Fishing for ROI on Tech Investment: #MBAIMB26

(Cunningham, left, and Lee)

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.–It can be difficult to measure the ROI on your firm’s tech investment. But mortgage industry veteran Mark Cunningham has some suggestions that will help.

Cunningham is CEO and co-founder of mortgage processing artificial intelligence technology firm TRAiNED, Inc., Pittsburgh. The Software-as-a-Service firm says its mission is to modernize mortgage processing with AI that delivers measurable ROI without forcing lenders to overhaul their systems.

Owen Lee, 2026 MBA chair-elect and chief executive officer of Success Mortgage Partners, Inc., Plymouth, Mich., interviewed Cunningham in a general session here at MBA’s Independent Mortgage Bankers conference.

Cunningham, who also co-founded Sales Boomerang, noted he has worked with hundreds of IMBs, banks and lenders during his career. “Being an early adopter is important, but you still want to go with a plan,” he said.

“Start with a map of your workflows,” Cunningham said. “Maybe you’ve done this: map it in a different way. I think you want to map the high touch. You can even map it by load type, because some loans are higher complexity than others. When you’re doing that, you’re looking for high effort/high variance tasks.”

Cunningham said to break it down into a four-square diagram. “Find which tasks are simple to tackle, and then take your expectation and break it down into slices.”

When feeding something into an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, it can be helpful to break up what you’re trying to get into a couple steps, Cunningham said. “That’s the same thing that’s going on in POCs [paid outside of closing] right now that you guys are probably dealing with.”

One final tip: “You want to be the AI,” Cunningham said. “It’s not like when we were building tech from 2012 to, say, 2021 or 2022. The newest wave of AI, I will tell you that every month we are swapping out models on LLMs. We are swapping LLMs. So you want to actually build a platform within your lending model of knowledge that can swap in and out.”