How New American Funding 
supports its mission to democratize 
home ownership with generative AI (2024)

0:09

I’m Andrew Strickman, the Chief Marketing Officer at New American Funding. We are one of the nation’s largest independent mortgage banks. One of the things that first drew me to this company 10 months ago was our mission to define a path to home ownership for everyone, including previously underrepresented and diverse communities where access to lending has been restricted in the past.

At NAF, I have a team of almost 60 people focused across multiple functions — creative, performance marketing, brand communications, content marketing, social media, and a handful of others.

1:08

When I arrived at NAF, one of the first things I recognized was that our content team was underwater. They were responsible not only for developing content for our blog, but also many other forms of content marketing, with a focus on SEO, to drive users both to our site organically, as well as supporting our performance marketing team.

Our content team was also responsible for external communications, PR, and supporting the needs of the organization as we grew. I quickly realized people were drowning in work, and the quality of the work was suffering. One of the first things I did was suggest that we look into some AI solutions, not to replace anybody or do the work for us, but to support the content development process and figure out how to make it more efficient and give some relief to the team.

2:27

I was familiar with Writer in part because of the phenomenal job with outdoor advertising billboards along Highway 101 in the Bay Area, where I live. I also happened to run ‌into a Writer employee at a conference, and had a great conversation with them.

When I got to NAF, we reached out to Writer. They quickly connected with us and between their existing product capabilities and vision for the future, we realized there were many ways for us to utilize their enterprise AI platform for content. It became a no-brainer for us.

4:04

Being in a regulated industry always brings with it an enormous number of challenges as it relates to what a company can and can’t say, both internally and externally. It was very important to us that any AI platform we considered really understood how regulatory landscapes can impact marketing and content development.

We were really pleased when we began the conversations with Writer to hear not only about the considerations that have been made for the financial services industry‌, but how regulatory checks and balances are built into the platform.

Our legal team, who generally are pretty open-minded when it comes to new technologies and how they impact the work that we do, were also really pleased. They felt comfortable with the rigor that was in place and the way that the AI platform considered what could and couldn’t be said, including how we could enforce language in Writer. The legal team has been very pleased, so much so that they’re wondering how they might use Writer to support their efforts.

10:19

We’ve been able to use the Writer platform across our entire marketing department, which has been really impactful. Everything from writing YouTube video descriptions, where Writer can analyze the video and come up with keyword-heavy descriptions, to job postings, to social media posts, even using it to help us write search advertising and in the condensed format you need for SEM. With Writer, we can create SEO-valuable content that demonstrates the importance of NAF in the home buying process and creates a lot of opportunities for us to rise in organic search ‌rankings. The list is endless.

9:30

We’re also excited about the rollout of the customized AI app that helps us refresh content that may be a little tired or outdated and not as relevant anymore. We can feed the existing content into the app with a specific set of updates we want to make, and the outputs have been nothing short of amazing.

6:08

I’m thrilled that my team is wholeheartedly embracing and utilizing new features every time they are rolled out. The new voice functionality is one of the recent important features for us, where we can feed written and spoken content from our executives or members of our team and generate content in their voices. Coming from the world of brand leadership, one thing that’s incredibly important is making sure that we are speaking in one unified voice and being able to update that voice as our brand evolves.

7:05

Our team ‌also frequently uses the image analyzer app. We get an enormous amount of marketplace data about the financial services and mortgage industry, and being able to take charts and graphs and distill them down into easy-to-evaluate and explainable language has been helpful as we grow our outbound content around these topics.

3:46

We’ve even looked at expanding the usage of Writer beyond just the marketing team to other functions within our organization, like sales and support.

17:46

Our company mission is to define a path to homeownership for everyone, including previously underrepresented, diverse communities that may have been denied access to lending in the past. The language around how we discuss these topics has changed over time, and I’ve been really proud of the team at NAF for leading the charge at updating the language to be more inclusive. With its governance features like style guide and terms, Writer has been incredibly helpful in ensuring that we are speaking with inclusive language to a diverse audience.

7:34

Writer translation capabilities have also come into play. We do a lot of work in Spanish language, and we’re one of the top lenders to Latino homebuyers in the United States. Having ‌language translation functionality in Writer allows us not only to support the needs of outbound communication, but to take in a lot of content that’s written in a foreign language and translate it to English for our team.

13:59

It was really important to me that we were supported from the time we signed the contract through the initial few months of our usage. The Writer customer success team has been incredible at making the onboarding experience very comfortable for us.

It’s been really important in the longer term not only to ask questions of the Writer team, but also to find a community of people who are using Writer internally in different ways and learning from them along the way. Our internal AI evangelist, Karen, launched a homegrown support group for Writer because people wanted to engage around topics that were meaningful to them, share best practices, and ask questions. Karen developed a bunch of how-to videos for the platform and shared them, which has been really helpful and well-received.

19:15

On top of all the work she’s done to bring Writer on board, Karen has had a huge task of writing a company white paper focused on lending in diverse and underrepresented communities, coming up with an action plan, and putting that white paper out into the world.

Had it not been for Writer, Karen would not have had the time or the ability to do any of that work. Writer allowed her not only to take time back for herself, but also allowed the team to take on some of the other work that she would have been responsible for so she could take on new strategic initiatives.

15:51

We are pretty amazed with the results we’re seeing. We’re saving 360 hours a week after only six or seven months of usage. The fact that we can reduce our time to market so drastically demonstrates to me how important Writer has become to us.

16:34

Another success metric that we’re proud of is what used to take us two to three days to create content and get it ready to publish now only takes about two to three hours. This takes a lot of pressure off my team, and creates an opportunity to create net-new content quicker.

11:19

Our workflow has definitely also improved from a compliance perspective since we adopted Writer. Previously, it was a pretty laborious process. We’d get a request from a stakeholder for a particular piece of content. We’d write that content, review it with legal, send it back to the stakeholder for review, the stakeholder would have changes, and it’d come back to us again.

Because Writer is trained on our regulatory areas and language, we can significantly reduce the amount of time spent in the content review process. Now, we’ll get a request from a stakeholder, write a piece of content, use Writer to help in our compliance review, share it with the stakeholder, and there are generally few changes.

20:23

Our executive leadership has embraced this move into the world of AI, and that top-down effort has been a positive driving force. But if I had one bit of advice for leaders who are thinking about dipping their toes into the water of AI, it would be to just get in and play with it.

Too often, there are so many decisions that are made formally and conservatively based on business and investment value. But until you actually experience what AI can do at a really core level for your teams, you’re not going to experience AI in the way that you should, and you won’t use it in a way that’ll benefit your company. So the one piece of advice I have is play. Explore, experiment, and have fun with it.

12:30

There are some other features we don’t use regularly now that I hope we can use in the future. One that’s really important is the ability to take audio content, summarize it, and basically crunch the numbers.

Additionally, our Consumer Direct loan business is very important to us. Loan officers work daily with customers on loan applications, credit checks, and preparing to lock a rate and fund a loan. We plan to take an enormous amount of audio data from those conversations, feed it into Writer, and use Writer to help us create better verbiage choices and ideate how to have better conversations, essentially as a coaching tool for our entire sales organization.

21:45

We’re excited to continue using and experimenting with generative AI. Our creative team is about to launch a new marketing campaign focused on reverse mortgages, which tend to be targeted toward older homeowners. We’ve used AI to create the entire campaign. It’s video, it’s audio, it’s display advertising, it’s social media. All of the imagery, all of the video content was generated using AI. We’re excited to get it out into the world and see how people react to it.