For many, business is slow out there, and the industry waits for the House vote on the abusive trigger lead bill. Depository banks continue to focus on residential lending in their own footprint while scaling back distant originations, and IMBs continue to look at staffing with a critical eye. A safe prediction is that this will continue, although people have grown more skeptical of others making predictions to grab headlines. A recession has yet to materialize, nor has a tidal wave of delinquencies and foreclosures. In fact, quite the opposite: The OCC Mortgage Metrics Report, First Quarter 2025 showed that 97.6 percent of mortgages included in the report were current and performing at the end of the quarter, an increase from 97.4 percent one year earlier. And The percentage of seriously delinquent mortgages decreased from the first quarter of 2024. MLOs motor forward and on today’s episode of Now Next Later at 10am PT, Sasha and Jeremy welcome Jake Vermillion, CMO at Mortgage Champions, to discuss the evolving role of mortgage loan officers and its impact on training and performance. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week is sponsored by Optimal Blue. OB bridges the primary and secondary mortgage markets to deliver the industry’s only end-to-end capital markets platform, helping lenders maximize profitability and operate efficiently so they can help American borrowers achieve the dream of homeownership. Today’s has an interview with Argyle’s John Hardesty on what’s driving lender migration in the LOS and POS space, how tech stacks are being evaluated more strategically, why “conversion” matters more than ever in verification workflows, and what true interoperability means for mortgage fintech.)