When the founders of Neat Loans were in need of some tech talent six years ago, they reached out to Steve Herschleb to see if he was interested in joining the team.
CEO Luke Johnson led the pitch. Neat Loans was a digital mortgage lender that would fix the traditionally arduous mortgage process, he explained, and they needed someone like Herschleb to write code and develop products.
Herschleb listened. But he couldn’t quiet his knee-jerk reaction.
“Mortgage?” he thought. “Heck no.”
Mortgage wasn’t “sexy” like the many other industries such as e-commerce, robotics or AI that could use his tech expertise. Herschleb also didn’t own a house, or know anything about the mortgage process in general. He mostly associated the industry with the 2008 financial crisis. But he listened, and the more he learned, the more intrigued he grew.
Johnson explained the key problems in the mortgage industry: how the massive incumbents weren’t using technology well, thus making the already slow-moving and complicated mortgage process even more taxing. Neat Loans would differentiate itself by bringing new technology to an antiquated industry to solve a hard problem in a huge market.
“What got me most excited was the competition,” Herschleb, now the co-founder and CTO of Neat Loans, said. “We’d be competing with massive financial institutions that have infinite resources, yet they were severely lacking on the tech side. We could be a scrappy little startup and just eat their lunch.”
Herschleb was in, and since then, he’s recruited others by reciting the same pitch. Sure, mortgage isn’t sexy. But tech and opportunity are.
Built In Colorado sat down with three people at Neat Loans to learn more about why they enjoy working at the digital mortgage lender, and what’s on the horizon for the company.
How did you end up in the mortgage industry?
Alana Zhang, senior director of finance: I was always drawn to being a part of a fast-growing startup but didn’t have an industry in mind. I was really just looking for a good idea. The mortgage process wasn’t a stranger to me since I had started to look at houses and apply for preapproval letters. It was a crazy moment for me when I met the team at Neat because all the issues they were tackling were the same ones I was facing in my mortgage process. Issues like the redundant back and forth emails with our loan officer, documents getting dropped or misplaced, vague explanations, re-explaining the same things over and over. It really made me see how having a human involved slowed down the whole process. It was like the Neat team had developed their tech purely to solve the frustrations I had in my personal experience; and it was all automated. All of it just happened at the click of a button.
It was like the Neat team had developed their tech purely to solve the frustrations I had in my personal experience; and it was all automated.’’
Berenice Nuss, general counsel: I got involved in the mortgage industry early in my career, because my client began tracking the Dodd-Frank Act (a law passed in 2010 in response to the financial crisis of 2008 that established regulatory measures in the financial services industry) from the very beginning, right after the financial crisis hit and throughout its duration. By pure accident, because I was a baby attorney and received this assignment that no one wanted, I began tracking every single regulation associated with mortgages during the financial crisis until the law became law in 2010. Eventually, I took a break from the industry, but missed it. What appealed to me about Neat Loans was it wasn’t the brick-and-mortar bank where I had worked before. Being in the fintech industry, I imagined that it was nimble, fast-moving and not very bureaucratic. And I was right.
JUMPSTART
How does Neat create a culture that keeps your job interesting?
Steve Herschleb, co-founder and CTO: On the tech team, we’re all dorky engineers who love solving problems. I don’t know if there’s anything more complicated or crazy detail-oriented than mortgage. There’s just an infinite layer of complexity. No one on the tech team comes from the mortgage industry. So newcomers have to talk to the industry veterans we have on staff to understand the background and what we’re trying to do. In almost all cases, the more we learn, the more complicated it gets. There’s an infinite sea of interesting problems for the tech team to solve, and that keeps it fun and exciting.
Nuss: Coming from a financial and banking institution background, I think that what makes Neat interesting is that you get to own as many projects as you want. That’s not something you would find at a typical institution, especially a financial one. Because we are a fintech company, it gives people the freedom to roll up their sleeves and have as much experience as they want in leading projects. That’s very unique in this industry.
There’s an infinite sea of interesting problems for the tech team to solve, and that keeps it fun and exciting.’’
Zhang: If we want to talk about mundane industries, I’m an accountant in mortgage (laughs). But we have a ton of fun back in our finance corner. We collect information and then make decisions based on it. You don’t get that ability anywhere else. You don’t get to walk over to a different department and say, “Hey, I found this metric that is very interesting. Did you know that your team was doing this? I think maybe we can figure out a solution.” You can literally make a change in the entire company, just from one conversation, just by walking over to someone’s desk. We all have the same goal here: to make Neat better and more efficient.
Alana, you mentioned the ability to create change with one conversation. What’s an example?
Zhang: At Neat, we’re always seeking to streamline our processes, whether it’s within a small team or across multiple departments. Because of the levels of complexity within every step of the mortgage process, I still find that I learn something new every time I talk to one of our subject matter experts. We’ve actually started a new process that originated from a conversation I had with another manager. I wondered, why can’t every department have a time every month to simply talk about their biggest challenges, bottlenecks, and little things other departments could help with to make their days easier?
We just had our first meeting of this kind! We all gathered in our break room (where there’s a constant supply of seltzers and cookies) and one of our departments got to highlight their day to day activities and challenges. We had so many participants and “aha!” moments. Even our office manager agreed it provided clarity into the process for her.
Berenice, why is it fun to be a part of the compliance team at Neat?
Nuss: I am driven by problems and curiosity. Mortgage is one of the most heavily regulated industries in our country. Combine that with a fintech company that deals with a lot of nonpublic personal information, and you have a lot of laws and regulations that you need to comply with.
As a tech company, we have to be the best in terms of our product, our technology and our security. It’s very rewarding and complex. Take Wells Fargo, for example. Their complaints department is composed of a bunch of people. My team has three. So we get to wear a lot of hats every day and deal with a lot of problems. That’s fun, because we get to be experts on many different things.
