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Last week it was announced that LoanLogics’ Head of Mortgage Automation Technology, Roby Robertson, was part of an esteemed class of 2022 HousingWire Insider Award winners. The award recognizes the “industry professionals who are essential to the performance and success of their organizations but may be lesser known to those on the outside. These industry pros are the engines that keep things running smoothly, the secret sauce to their teams’ success.” Meet LoanLogics’ 2022 HousingWire Insider.
An industry expert on borrower income calculation and automated origination technology, Roby was recognized by HousingWire for his role in the development of LoanBeam® income calculation solutions. As one of the founding employees of LoanBeam the company, acquired by LoanLogics in December 2021, his notable support efforts include playing a vital role in:
- LoanBeam Tax, a groundbreaking self-employed borrower income calculation and analysis technology endorsed by the GSEs.
- LoanBeam Wage, announced in April 2022, an API-enabled tool that automates the wage earner applications not captured in digital databases. Using best-in-class OCR and proprietary machine learning to replace the manual ‘stare and compare’ process still plaguing the industry.
- LoanBeam Transcript, a tax transcript service for IRS-certified data validation that has been endorsed by Freddie Mac for use with its Loan Product Advisor Asset and Income Modeler, expanding the existing rep and warranty relief eligibility provided by LoanBeam Tax.
As we’ve done with other industry award winners, we wanted you to get to know Roby a bit more and learn what makes him so vital to the fabric of LoanLogics. Below we share responses from a recent Q&A.
We’re coming up on a year since you became a LoanLogics associate. Tell us more about your role at LoanBeam prior to the acquisition and your broader mortgage background.
After spending 10 years working at Chase Bank in a mix of training development and relationship roles, I purposely took on an opportunity at Pacific Union Financial (now part of Mr. Cooper) where I could play a larger role in a smaller organization. There I was Director of Multimedia eLearning and was involved in the rollout of an innovative training initiative focusing primarily on a new, robust eLearning platform. While in that role, I was offered the opportunity to join LoanBeam, a startup company, to drive its marketing, operations and I might add wear a thousand different hats to pitch in where my expertise might be needed. There I was a bit of a one-man marketing force planning all the company’s events, organizing the company’s marketing materials, and overseeing the sales team as well. While attending industry conferences and meetings I began talking to other industry leaders and quickly learned what products were valuable to lenders and which ones weren’t. This prepared me to take on a larger role within LoanBeam’s product development team where I helped to create some of the most revolutionary borrower technologies in the industry, which remain market-leading today.
How has the LoanBeam transition to LoanLogics been going?
Pretty smooth! Given my product and marketing roles at LoanBeam, earlier this year I worked alongside our LoanLogics marketing team to transition the LoanBeam product branding and hand off all my former marketing responsibilities. Now I am fully focused on automated origination technology development in the product organization. I’m involved in both the day-to-day product management of LoanBeam solutions and the synergistic alignment of these key systems within the broader LoanLogics product roadmap.
From a client and industry partner standpoint, I am involved more than ever in understanding their needs and working to develop new origination technologies to verify borrower income eligibility from application all the way to loans being sold in the secondary market. In support of that, perhaps most exciting, we announced LoanBeam Wage earlier this year. While the industry is slowly marching toward a totally digital, end-to-end mortgage process, most lenders and servicers are stuck using human staff to “stare and compare” data and documents when qualifying a wage earner’s income. LoanBeam Wage can empower lenders to evaluate income early in the process, determining the need for VOI/VOE and possibly avoiding these costs if not needed. LoanBeam Wage uses a combination of advanced machine learning with layered optical character recognition (OCR) technologies to automatically extract and interpret the variety of income data contained in a borrower’s unstructured paystub and W2 income documents, with no human involvement. A real game changer for the industry.
When you’re not working, where will we find you?
I’m with my family here in Texas most often, but my wife and two sons (ages 8 and 11) also love to travel. Most recently we took a trip from to D.C. in the spring to visit the capital and all the great museums and just last month we hit the beach on the gulf.
I also love sports, both playing and coaching. My wife and I are on a sand volleyball team, playing each week and I spend each morning (5:30 am) doing Crossfit at my local ‘box.’ And for years, I’ve coached my sons’ football and soccer teams.
In addition to the sports, you may also expect to find both me and my wife supporting local food charities. We both grew up experiencing food insecurity and food donations so feel obligated to pay it forward through our local food charities.
This industry recognition as LoanLogics’ newest 2022 HousingWire Insider and the responses to your Q&A clearly demonstrate leadership. In your words, what makes a good leader?
Leadership is about being a good coach. If you win, a good coach says it’s because the players trained hard and performed well. If you lose, a good coach says it’s because I didn’t coach well enough and I need to do a better job preparing the team. I firmly believe in sharing applause with my team, but if something falls through the cracks, it’s really on me. When building the roster, I love a team of people who are willing to try and fail and keep trying. For any team to win, you must have people who are willing to put in that extra effort in the fourth quarter. Putting in the work outshines any level of skill.
