In less than 24 hours, the credit trigger lead ban goes into effect. While there are carveouts for the original lender & servicers, the days of boiler rooms buying 150K credit trigger leads a month(!) & carpet-bombing would-be buyers w/ calls & texts are coming to an end. 

In today’s edition of The Mortgage Scoop, we break down how the lead gen game has changed & what’s replacing credit triggers (scroll to the bottom plz). The breakdown is only for Mortgage Scoop Insiders, so please consider becoming a paid member.

Also in today’s edition: A scoop on a $2.4B MSR portfolio, saying goodbye to an AI-focused mortgage tech firm, what to make of Experian’s latest price increase, analysis of Rocket’s kinda-new “Jupiter” LOS for brokers & more. 

(🙏 If you like what you’re reading, tell a fellow mortgage junkie to sign up here.)

Jupiter is the solar system's largest planet, a massive gas giant over twice as heavy as all other planets combined & capable of holding over 1,300 Earths. But here on Earth, mortgage brokerage platform ARIVE has all the weight. Harish Tejwani’s platform has roughly 30K users & is the stickiest portal out there. 

So beloved is the software that it hasn’t gone unnoticed in the broker space that UWM & Rocket have both rolled out LOSs for brokers, which one source said was proof of ARIVE’s strategic threat. 

“They’re both afraid of ARIVE having too much control,” argued one broker-owner.

UWM last year debuted Sphere, which is a LendingPad LOS combined w/ a POS & CRM. At its Ignite virtual conference last week, Rocket debuted Jupiter, which is a reconfigured version of the Finmo platform Rocket’s Canadian arm acquired during COVID. Rocket is offering the LOS for free & brokers can use it to send loans to non-Rocket Pro wholesale lenders.

I asked Austin Niemiec how the new LOS washed w/ Rocket only recently having integrated w/ ARIVE. He brushed off the suggestion that Jupiter had anything to do w/ ARIVE’s dominance. “We have a fantastic relationship w/ ARIVE & are integrating even deeper into it,” he said. “Jupiter is just another tool for us to provide brokers options.”

Niemiec added that a lot of brokers are frustrated w/ their LOSs & Jupiter is plug-and-play & allows brokers to easily port in via APIs.

Experian has taken the unusual step of increasing its credit reporting costs roughly 3% on mortgage lenders. HW confirmed Greg Sher’s LinkedIn post from late last week. 

That Experian is raising credit report costs isn’t unusual, but the timing is. No one can recall a price change coming so soon after January’s hike.

An Experian spokesperson told HW that the new “strategic pricing structure” would bring a “broader set of capabilities across the lending lifecycle” to lenders.

I know some people will look at the timing of this & assume it’s about trigger leads, but it’s not. This is all about VantageScore v FICO, baby! Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia, etc. 

Experian told HW that it lowered the price of a standalone VS4.0 score to 1/3rd the price of a FICO score for ‘26—compared to about 50% previously—& VS4.0 continued to be free in ‘26 when bundled w/ legacy scores & that came w/ “pricing adjustments to credit reports that can be “offset by strategic partnership commitments.”

In plain English: We lowered the prices to kick off VantageScore & raised them for FICO-based scores! The latest pricing changes will take place in April. I wouldn’t bank on Experian being the only bureau that does this, either…

A reader spotted that mortgage tech firm AiCurio is in foreclosure. Bidding closes on March 16. 

“AICurio specializes in artificial intelligence-powered mortgage analytics within the financial services industry,” reads the bid doc. “It offers a solution that enables credit institutions and mortgage professionals to predict risks, profitability, and cash flows. It uses AI-powered machine learning, deep learning, and artificial neural network for operations.”

AiCurio, founded by Lester Firstenberger, describes itself as “the first & only commercially available deep learning artificial neural net cash flow underwriting engine for US Residential Mortgages.” It claims to predict at a 98% accuracy all monthly cashflows at the loan level & its model had 135M loans & 8B monthly payment records containing up to 300 data elements per monthly record.

AI underwriting is relatively nascent in mortgage. There’s firms like Friday Harbor, Gateless, Candor & Ocrolus out there, but most lenders still haven’t taken advantage of the new tech, which can help processors take on more files & clear conditions more quickly. 

As you might know, I’m taking courses to become a licensed LO, so I asked Theo Ellis to give me a demo of Friday Harbor’s new income & asset sandbox (Full disclosure: Friday Harbor is an advertising partner). Basically, it helps LOs dynamically structure income & asset decisions earlier in the workflow. I thought it was v cool.

Defunct subprime lender CashCall is on the hook for a $134M in restitution to the CFPB for initiating high-interest loans through a tribal lender to evade usury laws. It’s an absolutely wild case that’s 12 years in the making.

CashCall’s owner Paul Reddam (better known in horse racing) ran subprime heavy DiTech before selling it to General Motors in ‘95. Like DiTech, CashCall advertised widely & even had the late Gary Coleman as a pitchman at one point.

CashCall’s loan mix was pretty, uh, interesting. In one example cited in a ‘12 Bloomberg report, CashCall said it could offer a borrower $2,525 to be paid back in 47 installments at an annual interest rate of 184%. Incredible stuff.

CashCall is no longer slingin’ loans, but Reddam remains active in various businesses. He sold Owning to Rate about 5 years ago.

Cotality’s Praveen Chandramohan said the shift in lead generation is toward relationship-based lending. He described 4 spheres of influence.