AI Is Reshaping Mortgage Lending. The Real Test Is Leadership.

If I Was a Board Member of a Top Ten Lender

Dain Ehring November 2025

f I were a board member at a top mortgage lender, I’d think about my business not in terms of balance sheets but in terms of interactions—roughly 100,000 a year. That’s about twice the number of U.S. touchpoints BMW has with its 5-Series customers. Each one is a moment of truth: a chance to build trust, reinforce the brand, and either streamline or frustrate a borrower’s experience.

My responsibility as a director would be to ensure technology keeps us competitive—reducing costs, strengthening compliance, and improving customer engagement—without steering the company into a dead end. I’d know the wrong technology choice can destroy shareholder value as surely as a credit crisis. Overspend, underspend, or bet on the wrong innovation, and you can lose a decade and a fortune.

But AI feels different. Everyone is talking about it. Customers are already wondering whether lenders—and maybe even their loan officers—are becoming obsolete. So the first question I’d ask is whether AI is a true paradigm shift or just a powerful new tool. That distinction matters. A genuine paradigm shift rewrites the rules. Ignore it, and you become the steam shovel in an era of hydraulic backhoes. Chase it blindly, and you risk dismantling the very processes that keep the business alive.

Not every technology is a paradigm shift. Nuclear power still boils water to turn turbines; it’s faster, more efficient, and far more unforgiving, but the underlying concept is the same. Electric and self-driving cars still move people along the same roads—different propulsion, same purpose. True paradigms change how we think. When Copernicus moved Earth out of the center of the universe, it changed our understanding of ourselves. The iPod vanished, but it rewired how we consume music. The internet reshaped commerce, politics, and relationships in ways we’re still grappling with.

So as a director, I would ask my executive team: Do we actually believe AI is a paradigm shift? If so, are we prepared for what that means? Because if it is, everything from our compliance architecture to our customer relationships may need to be reimagined. If it isn’t, then we treat it as evolution, not revolution.

Then I would turn to the fiduciary questions—the ones that make CEOs shift in their chairs. Is AI a technology only the largest balance sheets can truly afford? Or does its widespread availability make our capital advantage irrelevant? When we buy a Super Bowl ad, we know exactly what we’re buying: reach, reputation, and a competitive moat that smaller players can’t cross. But with AI, that moat may not exist at all. Every customer, regulator, and even fraudster has access to the same intelligence, often for free.

If that’s the reality, where does scale matter? Should we be acquiring a company with an AI head start? Should we double down on distribution and “sell through” the hype while we catch up? Or is the risk of falling behind so great that the board needs to rethink the entire strategy before the market forces our hand?

My next question would be about timing. How much runway do we actually have? Is this like carbon-credit accounting—complex but manageable with consultants and internal teams—or is it the beginning of a multi-year transformation that will redefine our operating model? Do we call McKinsey or Goldman? Do we rename our innovation lab and hope Wall Street rewards the headline? Or do we accept that real transformation may require years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and leadership courage that can’t be outsourced?

Most boards have seen what happens when major technology replatforming goes wrong: a decade of effort, a billion dollars in spend, and a system that never gets deployed. Before we approve one more dollar, we should be honest about what this transformation demands—and what it risks.

And then, when the CEO steps out of the room and the directors meet privately, I would ask the hardest question of all. It’s the question that determines whether the company will adapt or fall behind, whether it will lead the next generation of mortgage lending or drift into irrelevance.

Do we have the right leader in place?

Because if AI truly is a paradigm shift, it isn’t just a technology issue—it’s a leadership test. The institutions that win won’t simply “adopt AI.” They’ll rethink what it means to serve customers, manage risk, and earn trust in a world where everyone—borrowers, regulators, and bad actors alike—has access to the same intelligence.

Everyone else will keep holding strategy off-sites in Maui, talking about innovation, until the market—and the machines—move forward without them.

#artificialintelligence #AI #leadership #digital #lending