available resources to ramp up their capacity to take on additional oversight responsibilities.
“Addressing the elephant in the room (the greatly reduced supervisory activity by the CFPB), Kirsten Anderson, deputy administrator of division of financial regulation for the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services, said efforts to collaborate on a coordinated approach to examinations, share exam data and stay in constant communication will be key to their efforts to pick up the slack for the bureau.
“’It is such a great way that we are using our resources because I would have to go to the state legislature to get approval to hire more people and to have more authority to spend funds,’ she said. ‘I don't really get the ability to go and say, “Oh, I lost my full federal partner, and there is a void in the space here so maybe I need to do something more.” But what I can do is rely on this network of supervision of all the states where we work together and we take our resources and we amplify them by using them in the most efficient way. That’s what these types of systems do and what the network of supervision is all about.’
“Anderson noted that the ability to share data between states quickly and efficiently represents great strides that make examiners’ lives easier than they once were, which they should not take for granted. ‘Because of technological advances, we can be sharing our information in a much quicker and more efficient way,’ she said. ‘Network supervision is about using this network in all the states where we work together, and we take our resources and we amplify them by using them efficiently.’
“Tony Vasile, senior vice president of nonbank supervision and enforcement at the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), elaborated on his organization’s efforts to build up common standards and practices across states to help with coordination. ‘We’ve been working on building standard examination programs for the states to use, within our systems, outside of our systems, wherever they are. Part of that is defining what the right information requests are, what the right exam procedures are, and there is a lot to build out with these programs.’
“Over the past few years, states have been working on condensing data from their unique systems for sharing and accepting information into four extended mortgage exam programs, tailored to account for specific business activities.
“CSBS launched the State Examination System (SES) in March 2025. In its first six months, the system was used to record data from approximately 1,600 mortgage exams from various states. By allowing states to access exam data on one centralized platform, CSBS wants to help states familiarize themselves with each other’s work. ‘States have been working on standard examination procedures that tie directly to these information and data requests,’ Vasile explained. ‘Those were just launched in the state examination system on Sept. 13. We’re really working on building up common standards and common practices so it becomes easier for states to accept exam results and leverage them before moving on to the next example.’
“Vasile emphasized that CSBS has come a long way over the last three years after battling with a series of technical challenges pertaining to compliance technology being utilized by examiners in the field. From that experience came an interesting revelation. ‘We learned that it wasn’t a technology issue; it was a data issue,’ he said.
“In July 2022, MISMO, the mortgage industry standards and maintenance organization headed up by Brian Vieaux, set out to address this issue, establishing a work group to develop its standardized Mortgage Compliance Dataset. ‘As soon as that working group was stood up, that’s when CSBS decided to become a member of MISMO,’ Vasile said. ‘We strongly support the work, and we understand that it is a very diverse ecosystem with respect to the loan origination systems, the document providers, and companies with their own proprietary software systems. There’s a lot to think about here, but we believe it’s going to help on both the regulator side of the equation and the industry side of the equation, saving time in the examination compliance process.’”
The Dodd Frank Update continued. “While the idea of aligning examination standards across the country appears to have significant upsides in terms of simplicity and efficiency, it has presented new concerns for industry stakeholders. With states sharing supervision data concerned with one another, some have asked whether it would only be a matter of time before a problem uncovered by one examiner would be then scrutinized by regulators from every other state.
“Kat Hyland, deputy commissioner of financial regulation for the Maryland Department of Labor, explained that the purpose of sharing supervisory data between states is to avoid instances where states end up duplicating efforts by devoting resources to the same issue. She noted that Maryland has become an active participant in SES work groups over the past year, trying out new products and collaborating in-person with colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Virginia to discuss effective strategies for developing examination procedures and sharing data about larger exams to avoid duplicating efforts.
“’We have very aggressively adopted full use of SES at a higher performing level, and we have accepted a number of exams,’ Hyland said. ‘We have shortened exam situations, and we really cut into our seemingly perpetual backlog.’
“When mortgage-related exam issues escalate into multi-state matters, they are often referred to the aptly named Mortgage Multi-State Committee (MMC), a group of state financial regulators formed by a partnership between the CSBS and the American Association of Residential Mortgage Regulators. Michelle Rogers, global chair of financial services at Cooley LLP, noted where her clients encounter an issue that ends up before the MMC, because the experts they tend to come in contact with are different than those they typically encounter. ‘When you get to an enforcement process, including through the MMC, you are not dealing necessarily with people who live in the dirty details of loan originator compensation and RESPA,’ Rogers said. ‘You’re getting a lawyer who is a practiced enforcement lawyer. We are seeing a challenge with how we continue to balance our relationship with our state regulators, while being responsive to those MMC concerns.’
“Rogers said the difficulty in educating her clients about these differences and how to navigate them has a been a significant challenge. The same is true amid growing tension she has seen around attorney–client privilege pertaining to state exams, especially with respect to cyber incidents and multi-state enforcement. ‘The issue isn’t so much that we are concerned that the states are going to share information,’ she said. ‘We very much trust that process. We are stuck, because if the plaintiff’s attorney finds out that you shared with a third party, you have now arguably selectively waived your privilege with your attorney.’
“Anderson acknowledged that this was a blind spot for many regulators and committed to further work. ‘There is a privilege issue here that is separate from confidentiality,’ Anderson said. ‘If that is truly the case, then we need to start talking about that internally and figure out what we can do.’
“For institutions, adapting ‘with confidence’ in this environment means designing exam-ready data and systems aligned to SES standards and MISMO data structures, building playbooks for how to respond when one state finds a significant issue (including when and how to self-disclose), rehearsing response scenarios for cyber and other high-litigation events that balance regulator expectations with privilege preservation, and tracking which states have adopted the CSBS model standards and how that affects prudential oversight of nonbank servicing. Vasile suggested that regulators are working from ‘a methodology to the madness’ in multi-state scheduling and supervision. He added that companies choosing to mirror that discipline in their compliance strategies will be best positioned to navigate the next wave of state-driven oversight.”
(Warning: harsh language. No complaints please.)
Who can forget Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross Speech. “You see this watch? That watch cost more than your car!” The speech every sales manager occasionally wishes they could give.
Visit www.ChrismanCommentary.com for more information on our industry partners, access archived commentaries, or subscribe to the Daily Mortgage News and Commentary. You can also explore the Chrisman Marketplace, a centralized hub connecting mortgage professionals with trusted vendors and solutions. If you’re interested, check out my periodic blog on the STRATMOR Group website. This month’s piece is titled, “Mortgage Rates Are Not Random.” The Commentary’s podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple and Spotify.
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(Market data provided in partnership with MBS Live. For free job postings and to view candidate resumes, visit the Chrisman Job Board. This newsletter is intended for sophisticated mortgage professionals only. There are no paid endorsements by me. For the latest mortgage news, visit Mortgage News Daily. For archived commentaries, or to subscribe, go to www.ChrismanCommentary.com. Copyright 2026 Chrisman LLC. All rights reserved. Paid job & product listings do appear. This report or any portion hereof may not be reprinted, sold, or redistributed without the written consent of Rob Chrisman. The views and opinions in this newsletter are mine alone unless otherwise specifically stated herein.)
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