In this episode of Leading Lenders: Risk, Reward and Reinvention, we sit down with Charlie Fleming, President and Co-Founder of Remarkable Mortgage, to explore how his team has scaled year-over-year while maintaining operational excellence. Fleming's strategy centers on empowering LOs to act as trusted advisors, guiding clients through homeownership with clarity and care.
With the power of Oconee State Bank behind them, Remarkable Mortgage has built something rare: a lender that behaves like a bank but prices like a broker. Charlie highlights the role of Remarkable’s empowering of LOs to give their borrowers better options and the role of Polly in surfacing those options in real time. Polly’s ability to integrate across LOS and CRM platforms, eliminating common pain points like double entry and missed lock opportunities, helps Remarkable better serve its borrowers.
Each episode of Leading Lenders: Risk, Reward, and Reinvention dives into how industry leaders are embracing change, overcoming challenges, and driving innovation in today’s market. Click here to navigate to the series page for videos 1-4.
Episode 2 of Leading Lenders: Risk, Reward, and Reinvention is powered by Polly.
With the power of Oconee State Bank behind them, Remarkable Mortgage has built something rare: a lender that behaves like a bank but prices like a broker. Charlie highlights the role of Remarkable’s empowering of LOs to give their borrowers better options and the role of Polly in surfacing those options in real time. Polly’s ability to integrate across LOS and CRM platforms, eliminating common pain points like double entry and missed lock opportunities, helps Remarkable better serve its borrowers.
Each episode of Leading Lenders: Risk, Reward, and Reinvention dives into how industry leaders are embracing change, overcoming challenges, and driving innovation in today’s market. Click here to navigate to the series page for videos 1-4.
Episode 2 of Leading Lenders: Risk, Reward, and Reinvention is powered by Polly.
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LearningTranscript
00:00We feel very valued. We feel very seen. And I think what's unique about Poly, they want to grow with us.
00:14I am president and co-founder of Remarkable Mortgage. We are a division of Oconee State
00:20Bank. Oconee State Bank has been around for over 60 years, headquartered in Watkinsville, Georgia.
00:25I thought I wanted to go into school counseling, believe it or not. I graduated from the University
00:31of Georgia on a Friday and I jumped into the mortgage industry on that Monday. And I've
00:36ridden the awesome wave. I didn't realize going into the mortgage industry, but knowing that I
00:42get that one-on-one personal relationship and then my clients come to me and say,
00:47hey, we need advice. We don't really know what to do. And I love acting as that kind of co-pilot
00:52in them in that journey where I'm not going to tell them what to do, but I'm going to present
00:57all the options and say, hey, this is what I feel is your best opportunity for you to build
01:03wealth through home ownership.
01:07Our kind of operational setup is very unique, I think, in the market. We act as a delegated
01:14correspondent. Our operations are very similar to like a lender, right? So we process, we underwrite,
01:20and we fund with the ability and our partnership with the bank. So we're using our own money to fund
01:24the loans. But through the delegated correspondent relationship, we shop around and we shop around
01:31with investors to try to find our customer the right deal. And so we have a great slew of investors
01:38on the conventional side and FHA and VA. And so the ability, I think, to also control that process
01:46while also almost pricing like a broker, it allows our loan officers, I think, to have the confidence
01:52of knowing like, hey, I have some of the best investors that we can select from and our ability
01:58to be very, very nimble.
02:00What Polly can bring to us is it allows us to see accurate pricing very quickly rather than going
02:12into every single investor one by one and trying to figure out like, okay, hey, who's winning today,
02:18right? And making sure there's guardrails in place and guidelines in place to make sure that we're not
02:24locking a loan that an investor says, hey, we don't want that loan, right? Based on debt to income,
02:30income ratio or credit score. One cool thing too is that Polly allowed us to bring our portfolio
02:37products in there as well. And they kind of held our hand to that too, because that's a big lift.
02:43That's very complicated for somebody who's going 100 miles an hour for them to take that on so that
02:48our loan officers can see accurate pricing, not just on the secondary market, but the Oconee State
02:55bank products too, where we can accurately lock that loan as soon as possible.
02:59That's been a challenging landscape in mortgage world since 2022. And I think one of the quotes
03:07that I love the most is like, generals were never made in a time of peace, but always at a time of
03:12war. And so I feel that we have got our battle scars. Early on in our stages, we obsessed over
03:19making sure our operations were so dialed in and that they were predictable. Because I feel that
03:26predictability leads to profitability. And if you can have a predictable process every single time,
03:33that reputation will go out. We've seen a lot of growth, even from 2023 to 2024, we did 50% more
03:40loans. I think that has a lot to do with our predictability of our operations team, how operations
03:46is just making it happen. And then our loan officers doing what they need to do every single
03:51day to go out and get the business. When we're looking at tech stack, everything's got to be
03:59integrated. There can't be any double entry all the way from our product and pricing engine, all the way
04:04to the CRM that we're using. And it's all got to be connected and through our loan origination system,
04:09because there can be some fragments in the mortgage tech stack. But when we're evaluating vendors and
04:15partners, we're looking at speed, we're looking at accessibility. And I think it centers around
04:21that because we want to communicate well, we want to close on time, and then we don't want to bait and
04:27switch our customers. Talking digital transformation, I think really starts at the point of sale. It also
04:34includes our product pricing engine. Our loan officers are depending on something quick and reliable and
04:39fast to figure out what is the best solution for my client. What lenders are stacking up and then
04:46to be able to say, hey, I want an FHA loan at 3.5% versus a conventional at 5%, which feeds back into
04:53the loan origination software. So I think the API connection is very important to us. And through
04:59front-end point of sale, all of those have to be interconnected and work very quickly,
05:05right? Because a loan officer needs to get, you know, they're going 100 miles an hour. And then
05:09not only, you know, it could be very fast, but it has to be accurate as well. And I think that's very,
05:14very important. We were evaluating like, what are other lenders like going to? What are the larger
05:21independent mortgage banks or what are the larger banks? What are they doing? And all I heard was like,
05:27yeah, everyone's switching to poly. I think from a user interface and a user design and an overall
05:33like loan officer configurability, I think the technology speaks for itself. And I think what's
05:39unique about poly, they want to grow with us. As we grow and add loan officers on, they grow too.
05:45We wanted that alignment, not only from a growth standpoint, but also like culture. We wanted to be
05:51able to get on the phone and say, hey, we've got this like problem. Like somebody hop on a Zoom call
05:56and like, you know, snap of a finger, they're there. Polly understands like, they're just as
06:01frustrated at the market as us of like, okay, it doesn't need to be this difficult in terms of like
06:06your PPE provider. They see that need. And so, you know, I was kind of skating where the, you know,
06:12the puck was going, so to speak. The flexibility and the usability of like actually locking in the
06:19loans on the backside. It's very easy. It's very smooth. It's not confusing, you know, to be able to
06:24enter in concession requests or, you know, to change discount points within the system. I think
06:30our loan officers, like, you know, it's all built into the LOS, which is nice. And they've seen,
06:36you know, they've seen a lift, but I think just from, you know, with our size, like sometimes I
06:40got to go in there and lock these loans. Right. And so I wanted something that was really easy.
06:45And yeah, I mean, it's been a great selection so far.
06:48I would say I'm most excited about the technology advancements with AI involving like the point of
06:57sale and the loan origination system. I think it's like upon us already. And I'm really excited
07:02that all of the, you know, the vendors that we have spoken about, I think they really are forward
07:09thinking and they're always changing, always adapting, always rolling out something new,
07:15moving towards this thing called like task-based workflow is really important from an operational
07:20standpoint, meaning that like processors and loan, you know, loan officer assistants,
07:24we want them to go in every single day and not be confused on like, what do I work on today?
07:29Right. Like that is a major issue. And we're trying to solve that, you know, through our technology.
07:36So I'm, I'm excited. Like AI does not scare me. It excites me. That's the direction that I think
07:41all lenders are trying to figure out like, what does it mean and how, what's it going to impact?
07:46I'm a firm believer that the loan officer will be around for a long time. I do feel that way.
07:50I think AI is going to help our jobs tremendously. I'm excited for the future.