Ice’s Matt Dowd On Targeting Mortgage Servicing Call Volume With Ai Agents

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is targeting long-standing friction in mortgage servicing with new artificial intelligence-powered voice and chat agents designed to handle routine borrower inquiries instantly while reducing call-center strain, the company announced Tuesday.

In a conversation with HousingWire at the ICE Experience (X26) conference in Las Vegas, Matt Dowd, the company’s vice president of product management, said that the tools aim to address common pain points on both sides of the servicing equation. Borrowers are often frustrated by long wait times for simple questions about payments or escrow changes, while servicers grapple with unpredictable call volumes and staffing challenges.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Wolak: Coming out of the MBA servicing event last month, there was a lot of chatter about pain points in servicing that could be remedied with tech. What has ICE observed in terms of specific borrower pain points that it’s aiming to solve with the new agents?

Matt Dowd: There are two different personas that we’re solving for: borrower and servicer. But the capabilities and the functionalities do intersect to a degree.

We’ll start with the borrower experience. There are generally some well-defined reasons why a borrower engages with their servicer. They want to understand their payment, maybe why their payment hasn’t cleared, or why it changed. Escrow is a big one. Around tax time, it’s “where are my tax documents?”

Those are usually pretty quick answers. But today, you have to pick up the phone, call someone and potentially sit on hold. That’s not a great borrower experience.

With chat or voice, borrowers can ask those questions, take action on their loan and get answers 24/7, instantaneously. If they need more explanation, they can go deeper. So whether it’s chat or voice, we have those guardrails, and we know enough when somebody asks a question that should be routed to a person, it will do that.

So that’s really important from a borrower experience, because it allows them to ask the questions they want and get an answer 24/7. And then if they need a person, they can ask those initial questions, get directed, and all that transcript gets populated with a customer service agent.

SW: So everything is on record with the agents?

MD: Yes, all of our AI is governed, and what makes us really unique is that our AI technology is built into the system of record. Think about how important that is: It’s not something that you’re buying as a bolt-on service or stitched together. Whether you’re using MSP for customer service or default or servicing, digital AI is built in automatically.

SW: What was the previous option for borrowers who wanted to interact with their servicer? Was it a call-center model?

MD: Yes, exactly. When we talk to our clients, they have very well-defined metrics, prevalent reasons for borrowers to call. And a lot of them are pretty basic — like, genuinely people call in and say, ‘How come my payment hasn’t processed?’ or ‘When’s my next payment due?’

A big one is people’s payment goes up because of escrow, and people always wonder why it went up. Instead of them having this question at 9 o’clock at night and the borrower not wanting to wait until tomorrow, they can ask the AI, and it’s going to give them a clear, concise answer.

SW: And sometimes, as a customer, you really don’t want to take the time to make a phone call for one question.

MD: Yes. One thing we all know is that consumers, the longer they’re on hold, the more frustrated they become. That is agnostic across everything, and it’s very difficult to staff a call center because you don’t really know when you think your busiest times are. You don’t know how long that person is going to have to wait and you can’t predict the state of mind [the customer is in] before they call in.

It’s all about allowing the borrower to engage with the servicers on their time, through their channel. Some people do want to just talk to a person, though, so our technologies are built so that there’s always what I call an exit route, meaning they can be directed to an agent as soon as they want.

SW: I wanted to ask about the concept of governed AI since ICE deals with a lot of sensitive borrower and servicer information. How is that regulated, and how are the agents trained to keep that information as safe as possible?

MD: It’s basically the same way we keep our data secure today. One thing about ICE is that we are focused on data privacy. But our clients, they can do whatever they want with their data. If they wanted to take it out and leverage it in other places, like they do today, they can still do that. But our models, they’re always governed. Everything we do is auditable and explainable. But again, we’re not going to enrich public LLMs with all this proprietary data.

SW: Going back to the pain points, what about the servicer? How are these tools helping them be successful?

MD: By providing the experience of the AI tools, the servicer gets the same thing: They don’t have to take as many calls. With that being said, as those conversations come in, they’re being audited and tracked. So if a customer calls in a month later, we will use our AI to give a prediction about why they might be calling.

With the voice side, the servicer is benefiting, not just because they’re reducing their costs by taking fewer calls, but also because that’s better for the borrower since they have a 24/7 service to help them.

SW: Lastly, to what extent does this affect the relationship between a borrower and their servicer, since these tools aim to further establish or maintain that relationship?

MD: The borrower-servicer relationship is often minimal during normal times, particularly for borrowers on autopay who rarely interact with their servicer. But back to your question about the relationship: If the borrower is a great homeowner and on autopay, the relationship is likely positive.

But the relationship changes when the payment goes up. That relationship becomes most critical when borrowers begin to experience financial distress. When someone gets in trouble or starts to get in trouble, that borrower-servicer relationship becomes critical. Now they’re at risk of losing their home, and the servicer’s responsibility is to do everything possible to keep them there. So how well the servicer executes against that is going to make or break their relationship with the client.

But since borrowers have no choice in who their servicer is, it’s an interesting relationship because there’s little borrower control. It’s even more interesting if it’s a company that is a servicer but also originates. If you’re doing servicing and origination, that relationship with the borrower is key if they’re going to refi, do a HELOC or buy a second home with you — if you maintain the relationship and get retention.