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Josh Feinblum
Co-founder, Stavvy
Age: 36
Industry experience: 16 years
When Josh Feinblum looks at mortgage lending five years from now, he hopes to see community banks and credit unions competing with larger institutions without having to go through extensive consolidation to make this happen. And he would like to see his financial technology platform, Stavvy, playing a role. Feinblum and Stavvy’s co-founder, Kosta Ligris, have built a mortgage lending platform to help community banks and credit unions manage and communicate with vendors that provide title, settlement, and appraisal services.
One feature of the platform supports remote notarization. Feinblum and Ligris had planned to launch Stavvy in March, and when the pandemic started, they were able to pivot to help lenders adapt to remote notarizations. Feinblum, who met Ligris when they were graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has spent his career working in fintech, with a focus on programming, cybersecurity and fraud.
Q: What is Stavvy?
A: When Kosta and I first started talking, we were predominantly focused on enabling the parties to facilitate a fully virtual closing. For all sorts of reasons, we felt like the market wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Ultimately, we pivoted, and the very first product that we built is a tool that helps connect lenders, especially community banks and credit unions, with the vendors that they use during the underwriting and settlement of residential loans. Specifically, how do they exchange documents securely, communicate in a way so everybody can see the communications and be on the same page, and removing what has historically been email from that process.
One of the major things that we help with is automating a lot of the compliance that goes into what it means to be a lender or one of the supporting vendors in this space. The functions that the vendors play in the process right now are incredibly manual, and so it’s really about automating the processes for both parties and bringing more transparency to them.
The market, for obvious reasons, is starting to become a lot more interested in hybrid closings or fully electronic or remote closings, and so that software we also offer. If lenders want to enable their vendors to facilitate a hybrid closing – collecting electronic signatures on all the documents, wherever it’s permitted – or a fully remote online notarization closing where that’s legally allowed, all of that is ultimately going to be part of the process that we support.
Q: Where does the name Stavvy come from?
A: Kosta and I spent a long time trying to find a name for this. We were brainstorming, and he started talking about his father, whose name was Stavros, obviously a very common Greek name. He mentioned that the nickname for Stavros was “Stavvy.” It was just a name that I think resonated with both of us in terms of building a serious but fun tech company in Boston. But there’s a lot of other meanings to it. In Greek, [Stavros] means intersection or cross, and so in our minds, it is the intersection of real estate and technology, something that is really just at the beginning of transforming how these transactions are going to occur. It struck a tone for a lot of reasons.
Q: How did you come to recognize the need at community banks and credit unions for this kind of a platform?
A: This honestly is what has me the most excited. As I was learning more about the process, you start to recognize that how these transactions occur is going to look a lot different 10 years from now. And as it stands today, smaller institutions don’t have the resources or teams to go out and build their own platform. The question was: How do we democratize access to great technology so that, as the experience changes, the entire industry doesn’t need to change along with it?
[Mortgage lending] is really one of the last unique industries in the United States where you frequently have access to very local experiences – with a local title company, a local settlement agent, a local bank – that you can partner with to go transact on the largest financial transaction of most people’s lives. That was exciting for us because it helped us play a role in ultimately transforming how these types of experiences change or improve, but not necessarily needing to transform the industry.
What became apparent to me is that there is a way that we can use technology to enable all of the stakeholders in the current process to operate more efficiently, to operate more securely and to provide a better experience not only for their external customers – the people borrowing money – but also the vendors that support them through the process and the bank employees themselves.
Q: What are your plans for growth?
A: The first and top priority, as the features really come online with more banks, is with really attacking how we integrate as many partners in that ecosystem as we can. Banks, especially smaller banks, have to deal with extraordinary fragmentation where their borrowers are getting more than three or four usernames and passwords during the process of buying a new home. The more that we can integrate to reduce that borrower friction, as well as the more we can integrate to reduce friction within the loan operations and closing departments of banks, I think that inherently will drive growth.
The underlying premise of everything that we’re doing is that by democratizing access to great technology for community banks and credit unions, we’re going to enable them to compete well into the future against any institution of any size, and I think that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. And we’re trying to do it starting in the great city of Boston. It’s been certainly challenging times for everyone, but there’s going to be a lot of change coming out of what we’re going through right now in terms of the importance of digitizing how our businesses operate to make sure that – whether it’s a future pandemic or other issues that come – we’re able to operate efficiently and keep everybody safe. It’s an exciting time for us to be in this space.
Feinblum’s Five Favorite Emerging Technologies
- Augmented reality
- CRISPR gene-editing
- Solar-powered drip irrigation
- Self-driving trucking
- Quantum computing
