Live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez sits down with Tim Bowler, President of ICE Mortgage Technology, for a deep dive into today’s most pressing trends in the housing and capital markets. As lenders consolidate and capital markets evolve, ICE Mortgage Technology is doubling down on platform-native innovation. Bowler shares his perspective on the wave of lender consolidation sweeping the industry, ICE’s strategic response, and why scale and efficiency are now non-negotiables for long-term success.
The conversation also unpacks ICE’s roadmap for secondary and capital markets, including the decision to natively build critical functionality into the ICE platform—rather than relying on third-party solutions. Bowler offers an insider’s view on the thinking behind these tech investments and how recent partnerships, like the one with United Wholesale Mortgage, represent a broader shift in servicing and platform integration.
The conversation also unpacks ICE’s roadmap for secondary and capital markets, including the decision to natively build critical functionality into the ICE platform—rather than relying on third-party solutions. Bowler offers an insider’s view on the thinking behind these tech investments and how recent partnerships, like the one with United Wholesale Mortgage, represent a broader shift in servicing and platform integration.
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NewsTranscript
00:00We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. Amazing. I'm Diego Sanchez, president of Housing
00:14Wire. And my guest today, actually, I'm kind of your guest. But my guest today is Tim Bowler,
00:22president of ICE Mortgage Technology. It's so great to talk to you again.
00:25Hey, Diego, it's great to host you here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is,
00:29you know, an absolute honor for me to be able to bring you down here to 11 Wall Street,
00:34you know, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to talk about what's happening in our industry.
00:38Absolutely. So, Tim, you've got a little bit of an interesting background.
00:42I do.
00:42So you were at the Treasury.
00:44Yeah.
00:44You were at Goldman Sachs.
00:45Yes.
00:46And now you're at ICE.
00:47Yes.
00:47Tell me how that perspective and your career so far informs your strategy for ICE Mortgage Technology.
00:55Well, that's, I mean, it's a great question. So whether my time in the private sector or
01:01back at Goldman Sachs or in the public sector when I worked at the U.S. Treasury, a lot of
01:05it was really centered around housing and housing finance. So I started working in the housing
01:12finance space back in 2005, prior to the great financial crisis, where I did a bunch of advisory
01:17work for mortgage-related companies and especially finance-related companies and banks. And it really
01:22got to understand both the plumbing of the mortgage system, how mortgages were manufactured, how they
01:28were serviced, and then the value that gets created when they're funded appropriately in the
01:33capital markets. I also got to see some of the issues associated with housing finance, you know,
01:37heading into the great financial crisis and their aftermath. And I was lucky enough as an individual
01:43to be asked to join the U.S. Treasury Department in 2011 to really help try to sort through and work
01:50through a lot of the core policy issues and economic issues associated with like how we were going to
01:55reset the housing finance system in the United States, you know, post the great financial crisis. Right. And that
02:01really informed me around how a housing finance system that when it's structured right in a transparent
02:07manner, that does put the household first, that puts the family first, you know, really delivers over the long
02:13haul. It can also continue to deliver, you know, tremendous economic benefits for those that come into
02:20the housing finance ecosystem. One of the things that I always, you know, think back to is, you know,
02:27all those poor families that lost their homes during the great financial crisis, have they been able to stick
02:31with it? How much more wealth they would have now as a household? You know, because home prices since their peak
02:38back in 2000, you know, call it late 2006, 2007, you know, in many cases, more than doubled or tripled.
02:44So if we've done a better job as a country responding at that point in time, working with those
02:49households that bought that house as their primary residence to keep them in, just think about how
02:54much more wealth it was, what households would have had. And that motivates a lot of my work today
02:59here at Ice Mortgage Technology is how can we deliver technology solutions,
03:04better workflow to help a mortgage get manufactured better, to make it an easier household experience
03:11when that loan is being made. And then when it's being serviced, to have that household have just
03:16better opportunities to engage in refinancing, home equity, but in a safe and sustainable manner.
03:23So Ice Mortgage Technology is really overlooking that entire life cycle of a mortgage right now.
03:30It is. How are you thinking about that in terms of the platform that you're building and your strategy
03:36and your product roadmap? Yeah. Well, I, you know, first and foremost, our strategy and our product
03:42roadmap is like a hundred percent focused on helping the entire ecosystem, right? We want to be that,
03:48you know, trusted partner that, you know, that is unconflicted, that is focused on like helping every
03:53lender that we interface with, be able to do more with households and be able to do that as efficiently as
03:58possible. So I think about like, you know, at the beginning of a, you know, let's just take a first-time
04:03home buyer as an example. At the beginning of that life cycle. All right. We are definitely at the New York
04:09Jim Kramer. We are definitely at the New York Stock Exchange. And that is a wrap on Kramer for your audience.
04:17Amazing. It is. It is great. So just for your audience's benefit and those that aren't aware,
04:25um, Jim Kramer, Mad Money gets filmed here every night. So, um, after the close of market and he
04:30is the, he has the floor and he's done this now for 20 years. So hence his, him and his crew were
04:35out there celebrating today and we got to, um, we got to watch it. Amazing. But back to your question
04:40about, you know, how we at Ice Mortgage Technology are helping. I'll go through that example of that
04:44first-time home buyer. Yep. So we're working with lenders to be able to give them consumer engagement
04:49tools that can really help and make it easier for that first-time home buyer that find a home.
04:55Secondly, once they find the right home, be able to work with their trusted lender,
04:59that trusted partner, that lending officer to find the right mortgage, um, a mortgage product for them
05:04to be able to populate that application efficiently, to be able to get that loan underwritten in a way
05:10that's, um, straightforward and understandable from both the lender's perspective and the household's
05:15perspective when you're engaging with information. How do you make it easy to get source,
05:19data and documentation? How do you make it easy to go back and engage with that household as you're
05:23going through the underwriting process to get them approved? Second, you know, from the lender's
05:27perspective, you know, working with that first-time home buyer, like how do you make certain that that
05:32process is as seamless as possible? Right. You know, within the context of delivering them letters that
05:36they need in order, say they have committed financing, you can help with that in order to be able to, um,
05:42process that loan as an expedited manner as possible so they can get to close very quickly
05:46and then buy that, buy that first-time home. And then, you know, once the loan is funded,
05:52you know, it's registered and recorded, you know, uh, in our ecosystem on, on MERS and then leveraging a
05:57lot of the technology we have at, at simple file, it's record on the security interest at the county
06:02level. Being able to take that loan and have it boarded into a servicing system with ease and the
06:09minimal amount of compliance risk possible. And why that benefits that first-time home buyers,
06:14it's, you know, it's multifaceted. You know, first and foremost, if that originator is going to sell
06:20servicing, um, and it's going to go into a service that's on the MSP platform, which is the ICE platform,
06:26you know, we're developing and delivering technology that will allow for a straight-through process from
06:31that originator and encompass that's leveraging our encompass technology to get that information over
06:37to the, um, uh, and the underlying data and source documents over to that new servicer and the lights
06:42out process such that that new servicer that's going to service that loan over the next, you know,
06:47two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, up to 30 years, depending on the journey that household takes,
06:52how they can take on that information extremely efficiently. Secondly, if it's, um, the originator
06:57retained servicing, how they can just do that in a lights out process in house, you know,
07:03to ease the transition to servicing and then begin to interface with that household much more
07:07dynamically. And so, you know, turning back to that household link and how we're helping there,
07:13it's, you know, once that loan is being serviced, we can provide a life of loan experience.
07:17You know, we can help that servicer identify, um, engage with that household to say,
07:21hey, it's time to refinance. You can save over $500 a month. You can save over $600 a month.
07:27Or if the household's been, um, occupied in that house for, you know, a number of years,
07:32and, um, they've built up equity and, you know, the time is right to send a kid to college,
07:36we can help that, um, that servicer identify an opportunity to provide a home equity loan.
07:41So it's that whole life of loan ecosystem that we can deliver and we can dock into the various
07:47clients, whether that be a small INV, you know, a large regional lender, or, you know,
07:52the nation's biggest seller of servicers. We can provide a technology suite to all
07:56of them across the board. So let's dig into the, the secondary and capital markets process,
08:02that process of the originator potentially selling the loan to a servicer. Um, you have started ICE,
08:09mortgage technology has started to look at that space much more closely from a technology and
08:14product development perspective. Tell us more about those initiatives. Well, it goes back to what
08:18we just discussed, Diego. So if, you know, if we're helping an originator create, uh, a loan file
08:25and encompass that can easily be boarded on to MSP or servicing system of record without errors and
08:32data integrity, and then underlying file can move efficiently from that originator over to the
08:38servicer that creates tremendous, um, uh, tremendous benefits for the system of buying mortgage servicing
08:45rights. Because, you know, one of the core costs and core risks associated with taking on servicing
08:50is, did you get the data right from the start? Right. And we can address that. Secondly, and this goes
08:55back to your, um, your question on capital markets, as you know, MSRs get traded. They, they move over their
09:01life, you know, and an individual loan might have, you know, two, three, four servicers, you know, over
09:06its lifespan. And what we're working to do is within the context of our, you know, ICE mortgage technology
09:12ecosystem, um, be able to move a loan that's resting in one servicers platform on MSP over to
09:18another servicers platform with minimal, uh, friction and minimal risk. That, what that does,
09:24you know, using capital markets, because we're here at the NYSE is that makes the market more liquid.
09:28Yeah. Right. Traditionally, if you think about, you know, trading MS, uh, servicing rights, there was,
09:33it was a clunky process. There was lots of friction built in because a lot of, there was manual work,
09:38a lot of stare and compare, a lot of sampling of underlying portfolios and a lot of back and
09:42forth, even after the sale took place. But if we can actually connect that selling servicer to that,
09:48uh, that buying servicer, and they can go straight from their instance of MSP over to the buying
09:54servicer's instance of MSP and have that data move flawlessly, that has a lot of value to the ecosystem
10:00and makes it a much more liquid and transparent market. So tell me more about why you're thinking
10:05about and building, uh, your own in-house technology as opposed to plugging into the other capital
10:12markets platforms that are out there. Well, I, you know, I, what I would say is like just, you know,
10:17taking a step back to like who we serve, we serve the entire industry. Yep. So what, um, I'm focused on
10:22right now is actually making certain that that piping works, you know, that the data and the documentation
10:28can flow seamlessly. And if the, over time that evolves into us having a, you know, an opportunity
10:33to help the broader market by allowing it easier for one servicer to engage with another servicer,
10:39we'll let that technology, you know, be that platform to do so. But, you know, today, you know,
10:44my relentless focus just with my team is in order to get a better trading market for whether it be
10:49whole loans or, uh, or servicing rights, it's just have that seamless connection from that point of
10:55origination onto servicing, or if the loan's already being serviced from one servicer that's
11:00on MSP to another servicer on MSP without having, um, any dare, uh, any data errors occur after the
11:07trade has taken place. That makes sense. So, uh, one partnership that, uh, the Housing Wire audience
11:13was talking a lot about was your recent deal with United Wholesale Mortgage to handle a lot of their
11:20servicing technology. Could you tell us more about that relationship? Oh, sure. I mean, um,
11:25uh, United Wholesale made the decision that they wanted to bring servicing in-house.
11:30Um, it's been an organization, you know, we've known for a long time, but they're listed here on
11:34the, the New York Stock Exchange. And we were honored that when they made the decision to bring
11:39servicing back in-house, they selected MSP to be their, their system of record and us as their
11:44partner. So we're very excited to help them as they bring servicing in-house, uh, as making that core
11:49strategic decision. And then we were there, um, when they were ready, um, ready to make that,
11:54uh, make that transition. Amazing. Well, Tim, it's always great to catch up with you. Thank
11:59you so much for talking with me today. Diego, it was my pleasure. And thank you for coming
12:02down to the New York Stock Exchange. It was amazing.