Track 2: Build vs. buy circa 2022: State of tech stack options & execution

Where is our industry on our journey toward cloud-native, open-API models enabling flexibility and adaptability for lenders? This session of lenders, servicers plus new and established tech providers will dive into tech stack decision-making for 2023 and beyond. 

Transcription:

Bonnie Sinnock (00:06):

Hello, and welcome to our panel on five versus Bill Cerca 2022, where we'll discuss the tech stack options and execution. I apologize for being a little late. I was in another panel. I'm Bonnie Snuck, Capital Market Editor at National Mortgage News, and with me today, our Scott Week Senior Technology Director at Ally Bank and Mike Yu co-founder and CEO of Vesta. They may tell you a little more about their professional roles and how they inform their expertise as we go, but for now, I wanted to jump into our discussion. I'll start out by asking each of you to give an overview of how or whether the recent shift in the mortgage market has changed lender considerations when it comes to buy versus bill. And maybe we'll start with Scott on that question.

Scott Weeks (00:56):

Sure. I think it's an interesting time. On the one hand, folks can see from the, all the presenters and the demos here, the range of options has never been greater. The kind of scope of problems that need to be solved, there's a lot of smart people trying to figure those out. At the same time, you've got a lot of stuff going on in the market where people are much more conscious of the expense of maintaining a platform, of implementing a platform and trying to make decisions about do I continue to invest now or do I need to pull back? So I think it's a very dynamic environment. It's really gonna vary in my mind by the lender and your risk profile and also what you're trying to accomplish.

Bonnie Sinnock (01:36):

Mike, what's your thought on that question?

Mike Yu (01:38):

Yeah, I think as the market has slowed down very dramatically. We've actually seen not just in technology but also in labor, people thinking more and more about how do I shift this from like a permanent fixed cost that I'm stuck with to something I can turn on and turn off as the cycle moves. It seems like when you're at the top of the cycle, no one thinks about how Morgan's a cyclical business. When you're at the bottom of the cycle, everyone thinks about how Morgan's a cyclical business. So when you know you're a cyclical business, buying tends to actually be a little bit easier where you can like taper down your investment and taper up your investment as opposed to building where you've got this big fixed cost and this big cost of ownership and so we've actually seen a lot of lenders saying. We're spending eight, nine figures a year maintaining one to these proprietary things. How can we get off of them? We'll see when in the boom, people might be very happy to invest nine figures in building something new. But I thin there's definitely been a shift towards just variable cost in general. You see that with some of the labor and the outsourcing people are doing, and you also see it on technology side.

Bonnie Sinnock (02:33):

Yeah, and I think when we had our pre-discussion on this, Scott, you were talking about how there is the question of the price of tech talent in today's market. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Scott Weeks (02:44):

Yeah, I've just a little background and I've been building and running mortgage technology teams for about 20 years. I've been in retail wholesale consumer direct at a range of bank and non-bank lenders. So I've kind of been on a number of sides of the build versus buy equation. I think we always talk about build versus buy as a decision in the context of an a specific system but, the first thing you've gotta do as a lender is take a step back and look at your organization and decide what you want to be where you feel like you're able to compete, where you want to invest? So, I think folks will say, and I know my friend Julian Hebburn has said that, every lender needs to be a technology company.

(03:25)

And I agree with that, but that doesn't mean that every lender has to build their own software development shop, right? So you've gotta think about what your value proposition is and find technology solutions that fit into that, and then figure out how to integrate those. So I would say for the vast majority of lenders, you need to be very careful about going out and, and trying to build technology teams that are actually building software, because there's a lot that goes along with that. you've gotta maintain that over good times and bad, right? You can't build something and then your team goes away and then you can't maintain it. And you also once you have a team of people that you're paying, they want build more stuff, right? So you're gonna continue to, to accumulate that over time, which makes it harder and harder to maintain.

(04:06)

So I think you gotta be really, really careful about that. And even at Ally Bank, and we have a, great company, a lot of great benefits, and the war for talent is very real. And we've seen, our costs for software engineers go up pretty significantly over the last couple years to the point where we even had to kind of over kind of a wholesale way, give people salary adjustments to compete with the market, even people that are happy where they are. So you gotta really be thoughtful about that.

Bonnie Sinnock (04:32):

Mike, do you have anything to add on that?

Mike Yu (04:34):

Yeah, even as a technology founder, I always tell people like the number one problem is hiring engineers. Out in Silicon Valley, people are getting, like, you have five years of experience and you're getting a $500,000 total compensation offer and this is like not at all uncommon. So the price of tech talent, one thing about the mortgage industry actually is, it is very cyclical, especially in a time like this, the price of tech talent does not move with the mortgage industry, right? Like, it kind of moves based on what Google and Facebook are paying. Google and Facebook do not stop paying very large salaries when mortgages are down and so, especially these days, being competitive with those kinds of businesses for tech talent is a really big struggle even for us and especially probably for people who are hit even harder by the current market than we are.

Bonnie Sinnock (05:17):

Wanted to talk a little bit also about, given the current market conditions what the considerations are. And we talked about this a little ahead of time too, as far as who your counterparties are, if you are going to do a buy strategy versus a build strategy are, you have to factor in the considerations as far as whether your vendors might merge or, even God forbid go out of business. But it's a tough time for the mortgage industry and if their fortunes are linked primarily to the mortgage industry, do you have to be careful of that?

Scott Weeks (05:52):

Wanna?

Mike Yu (05:52):

Take that? Yeah, I mean that we've definitely seen it over and over. We're a pretty early stage company and the number one thing that we probably get asked once people start doing serious diligence is like, how much money do you have in the bank and how long is that gonna last to you? So there are a number of players, we are very fortunate to raise a ton of money last year when like, honestly, venture dollars are kind of free. But there is a very real counterparty risk, which is you can't switch to a vendor that you're really gonna depend on and then have them go out of business. You also have kind of, who are there other customers that people like to ask a lot? Because a really important thing if you're gonna buy technology is you don't wanna be the only customer.

(06:28)

Cause then you're basically like, either that company's not gonna be viable, or you're paying them the full cost of building and maintaining the software, at which point you're basically building it, just have a different corporate entity. And so making sure not only that they're viable, but that the rest of their customer base is also ideally businesses that you think are gonna be viable is all kind of necessary to make the math kind of, not building it and it's said, buying it from somebody and that cost getting amortized over a bunch of other lenders that's gotta work for you. And so we've definitely seen as lenders are kind of starting to take a hit, and then accordingly vendors are gonna surely follow increase scrutiny on kind of what the cash balance looks like.

Scott Weeks (07:07):

From the lender perspective, when you see consolidation in the industry, you start to get concerned that never leads to lower prices, even though if you read the press releases, it's all about efficiencies and consolidation is supposed to drive lower prices. So you've gotta think about like, whose ecosystem am I playing in and how locked in is that you don't want to get locked to certain vendors who have all of the pricing power, right? So I, you, gotta balance that again. Sorry, there's a lot of new entrant that maybe you take a little bit of a risk on. You gotta do your due diligence, but if you've chosen systems that are fairly open, then that least gives you options kind of at the margins. If you're kind of built your whole existence around a core LS and it's very hard for you to get off, then that's a little bit of a different problem. But at least at the periphery, if you've got open systems as, vendors come and go you've got some choice. So you just want to try to maintain that as much as you can.

Bonnie Sinnock (08:01):

I think we also talked about kind of the flip side to that question, which is, if you are gonna work with vendors, are you up for a lot of vendor management? I do hear a lot of companies say that can be a heavy lift. So I wondered if you could talk about that a little.

Scott Weeks (08:16):

I mean, so here's the problem, right? I mean, as technologists, we wanna build stuff, we wanna be vendor managers. However, you gotta think about what's best for the company. So, when I think about it in those terms, you really have to think about the team that you're going to build the type of talent that you've gotta acquire and what it's gonna take to run that your business, the long term. I would, when I think about where I am, I've got access to more software engineers now than I ever have. I've got our deposits business, our online brokerage and mortgage, right? And there's still lots of stuff that I would not build from scratch today. I would go out and try to find configurable systems that are based on open APIs and be more of kind of, I'm gonna integrate that stuff into my processes and my workflow and kind of leave it at that.

Bonnie Sinnock (09:05):

Do you have anything to add to that, Mike?

Mike Yu (09:07):

Yeah, I think that to Scott's point, there definitely is a burden of vendor management. We've got a lot of vendors, but if you really want a solution tailored to your business and tailored to specifically what you're trying to achieve, you can either build it, which is way more expensive, or you can string together a bunch of vendors, which is certainly more annoying than managing one vendor. But I think, the trade off shouldn't be like, do I manage one vendor or 50 vendors, or hopefully not 50, but it's really like, do I build a bunch of software myself or manage a bunch of vendors? And I think, to that point, that's not anyone, any technologist's like favorite version of the job. But it's certainly, well, I starting the job very likely, more cost effective.

Bonnie Sinnock (09:45):

One thing I was curious about is, I kind of hear that the stereotype and maybe, stereotypes may come from somewhere in this case that's always the large company that wants to have the in-house tech unit, and it's always the small company that's going to go the bender route. Is that true or do you think there are exceptions to that?

Scott Weeks (10:04):

I would say there are exceptions to that. I mean, larger companies clearly have the scale that they have more options. If you look at the top 25 in the top 50 lenders, right? Those are companies that really can, spend the money to build custom solutions. Yeah, so that's kind of how I would think about that.

Mike Yu (10:23):

I think that's just like how the math works. The way I would really think about building technology in any industry is, you're gonna spend some like X dollars, which is a fixed amount, call it like $50 million to build some solution. And then the number of loans that solution applies to, you get to kinda like divide it out. Like if over 10 years it does 50 million loans, the cost is like a dollar alone and if you do 500 loans a year and you do it for 10 years, then the cost is like a thousand dollars a alone. So this is one of the nice things about buying software is that vendor hopefully is serving, a million loans a year because they can serve a bunch of your competitors as well. Then you really get to amortize that cost down and you pay them way less than it would cost you to build it yourself.

(10:58)

That also means if you're doing a million loans a year yourself like rocket, then you get to spend a lot more in technology and it still looks like, a hundred bucks alone or 200 bucks alone. Whereas if you make that investment and you do a thousand loans a month, that investment looks a lot less attractive on a per loan basis. And so it really is just all about it's fixed cost to build software and then like using it each time is free. And so the bigger you are, the more sense that can make.

Scott Weeks (11:23):

I would also think about we hear, buy for commodity build differentiators, and, and that's right, but also in my mind applies to lenders of scale. I think your kind of average middle market lender and and below, technology is, is really only a differentiator if your technology sucks or if you've kind of exposed your internal complexity and processes to your customer because things don't fit together well, right? So, from that perspective, a lender that can do like a bunch of sophisticated ab testing to figure out, like, if I make this one tweak on my UI flow for engineering alone, I'm gonna get, 0.5% more a conversion. most lenders don't have the timer energy to do that. Pick a vendor that does that well, make sure that they've integrated that ab testing into their process to continue to make their product better. And put your money on that.

Bonnie Sinnock (12:21):

We're in the middle, obviously of a market shift right now. So I wondered is that changing the dynamic of bio versus build or bifurcating it? And in some ways where you have some systems you want to build some systems where you wanna buy, we've had a big interest rate change. Is there a shift there or not so much?

Scott Weeks (12:44):

Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, folks at the conference have talked about, like you, everybody's trying to optimize their cost at this point and increase their conversion, right? And so how do you do those things? And that's not necessarily spend a bunch of money on the technology. It could be like rethink your processes. I really enjoyed the Dennis Snow's presentation and the kind of the experience mapping, right? So taking a step back and saying, what does this look like from my customer perspective and how can I make changes in the process, whether it's technology or otherwise, to kind of solve some of those pain points and then think about, all right, I need some technology solutions to do those things, but be very thoughtful and specific about what you're trying to solve for and where you're gonna put your, your investment dollars.

Mike Yu (13:24):

One thing that also happens, I think when things like this happen in the market is it feels like lenders have gotten a little bit more in some cases short term oriented. It's like, how do we make sure that the next year we feel profitable, How do we make sure that over the next 18 months everything's fine? So in that case, it's actually very hard to justify like a big investment with a long time horizon for a return, like building some new system and buying some people are, even when they're looking at buying, I think increasingly looking for things they can do that are gonna give them a quick ROI, because there's a very, like here and now kind of mentality in a lot of lenders that I'm seeing, which makes it harder to do these longer term investments.

Bonnie Sinnock (14:05):

So we're seeing some different strategies and some shifts in loan channels right now. So I wondered if you had any suggestions to this buy versus build equation as far as that sort of change. Are there certain strategies that accommodate, say a monoline vendor lender versus one that has multiple channels, or if you're dropping in and outta channels, does that affect your buy versus build options?

Mike Yu (14:30):

Well, if you're dropping in and out, the nice thing is that when you buy software, it's much easier to like turn it on and turn it off . If you build software, it like takes a really long time to turn on and then it also is very expensive to write off if you're gonna turn it off. And so, but I don't necessarily think that we've seen a lot of lenders dropping in and out right now. They're definitely lenders trying to turn stuff on because they're trying to figure out, where they're gonna make a lot more money. I do think that one of the problems with having a bunch of channels is you kind of have to build a different software stack for each channels in some case there's some commonality, but in many cases it's like you need a slightly different set of functionality for wholesale and for retail.

(15:06)

And so that problem I mentioned of like, well, if you do a million loans a year, then you can spend a lot more on technology. If you have to build two software solutions to support it instead of one, then you're really, it's as if you do 500,000 loans a year or something, which of course you can probably still build software if you do that many loans a year. but you really have to think about how many loans am I gonna get to apply this solution to? And that's what makes it worth the cost of investing or not. And the people who do more channels at the same loan volume, it's just, it's again, it's harder math to make, to make that build work.

Scott Weeks (15:33):

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, complexity kills agility, right? And so if you have built custom solutions across multiple channels, that just means you have more stuff to manage and more interdependencies inside your organization, more work to do more expense. And every time you wanna make a change, you've gotta think about is that an impact on this one channel or all the channels? So that just reinforces if you're a multichannel lender, you need different solutions for different customers. And so in my view that would lead me to look harder for buy solutions that can serve those needs and just figure out again, how to hook them together, where they need to be hooked together.

Bonnie Sinnock (16:08):

I wondered about the question of security. Do we see any shifts in the kind of threats that we need to focus on these days? And is the management of that security today easier for buy versus build or better suited for different types of companies in that context?

Scott Weeks (16:29):

Well, I would, that's just another consideration if, say you're a medium size lender, small lender, you can afford to put together, an engineering team of, 8, 10, 12 people. If you're running a relatively shoestring budget like that, you have to be thinking about information security, right? And so it's one thing if you're, you're working with vendors that you, they've been vetted, you got the right, pen testing in place, maybe they've got, sock reports and all the things that you can do and during due diligence to at least get yourself comfortable that they've got good security practices. But when you start building things yourselves exposing, your data and your APIs to the internet it doesn't take much of getting something wrong or missing a step to, create a pretty significant security breach. So that's another reason why if you're gonna go down that build road, you really have to make sure that you can make the commitment to care for that kind of stuff.

Mike Yu (17:22):

We at Vesta spend a lot of time and a lot of energy on security. And so that's just like energy that each lender then would have to spend themselves on stuff. The thing that is hard about security though, is you can't really fully outsource security to your vendor because it is kind of, your security is always gonna be about your weakest link. If someone told me that, you know my point of sale is, bank grade encryption and my LOS is bank grid encryption and all my systems that I buy from all these vendors, they all have soc twos and ISOs and they're all super secure and all that great stuff. But what I do is, at the end when it's time to reconcile with accounting, I export every single name social and date of birth in my LOS and I email it to my accounting person and my accounting person's password is password 1234.

(18:03)

I can tell you where all those socials are getting leaked. And it's not from your POS or your LOS or any of your vendors, right? And so there is this tendency where people are like, well, if I buy the most secure vendors, that's gonna help my security posture. That's definitely true. But you also have to think about security as this holistic org-wide problem and you can't fully outsource that ever. And that's, I think, a thing where you, you can't just like buy a security solution off the shelf, if that makes sense. You do have to kind of ingrain that everywhere.

Bonnie Sinnock (18:28):

Right? That's my understanding of the CFP's traditional stance on compliance is you can have vendors, but you as the lender are ultimately responsible for any breaches of compliance that the vendors are involved in. So there has to be a certain amount of due diligence there.

Mike Yu (18:46):

Yeah, I think that actually is a reason that historically a lot of the big players have tried to build stuff. One thing that actually has steered away from that is that just like building technology gets easier every year, but the complexity of mortgage goes up every year. And so there's some convergence naturally where like the vendors are getting better and build better at building this stuff over time. But there definitely was a tendency of like, well, if we're gonna be accountable for it anyways, then we should just build it in house and own it and then it can align with our compliance interpretation and we can be very safe about it. So there's definitely been, like ultimately as the lender, you're still responsible for making sure that you're serving customers in the right way, that you're keeping their data secure, that you're following the applicable regs. So that is a place where finding the right partners that if you're gonna buy something, becomes really important cuz what they do kind of you are liable for in some sense.

Bonnie Sinnock (19:35):

And that brings me to my next question, which was are there new regulatory considerations in this question?

Scott Weeks (19:45):

I mean that there is increasing in our organization, there's a lot of third party risk management controls that are some of our internal, some of them are response to external regulators. I wouldn't say there's anything that's been a massive shift, but I as the technology gets more complex and they kind of bad actors become more sophisticated, those are things that just naturally start to ramp up over time. So again, you, I think to Mike's point, you have to do those things anyway. You have to have good security practices. We spend a lot of time testing for fishing to make sure our employees aren't falling for stupid fishing emails, right? Since that's a big threat area. but you just generally, one way or another, you've gotta be prepared for making sure your counterparties are doing all the right things, but you equally have to do that internally. So again, if you're building your own technology, that's just an additional layer of, of kind of knowledge and and control that you need to have.

Bonnie Sinnock (20:43):

What's your, oh, go ahead.

Mike Yu (20:44):

The other thing in mortgage reg that just like drives me nuts is, it just gets only more complicated every year. Like every year every state is gonna release another three things you have to do. Every county is gonna release another thing you have to do. And of course that's like 3,800 plus, 50 times three, like new things that you have to think about. And so because the regulations get more complicated every year, pretty much monotonically like, I don't think I've ever seen a year, I haven't been in mortgage that long, but where like people looked at it and they were like, Oh, you know what, originating mortgages got easier this year. The problem is if you build your own technology and you need to solve these regulatory problems with that technology, that means you have to update your technology every year to do that as well.

(21:20)

And this goes back to what, how many loans do you have to do a year where it's worth the fixed cost of like a bunch of lawyers who are gonna follow all those regs and they're gonna hand it to some product manager who's gonna give it to an engineer to actually go and like build, the updates to that system. How many loans have to go through the system a year for that cost to be worth it? And it becomes overwhelmingly likely that you should just buy that from somebody who does way more loans as like a software platform and I've really almost started to wonder recently, and this is just like a mortgage wide problem, they're 50 states of regs and they get only more complicated every year. It's such a scale problem in mortgage and building technology is like a prime example of that where you want just like one person to do this work for the whole industry instead of everyone they're doing it themselves.

Bonnie Sinnock (22:02):

Right. And I have heard, and it sounds, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think you, I hear you agreeing with this, is that 's sort of a big void or space that needs to be filled in the Morgan industry is that state level compliance on the tech side.

Mike Yu (22:16):

State level compliance is really hard. I think that there are a number of really interesting compliance companies that are, building very state focused and like disclosure or compliance level like logic focused engines. The really unique part of those is you have to basically hire a team of lawyers and a bunch of engineers and like it's actually harder for the lawyers probably like the writing the code of that kind of system is not the hard part. The hard part is like getting the lawyers enough of them we're actually going to read every time something new comes out in a lender letter and a regulatory enforcement, those kinds of things. So there are definitely some interesting companies that are very lawyer focused and very reg focused that are, that are working on that stuff. And for them it's like, can we expose it just as a service that all it does is you run the loan data through and it tells you whether you're compliant with, these like 70 things you have to compliant with.

Bonnie Sinnock (23:09):

And does that process get easier or harder depending on whether you pick a buy versus build approach?

Mike Yu (23:15):

Well ideally, you buy that piece at least, like you don't wanna build that yourself, right? But if you buy also something that comes with a pre-bake productized integration, it's a lot easier. Otherwise you have to go build that integration yourself. And those actually tend to be pretty hard integrations cause they're very data rich integrations, right? Like you've gotta send pretty much everything about the loan if you really want to know if you fill out all the rigs. And so I mean, almost every integration is easier to buy because you give them dollars than to build, so.

Bonnie Sinnock (23:45):

Right, makes sense. The other question I was gonna ask was about, we sort of have, and we talked about this a little in the pre-discussion too this mix of vendors, where you have kind of the vendor that offers a suite of solutions versus more the standalones that you link together through integrations, right? What is the consideration like in that? Has the market change affected the question of which approach you go with? I wonder if you could talk about that.

Scott Weeks (24:19):

I think it goes back to the lender and the scale that you're operating at. I mean we know who the big l OS providers are and they each have kind of their ecosystems of services that are kind of preintegrated. The integration in some cases is kind of like lowest common denominator. And so, maybe you could do better if you were building a custom, but do you really wanna spend the time there?

Mike Yu (24:41):

Yeah, I think when you think about whether you're gonna get this kind of like jigsaw of stuff that you put together, you're just gonna go try to buy one solution. There's a few things people think about and this is true in all markets, but some of these things are more true in this market than others. There's a flexibility piece especially, we talked a little bit about counterparty risk. If you have this open jigsaw where you can kind of swap out vendors as you need to, if you get into like a pricing negotiation with one of them and you don't like it, you can swap them out for one of their competitors and that gives you a lot of leverage. If one of them, heaven forbid goes outta business, you can swap. And so there's a lot more optionality if you take that jigsaw and you put it together and you kind of control your own destiny.

(25:17)

If you go with a all in one solution that can, save you on vendor management, it can maybe cost less. Although given their price and power, that's kind of up for debate and then of course you are subject, especially in a market like this kind of, unless you're very large beholden to, hey, if they want to raise prices on you 25% and you're like, well put the market's down and I'm getting, my profit margin is going to five basis points, they're still gonna do it and it's really hard to have the flexibility to do anything about that.

Bonnie Sinnock (25:44):

I wondered coz we've talked about this consideration of will you have a company go out of business? Will you have a company be acquired, a vendor? Have either of you had real life experience with that? And can you talk about how that kind of plays out in sort of an anecdotal example? If you don't that's okay.

Mike Yu (26:06):

I've only worked at vendors and I've yet to go out of business.

Scott Weeks (26:11):

I mean you're always during due diligence, right? You're trying to kind of gameplay out the scenarios like how much, how much of our are we putting in this basket and what's our, exit strategy look like? I mean, you do things like, alright, source code, escrow, if things go really bad in that vendor just disappears, but then you've got source code and can you, can you really management, right? So it's a great idea lawyers like that. But in practical terms, if, you dump source code on your tech team from some vendor, like can they really manage that? So, it's always a consideration. It's probably less so with some of the bigger players, they're gonna be around some of the smaller players if and if you've chosen wisely, then theoretically you can swap those out with, relatively, limited pain and suffering.

(26:51)

And I mean that's, I think what what's interesting about what Vest is doing is like reimagining what the OS is and scaling it down, but then making it very open so that, a lender can go and choose the solutions that they wanted. So curious to see how that, that plays out over time. And it's, everybody has kind of wrestled with integration in their l os and the kind of the dream is yeah, being able to plug and play. so I would say just, be very thoughtful when you choose your vendors, not just with the traditional due diligence questions, not just the security questions, but also, when they say, yeah, we can integrate with anybody really need to dig into that, right? Are they following the open API specifications? do they have kind of low code, no code kind capabilities so that you're not stuck in building custom code when if you wanna extend the platform.

(27:31)

So I think that's, when I say like you, you need to be a tech savy lender, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a software development shop. I think those are some of the things that I'm thinking about is choose your vendors wisely, think about the overall ecosystem and the value that they're gonna provide to your customers. And then don't, you could go out there and buy a bunch of solutions that just go overwhelm. So I would start with like, what are the things that are most important to your value proposition? Get those vendors in place and really just leverage them as best you can.

Bonnie Sinnock (27:59):

Right. I got the high sign that we're kind of out of time now, is that correct or do we have a little more time? Four minutes, few, a few more minutes. Okay. Do you either of you have some kind of closing remarks you wanna make or observations?

Mike Yu (28:15):

Yeah, I think based on what Scott just said, it's actually really interesting reframing, we talked about this like you can build or you can buy, but to Scott's point, if you have an open ecosystem and you can kind of pick whoever you want, you almost get to build your own technology stack. You're just building it at a higher level of abstraction where you don't have to like, build it by writing a million lines of codes. You instead build it by picking 15 vendors and how they're gonna stitch together and configuring those systems. And in that way you get a lot of the freedom to do what's gonna serve your business best and to customize just by who you choose to, to interoperate and how you can figure those systems. And so you get a lot of the pros of building and hopefully it's a lot cheaper than actually, hiring software engineers to write all that.

Scott Weeks (28:58):

Yeah, I would say builds as little as possible and look to take those solutions and like put them together in a creative way that delivers value to your customers. That would be my my advice and can speaking from a position where I could probably build anything, I wanted that I could sell up for management cuz we've got the resources for it, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.

Bonnie Sinnock (29:18):

Okay. Well thank you so much. Awesome.

Mike Yu (29:21):

Thank you.

Scott Weeks (29:22):

Thank you.

Bonnie Sinnock (29:22):

Thanks everyone for coming.