Mike Yu on the Problem of Building a One-Click Mortgage

You can do a lot of things with the click of a button nowadays. You can get insurance, open a bank account, or trade 347 different stocks all at once via an ETF. But one thing you definitely can't do via a single click, is refinance your mortgage. In fact, securing a mortgage still requires reams of paperwork -- a lot of which has to be physically mailed to all the different parties involved. So why is mortgage finance stuck in the stone age? In this episode we speak with Mike Yu, co-founder and CEO of Vesta, about why we don't have one-click mortgages ReFis. He describes how a mix of clunky legacy IT systems and regulation have combined to make mortgage finance a technological laggard. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Key Insights:
Mike Yu’s career and how he got his start — 2:55
How Blend simplified the mortgage application — 5:15
The relationship between lenders and GSEs — 7:16
Why it’s hard to update and modernize systems that lenders use — 9:32
The life cycle cycle of a mortgage in terms of technology — 12:45
How a complex web of rules and regulations hinder one-clickness — 15:59
Challenges in integrating systems — 17:56
The housing market is powered by FedEx — 20:50
How the 2008 crisis influenced changes in the mortgage application process — 23:45
Why the mortgage application process is still so manual — 27:42
How easy is it to commit some sort of mortgage fraud — 30:23
Why we can’t have a mortgage product with a floating rate that only resets downward — 31:53
Can blockchain come to the rescue? — 38:44