 Again, thank you to everyone for joining us for the March Hyperledger subgroup meeting. Just a before we start, I want to express our appreciation to the Hyperledger Foundation to VIP in the chair for the Capital Markets that we fall under and Karen our Hyperledger contact, they make this meeting and this community possible and I just want to express our appreciation to them. Okay, as always, please note that this meeting is being recorded. I think you saw the notification and it does fall under the umbrella of the Hyperledger Foundation. So we ask that everyone abide by the antitrust policy and the code of conduct. The antitrust policy states that we avoid discussions of company specific products and pricing and projects. We don't make negative comments about other companies or products and the code of conduct states that we treat each other with respect, never discriminate and communicate constructively. We fully support Hyperledger's policy of openness, equity and inclusion and also for those new participants because we do have quite a few new participants today. We welcome you. We ask that you just say hello in the chat and also if you do introduce yourself, please let us know if there are any specific areas of interest. We try to keep this as interactive as possible. Here's our agenda for today. We've just gone through the meeting and housekeeping. We'll have some brief Hyperledger community information. And then we have, I think, an excellent presentation from Mark D'Angelo. I'll talk a little bit about him. If we have time, we'll go through the state of blockchain in the global mortgage industry, future agenda topics and Q&A. Okay, we always like to start off with this blockchain journey slide just to show that we're all on the same path. We may be on different points of the path, but we're all following this blockchain journey and we want to demonstrate the feasibility of blockchain technology as it relates to mortgage industry and define potential implementation paths for our industry. The one item that I did want to cover on Hyperledger is that there is a Hyperledger challenge. This is intended to harness the power of the Hyperledger community to ideate, develop, and launch innovative solutions. They want to show that any innovation that advances the current state of the art enterprise-grade distributed technology and then leverage those in different types of Hyperledger projects. Can't seem to speak this morning. Just before this call, I peruse the list of admissions to date for the call and they are awesome. We'll send out the link to take a look at those different submissions. And as I said, I took a look at it. I really want to know what Kizania 2.0 is. Just the name alone is interesting. All these other slides, I'm not going to go through, I'm just going to burn right through them, but we like to keep these in the deck and let people know about it so that if you're new, these slides will show you how to join the community, how to join and create an LFID, take a look at the Wiki, take a look at the training that's available. And I think I just blew through that one. And a lot of this training is free. So we welcome you guys to take a look at this information and to just be part of the community. Now I'd like to introduce you to really the meat of today's presentation. I'd like to introduce you to Mark P. DeAngelo. I first became aware of Mark after reading his article, Digital Transformations Meet the Metaverse in the MBA Newslink. It was an excellent article on the almost frenetic pace of change that's taking place within the financial services industry due to new technologies. Mark framed the challenge facing companies when he stated a really sobering statistic. 70 to 85% of all digital transformation initiatives historically fail with to be sustainable after 12 months. To me as someone that's been in this industry for over 20 years and has done digital transformations in that that's really sobering. So with that a little bit on Mark's background, besides being an 18 year monthly contributor to the MBA and MBA Newslink, Mark's also a chief innovation officer, a prior CIO and CTO for Aquin, a principal for AT Kearney, Ernst and Young, CSC and Stanford Research. Finally, he's a published author of five books such as The Ramifications of Innovation Singularity, Beyond the Technology Traps and most recently M&A Digital Demands. But with that, I would like to turn it over to Mark, take it away. Thank you, Marvin. Hopefully everybody can hear me. Let me flip up my screen here if I may. Can everybody see that? Yes? Yeah, we're good, Mark. Okay, good. Good. I just just to make sure because, you know, I live out in the middle of nowhere as some of you folks know that we still have cows on the property. So I never know what my internet looks like. Thank you all for having me. I feel actually a little bit humble being here. It's like, what do you say to a group of experts? I caught the end of the call Marvin had right before this. And I'm always amazed, even though I'm a computer scientist by education, the new things that are coming out, the dialogues, the acronyms, the properties and principles we adopt are changing so fast. And that's really what we wanted to talk about today. And that's why I focus this presentation, talking about digital transformation, but also talking about blockchain and the technologies that surround it. What do we do with it? And that led to the title of this presentation called I'm Stuffing the Keyhole. And one of the things I should say before I get into this is my, since I do teach graduate studies and innovation entrepreneurship, if you don't stop me, I can blow through these slides in pretty quick time. So I encourage you to ask questions. I think Marvin, you're going to watch the chat room. And if you were next to me, I'm sure you'd throw something at me, but I will continue to look for it. But by all means, submit something to Marvin and we can do this as we go. Don't wait till the end because I think that oftentimes, if we don't have time for the Q&A, we'll lose some of the important ideas in the dialogue. Marvin? Yep, definitely. All right, good. So again, title of this presentation is I'm Stuffing the Keyhole and if you should have access to the Acrobat file for this, if you, I don't know if they have this in advance Marvin or not, but it is provided to you folks. You can take a look at it and make notes, ask questions. But if you look at the slides behind this title slide, you will see that I don't read slides to you. There's too much information. This presentation could go three to four hours by itself, I'm going to try to hit the highlights. You will see those in red. But again, we want to talk about how does this thing call digital transformation, which is oftentimes failing many enterprises, especially after 12 months. How does this align with things we're talking about today with the metaverse and whatever that means? And we're not talking Facebook and the rebrand meta. We're talking about something that is how do we deal with tomorrow's technology? And again, then the two questions I always have when you start talking about standards and technologies is we often focus, especially as computer scientists, we focus on things of adoption. We want everybody to adopt what we're doing because this is the right thing and we're confident, we're passionate. But the real question for many businesses and executives are how do we adapt these types of things? And I found a little cartoon and you'll see these throughout, I kind of like cartoons to poke fun at myself and those of us in the industry is when we think we have too many standards, what do we do? We say we need to collapse those standards and we wind up with one more standard or we wind up with more solution. And you will often hear me talk about things of rationale, it's like why is this important? But we often forget the implications and that's one of the things we really want to talk about in the three areas off to the left side is where are we at today? Putting everything we're talking about for financial services and Marvin asked me to put some mortgage slides in here so you will see some industry specific stuff in this as well. But where are we at? Why does this even make sense? What's the context of what we're trying to do versus let's focus on the technology of what we're doing and the immutability of let's say a blockchain or the security of it? And then we'll talk about laying the foundation for the core competencies. What are those for tomorrow? What does it looks like? And then we'll talk about transforming the organization with digital demands. In essence, how do we actually compartmentalize? How do we create layers? How do we transform? And more importantly, for those of you that are starting companies or even looking at the supply chains today and talking about what you invest in, what's the ESG, the environmental, the social and the governance demands that go with what we're doing? So that's our discussion for today. And I always kind of look at this one particular diagram and yes, that was probably me with hair in the middle there. Some of the people that have known me 30 some years. That's probably how I address today. And that's how I approach innovation is that I love innovation. I think it's we look for new things. But when I created the slide, I said, why do we have so much confusion oftentimes within our industry? What's happening today that wasn't happening just five years ago? And I created the slide of all things in about five minutes. I said, what are the things that are happening around us? And I just started making a list. And this is not inclusive, but these are things that have just popped up in the last couple of years from machine learning, which everybody talks about to my favorite, which is M&A 2.0. And even though as the cover slide that Marvin put up for what I do, is I still am actually, even though I teach graduate studies, I am an author of multiple books and many, many articles. I'm actually a consultant by trade. So what I am telling you today and what we're gonna talk about is I live and breathe. I believe what we do is a contact sport. We can't sit from the sidelines like an academic and talk about it. We need to be involved. We need to understand what's going on. So this is what we're facing today. And often executives, when they hear things like blockchain or they hear things like data analytics, Python or Rust or cognitive computing or blockchain as a service, where do we put all these things into our mix? What do we deal with our infrastructure and architectures? And that's when I started to say, okay, let's understand, especially from a financial services standpoint, where we came from. And you can see the one diagram on the left. This is a DOMO diagram. It's a very interesting diagram of what happens every minute of every day for some of the major platforms. And those numbers are staggering. And again, you may not be able to read them here, but Amazon's booking $278,000 every minute of every day in top line revenue. You've got, let me grab this real quick. You've got Instagram posting 65,000 photos every minute. You've got TikTok having 167 million viewers every minute of every day. You begin to look at those numbers and they're staggering. And we put that into perspective of financial services and what our customers are expecting from us. We can look at the old days from zero A.C.E, the time of when we started recording current time. Everything was paper-based, probably until the 1980s. I remember my computer science days starting on punch cards and people would probably look at me and my God, you're old. And yes, the dinosaurs were actually doing our computing back then. But if you look at the scale of what we had, we didn't have scale back in the day. The idea of disaster recovery planning or DRP was to make more copies, throw them in a warehouse. We began in the 80s with the advent of Big Iron. We began to see those transactional systems. Those of us that were in financial services back in the 80s, we may have run across something called IBM's FSDM. And what does FSDM stand? Financial Services Data Model. It was a multi-million dollar acquisition of intellectual property that consumed roughly 18 volumes, 10,000 plus pages, and it was every entity, every data element, everything you could ever want to know how a financial services company operated. The problem was it was too big. We didn't know how to apply it. But that was the rise of transactional systems. We went from flat files to databases. And in the 1990s, we started this idea of digitization. Let's get away from paper and you can talk about the data of a variety of velocity volumes and so forth. That kind of leads us into today's world of 2010, which is where we started, give or take a few years. We started to look at digital transformation. How do we take that e-paper from the 1980s? All we really are doing is augmenting paper, doing digital scans. How do we actually leverage that information and look for efficiencies, qualities, improve our processes? And then we get the whole thing called this metaverse, which everybody's talking about. What does that mean? Well, that really means the blending of physical and virtual realities, things like AR, augmented reality, virtual reality, bringing our capabilities to bear in a way that we hadn't thought about before. These are the types of scenarios. This is the story where digital transformation is playing today. And as we get ready to embrace or cringe, if you will, for what this metaverse may happen and what that means, this is what's going on. And so we understand the context of what we're trying to do as financial services and the idea of blockchain going into this. And then we can put a little more context in this. We look at a phase shift when we start talking about all the discrete things from tokenization on blockchains, the digital wallets and so forth. What's happened in the last decade? And you begin to see that from microprocessor speed down to the number of Vintech vendors back in roughly 2010, 2011, from 200 to 13,500. And that's probably a conservative number. And you put that number against the number of banks, which today the number of banks FDIC chartered are about 4750. And that is down from 12,500 just about 30 years ago. So you begin to look at these numbers and you say, this is a different context of how we apply blockchain. What does that mean? And from a blockchain perspective, the last one highlighted in red was actually, what does blockchain mean? What are we gonna do with this? And I tend to view all the technology and all the components of blockchain, especially for financial services and in particular mortgage, is that blockchain represents a tip of the spear. And you can look at those Gartner statistics at the very bottom of that page. And you can see that really at the start of 2011, it was really insignificant the amount of money that was attributed to blockchain, blockchain solutions. If you understand the Gartner projections coming for 2025, and that they are on the high side compared to other folks, I will warn you. They would say there's $176 billion of total revenue to be generated, but that number is going to jump up to $3.1 trillion in 2023. That is very significant, especially when you start looking at the fact that every year in financial services, and we can talk about all the technology, we lose roughly 220 to 260 different institutions. 40% of the financial services revenue is outside the walls of the bank. And if you begin to look at where all this is going, even though during COVID, the blockchain number of users, digital wallets have gone up to 81 million, we can look at the oversight and the compliance. And I didn't have enough space, if you will, on this presentation to fit into the window, that the amount of regulations that are coming forth are huge. Today on a local, federal and state basis, there are over 15,000 individual regulations often by locality that are impacting banks. That's a huge number. That leads to that $350 billion number up there on regulatory compliance that is going to be spent and the fact that record numbers of fines are being introduced, which is the number right to it. So when we take these things into context, we can see that blockchain has got to play into a very broad, very discrete number of institutions. And we should also note that even on the prior slide, where we look at 211 to 222, the asset base at that time of 211 was about $15 trillion. The asset base of FDIC banks in 2022 is over $20 trillion. So the numbers are getting huger and huger with a smaller number of organizations. Mark, we have a question in chat. So Maria's asking, are you aware of any concrete, real use case scenarios that aren't marketing for the metaverse chat? At this point, no. There's a lot of people talking about different things. And again, I am not an expert of everything that I've seen out there, but I know of nothing that's concrete. I know a lot of people that are making waves. I know from Facebook to Microsoft to even Intel. There are a lot of these things that they're talking about doing this. I saw something that Intel was working on blockchain on a chip. There are a lot of these types of avenues that people are looking at, but have they come to the practical implementation? I know of nothing that's in full production outside of a pilot. Again, take that with a grain of salt. Everything's coming out every day. Back to the slide four with the amount of things that are being introduced. Does that answer? Yes, Mark. I think it does. Thank you. Again, I'll give some time just so we can get some dialogue going here if anybody has questions. When we look at the mortgage space, for instance, we can look at the numbers here. And again, I used a range because there are many different numbers depending on where they are sourced. I try to on all of my slides give the foundational sources. But if you look at the typical cost for a mortgage, and again, we can look at the big bold numbers right there in the middle right side. The average production cost for a loan to originate is somewhere around $8,000. That's what they believe it's going to be. I believe last year, the official numbers I saw were about $78,000, $79,000. You compare that against 2007 when the cost was $4,000. Does that mean we have less technology now in 2007 than we do in 15 years later in 2022? The answer is no, we have more technology and we'll see what that means later on here. But you can see these numbers, they are not going down, they're going up. Some people may argue, well, gee, it's the point spread, it's the amount of the cost of the homes, the cost of whatever. Some of it, sure. Other parts of that, likely not, because we have to be actually be able to recover the cost for our technology. And one more thing to consider in the context of what we're talking with blockchain here. It used to be, if you look at back to slide four with the progression from paper into the metaverse, the reality was that innovations, and when I talk to grad students who are launching their companies as part of the incubator we work with, the idea of innovation, the idea that you can actually have a business model that lasts multiple years is probably a false flag. The innovation today is actually based on months and weeks more than it is years. And these are the realities that financial institutions, mortgage professionals, especially independent mortgage professionals are going to have to deal with, is that the things that we thought would keep people out, regulation, technology, the ability to get the data, are no longer barriers to entry. And we are beginning to see more and more of this actually eat into the market share here in a second. Oftentimes we look and we say, okay, how many unique products are within the banking sphere? I've argued and continue to argue that probably 50 to 75% of all banking products are commoditized around every single provider of the 4750 that are left. How many of them are really unique? You could argue some of them have different mobile apps. They have different capabilities. They allow you to transfer money differently. They don't have fee-based, let's say, overdrafts like some of the big providers are getting away from. But that is not necessarily a difference in the product itself. That is a difference in how the product is applied to the market. So we begin to look at the market and say, what is a loan? A loan is pretty much consistent across the board. And that where is blockchain and hyperledger ideas come into bear? From my perspective, they are enablers. They are catalysts that allow the transition to happen. And we can see what I'm talking about is kind of the one of the last context slides here is that these are FDIC slides. These aren't something that Mark interpreted and created so he could make his point. You begin to look at the growth of the mortgage share or where the non-banks have overtop in the very bottom center there. Non-banks are actually originating more than banks in the mortgage space. If you look at the amount of outstanding mortgage value on the top left, you will see that it continues to decline for traditional banking product, traditional FDIC govern. And then you look at the cost of servicing on the top right, it's a five times increase. And those numbers keep on rising even as we add more and more innovation even as we add more technology. And you're beginning to see this and you're beginning to see the non-traditional players. Marvin mentioned my article from last month where we put that in the MBA. We're beginning to see people like Walmart. We talked about Walmart as a bank probably back in the early 2010s. And we said, oh, they're gonna be the next bank. Well, Walmart didn't necessarily become a bank but they have launched their own Fintech firm here in the last 60 days. And they've also applied for seven different patents. They're beginning to start flexing their muscle. They're beginning to look at the markets and say, where else should we be looking? They launch an NFT to basically keep their customers loyal. There's all sorts of these things that are going on that are impacting our models and our markets. And this is where we start to look at how does blockchain, how does the hyper ledger, how does everything we're talking about on very discrete standards fit into this? And that's really the context that we're talking about for these types of presentations. I'll pause there for questions, thoughts. On the previous slide where you were talking about the cost related to originating and processing the mortgage. Yeah, $8,000 now is supposed to 4,000 in 2007. As I'm sure a ton of people on this call have, I've refied within the past couple of years. And as a consumer of mortgage and also as someone within the industry, I see those numbers, I see my own experiences and I see all these companies spending money on digital transformation, but the cost of originating a mortgage keeps increasing. When is there going to be some realizable or tangible benefit? When are we going to see those numbers start to decrease in terms of loan production costs? Or is that something that's just not going to happen? Oh, I believe it's going to happen. Do I have a crystal ball to tell you exactly when? No, but I do believe that's going to happen. You actually, that's one of the things we're going to talk about this laying the foundation for core competency. The reality is that oftentimes in the mortgage space, especially and I tend to be a little bit of an outlier on this and my editor, Mike, saw our hands at the very bottom of my screen and I see Mike there and he's probably cringing on the other end. And one of the things I keep on saying is that if we look at mortgage as part of an overall financial services supply chain, and again, supply chain, everybody thinks manufacturing, they think something that isn't us in terms of financial services. If we begin to look at that as part of a greater mindset of non-traditional competitors coming in, that's exactly how they're going to view it. They're going to look at the value add processes and we're going to see a few of these in about two or three sides. They're going to look at these and say, what do we need? How can we automate? Where is the data? What's that data transformation that's allowing us to do with processes? And oh, by the way, if I have a behavioral change in my customer, which we see that with a lot of people like you, Marvin, with regards to you're digitally competent, you understand mobile technology, you understand your information, where it goes, that is going to be more and more common as the baby boomers of the world, we begin to get out of those markets and the Gen X disease, the millennials and so forth, begin to actually start to embrace these types of technologies. They're going to say, why am I paying for this? And they're going to go to providers. They're going to look at the supply chain and say, I want people that make this simpler. I want people that can reduce this from 55 days or 45 days or 70 days into something that is 15 days, 10 days. And as the world begins to go more and more digital, as the digital transformation embraces more of the industries out there, including property, casualty, government, what have you, that reality is going to be there. And for the traditional mortgage provider, the independent mortgage provider that says, all I do is push it over the fence or I push it to a GSE and I'm done. And but it takes a certain amount of time. That is going to transform and that's going to change. And I think when the net of this long answer to you is that as the industry begins to wake up from that and the customers basically drive that, you're going to see that idea of supply chains across finance become more common and shorten this to a significant stage. Because again, what's the difference in one mortgage product versus another? And again, there are unique differences, but in the grand scheme of things on a macro level, you're lending money and you're getting payments. And again, that's very much an oversimplification because we know the nuances, but that is what's going to transform some of this is that it's got to take time and the cultures of the organizations have to change as well. So Mark, Maria's got another great question. What about regulations? How much can really be changed considering the current regulations? For example, Honda data being requested up front or how credit information is requested? I think you're going to see some of that if you even look at the executive order that went out yesterday from the White House, I think you're going to see, remember I had on slide two, what are the rationale, what are the implications of adopting certain things? If you look at that executive order for responsible digital assets, I think some of those regulations are going to get wrapped up in that. It may take 18, 24, 36 months to change that type of regulation in terms of who gets information, how they do it, what they see. But I think that is going to create a phase shift because now people are going to say, oh, I have a digital dollar. We have a digital yawn. We have the digital sand dollar, which was introduced. And we can look at all these things in terms of digital basis and say, well, if they can do that with currency, sovereign currencies, what does that do to the assets? And I think that's where that tip of the sphere is going to lead us, is that that's going to break the veil of barriers or barriers to entry in terms of when this happens. But I don't think it's going to be tomorrow. I'm not sure it's even going to be this year, but that is a very valid question. But I think we need to prepare for that. And that's as we talk about blockchain, we talk about the benefits of hyper ledger and so forth and all the products associated with it. I think that's something that's got to change and will change as a result of some of these government changes that are going on. Yeah, it's really interesting, Mark, because I know in some of our previous presentations, we've talked about the GSEs and, you know, Ginny May is actively investigating, Fanny May is actively investigating blockchain, Freddie Mac's not quite there yet. But we see him starting to get on board, but yeah, I think there's still a road ahead of them. Well, also, you know, Mark mentioned the White House briefing that came out yesterday, Alma just posted a link to that. So if you guys are interested in learning more about the White House briefing, click on the link in the chat. Because my question goes to the fact that the use of blockchain, it's not just one more technology because it's basically, you have to change the process and the process is set by the regulations. Otherwise, the use it gives is not as good and actually as it could be, right? And it's kind of like you've got these stoppers, these doors that you could remove to get an open space room right now. And nope, they're demanding that you put up walls. And so it's kind of like the same regulations don't help currently to implement things that might lower that origination cost that you mentioned, for example. You are correct. And but one of the things that also allows us to do, it gives us time to think these through because oftentimes I'll go back to all the things that are hitting us. We want to embrace it. We want to stuff all this stuff into the keyhole and get it done right away. The beauty to some degree, and I guess I'm more of a glass half full on this particular thing, it allows us to implement an engineering mindset that says crawl, walk and run. I can begin to get the processes changed. I can begin to develop the roadmaps. I can begin to understand the iterations that are going to have to happen when the regulations change. And this gives me a mindset also to change the organizational cultures and our partner's cultures. I mean, because if we view financial services products and the money that's flowing through as part of an overall supply chain, then we begin to say, I can't change all this once because it's just too complex. It's too much regulation. It's too many people involved. It's too many different standards. But it allows us to get time to set up. And I think over a period of time, if we adopt that, those of us that came from enterprise architectural backgrounds as IT, those that are leading strategy for business transformation, you can begin to lay those out in workable blocks, building blocks, if you will, that allow us to transform from where we are today to where we wanna be. It's not gonna be an overnight sensation. And I don't know even if it was, if they changed your regulations tomorrow, how many people would actually be able to get a spot on correct? Yeah, I guess that in a way, they're actually currently, it's like the regular, so it's the big lenders, that the really big lenders that for them, it would be a huge overhaul, but maybe for the smaller ones, they would adapt really quickly. So in delaying changes, you're favoring the lenders, not necessarily the borrowers, right? So, yeah, I guess you is, yeah. You are right, yeah, currently, before government could take time to decide how to regulate technology. And now technology is demanding of government of a very fast, rapid response time that government is not used. I mean, that's worldwide, right? It's not only in the U.S. But it is true that you've got huge new technologies that you wanna start using, but you wanna have the legislation in place or whatever, and it's not there. And as part of the legislation, we also don't have the legal background to backstop some of this stuff. It hasn't been challenged. Those of us that went through the, remember if you went through those of us that were here a part of 2007 and 2009 meltdowns, look at the challenges that went around something called MERS, if you remember those days, and who owned the title of that and the chaos that surrounded that. And we didn't have the precedent, I guess is what I would say. And I think some of that will come to be as time goes on. But as technologists, I am always convinced we can create the best technology. We can overcome our technology hurdles. The challenges, all these other things as you're talking about, Maria, can the government do it? Can we as lenders or borrowers even adapt to it? You know, again, you got different demographics that may or may not want it. You've got the banked and the underbank, can they get through it? What kind of information do they have? And when we start talking about this, whatever this metaverse expectation is gonna allow us, then who controls the information? Because now in that kind of a world, we are going from a centralized type of clearing and repository, which is really the underpinning for our bank system since the 1920s. Now we're going to something that's completely decentralized or quasi-centralized. Where does that go? And these are the kinds of challenges that we can't solve overnight. Hey, Mark. I agree. Hey, Mark, Pedro here. So if I can take a stab at that for Maria, I think it's in the past. You're right. There's this whole legal regulatory pillar, right? And the technology had to adapt into whatever was set in that legal regulatory pillar. The technology is advancing so quickly these days that it's way ahead of where legal and regulatory are. And so legal and regulatory are trying to figure that out and catch up. And eventually they'll merge. But you're right. There's no, I don't think there's a set plan on driving this technology or driving the legal regulatory stuff to favor one segment of the business versus another, right? Small versus large banks. It will eventually happen, but it'll happen over time kind of like the cryptocurrency stuff, right? What's the term, Mark, for the... CBDCs? CBDC, right? Everybody wants to look at that and they don't wanna be the first one, but they certainly don't wanna be the last one out there. They have no idea what the legal regulatory implications of that are gonna be. But I know that in the background, they are experimenting to figure out well, when this does open up, where do we wanna position ourselves and what do we wanna do? So it's sort of a dance, right? If you go out too far too fast, you may or may not be on target, but you certainly don't wanna be an absolute laggard because then this market is going to change so quickly that you'll never have enough runway to catch up. And I wanna add a couple points to what Pedro just said is that I think he was spot on. When I think about transformation, I think about what's already happened within the grocery and consumer market. And if you take a look at what happened with Amazon and the mom and pop grocery stores, it was a cataclysmic change. And what we're taking a look at now is transformation that can be evolutionary or it could be cataclysmic. And what happened with Amazon is it started out evolutionary. And then before you know it, it was cataclysmic and then Kmart, Sears, all of those large retail companies were gone and you just had this behemoth of Amazon. So I think to the point that Pedro is making that evolutionary change is taking place right now and I can almost guarantee you there is someone out there that's building a solution that's going to completely disintermediate art and industry and what we as practitioners need to do is how do we position ourselves when something like that comes to bear and how can we try and anticipate and benefit from it? Because although we're in the evolutionary start or phase right now, it's going to be cataclysmic. Blockchain is going to be one of the catalysts that speeds up that change and government guidelines and the GSEs, they're going to try and slow it down but they're going to be overcome. They're already behind the curve on this one and they're trying to catch up. So it's just a matter of when that cataclysmic takes place. Agreed. Anything else? I'm kind of conscious of the time here if we were about 20 minutes above the hour here or below the hour. Let me continue and then if there's something else because we've got a few more slides I'd like to at least get through. And again, if you view the, this is a mortgage example and this is an SEC diagram of all things. It's a couple of years old but if you look at the how a mortgage flows through from originating it, been to the GSEs into the federal governments, into foreign governments, into insurance markets, into private mortgage insurance, you begin to look at those numbers and those flows and you can say there are a lot of connection points and that's the whole purpose of this diagram. The numbers have changed a little bit of course in two years, but how this information flows is not just a one-way flow. Think about if we go back to 2008, 2009, 2010 when we try to figure out how do we unravel a mortgage-backed security? What's in it? What was in that trance? What was first tier, second tier? And then we start to say, okay, you've got covered bonds across the pond. You begin to look at all these instruments and they are composed of either slices, whole mortgages, whatever, but they are all part of the supply chain and that is the mindset here. And I think one of the things at the very bottom left-hand side, you begin to see at the last one paragraph, it says this requires a shift of sentiment. And I think that's where we're at today is that we have the technology, we have the components, we have the ability to most degree to do this, but if we don't understand how it's applying to the whole process, the supply chain, the flows, that can go one way, but it also comes back to the other and that's what I'm saying. Supply chain is a two-way street and things like blockchain and Hyper, Niger and so forth allow us to guarantee those chains for the integrity, but it doesn't necessarily mean that's the end all to be all. There are catalysts to help us get something done. And that's how I as a banking advisor, a consultant, a writer, people I talk to, that's how I view these things is that it gets me to that process. Now, if you look and I'm gonna get, this is gonna be your next couple of slides, you're gonna be kind of ugly if you don't have them in front of you. But a couple of years ago, I started to say, what's in a mortgage? And I was able to cobble some stuff together from the sources down there. And that began, and I had 72 boxes and why do I have 72? Cause it's fit on the screen. Could I ask, could I put more? Sure, could I take a few of these away? Sure. But you began to look at these generic boxes and say, what happens when we begin to, to some of your points, when we begin to disintermediate this, we begin to cut some of these out, the technology makes these points really, I don't wanna say obsolete, but they become automated is maybe a better way to say it. They become decentralized. They become controlled by our customer. They become controlled outside of our silos. And we begin to say, what happens when this thing with our technologies starts to cross some of these things out? And again, this is just a what if, but when we start to dive into this and when we start to look at what we are recommending for the industry in terms of technology standards, interaction models of, or patterns of business models, where do these things begin to go? And that's really the idea of the supply chain. If we understand the information flow and we believe in the ideas of big data, whatever that means. But if we understand that there is a lot of information out there growing at nearly, some people would say 90% a year, I think the consensus is 75% of the year. When you look at the amount of information, how does it fit with all these boxes? And that's where somebody to, I think it was Marvin and Pedro talked about, is that people are gonna figure this out. And they're gonna say, as a provider, as a vendor, as an innovator, starting a startup, as a venture capitalist investing in these things, I'd like what they're saying because they can shorten this process on the bottom from 45 to 60 days to something else. They can begin to take out non-value added processes because the digital transformation has provided us that capability. Digital transformation, and as Marvin said early on, 75 to 80% of these fail after 12 months. Why is that? Well, I think that's because oftentimes we still have that transactional mindset. We think things are a transaction, especially in financial services versus a solution. And that leads us to this whole digital transformation. And oftentimes what I termed the D-squared, I-squared, we define, develop, implement, and as banks and financial firms and mortgage providers, we often don't iterate. We don't realize that that cycle is continuous. Digital transformation today is not a one and done. Why do we think 90% of all organizations, C-levels across the board of the Fortune 500, 90% of them believe that they've got digital transformation down pat. They're good. And you sit there and say, really, what happens after 12 months? Because they're not thinking that this is a continuous or an iterative type of process. They don't look at things as building blocks. As technologists oftentimes, we think in building blocks. We think in containers and compartmentalization. We embrace orchestration and assembling and disassembling stacks. We live and breathe this. But when you look at the funding, the budgets, the what goes into the infrastructure, those things really from a cultural standpoint haven't changed. And it's because to some degree, the regulations, the mindsets of how that supply chain works is still in its changing process and metamorphizing. And this is where one other thing I wanted to highlight real quick on this given our time is that we're gonna see this more and more, especially in financial services. For those of you that know us, Pedro and I have been working on patents for what we call M&A digital or data clean rooms. And we look at this and say, how do we then take those types of ideas and begin to project using digital twin solutions? And again, borrowing something from another industry, borrowing something from manufacturing or retail, looking and saying, how can we begin to model these things out and project the future? And when you begin to look at the regulations and so forth, this allows us to apply gaming solutions and say, is my roadmap correct? So again, things are changing. And that kind of leads us into this diagram, which we could talk about for half an hour and we don't have that time. But this is a diagram, the painted black brick wall in the back there. I started thinking about digital transformation and what that means and where it's going to go and what leverages in this. And again, we can talk about this offline, but the idea is, how do you leverage these digital capabilities into something that's future? And that can include the meta universe that can include things like even ML and AI for our financial models. And we begin to look at all the things that correspond to that. If you wanna see this, there are probably half a dozen articles I've written in the last two years on this particular model. This model is also referenced in that digital transformation meets the metaverse, which was published in the MBA last month. This also then goes down from if we're gonna embrace this idea of the metaverse and understand regulations, here's the idea of crawl, walk and run at the very top. And to some degree, digital transformation is really the sunsetting of transactional mindset for financial services. And for all the reasons, all the diagrams, all the information that's on the right side there is that we cannot think in transactions anymore. If we believe that blockchain or even solutions within the Hyperledger Foundation are reviewing these from a financial transaction type of an approach, it's not just gonna be the regulators that probably say, well, we don't think so. I would say your customers are not gonna think so. They're gonna say, we want an organization that gives me a solution set, provides me that capability. And that's where we start talking about leveraging those digital capabilities into something new. And the very bottom hand there is the agility and the adaptability and the iteration. Very key in digital transformations, but also one of the primary causes why 70, 80% of them actually fail. Everybody thinks it's about adoption, it's a one and done, and the reality is that is not the case. Oops. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about smart contracts. And again, on the right side there with the Great Bay X over it, that's the traditional data set mindsets that we actually came to be. If you look back from the early, like I said, those of us that are in financial services, it was IBM Big Iron and the models that went with it and the solutions, that mindset right there on that diagram is still pervasive today. And what's happening with the FinTechs, with the RegTechs and all the other vendors that are coming is they're saying that is the way we used to think about it. And the regulators to Pedro's point, Marvin's point and even James's point is really going to change it. And I think that's Maria where you begin to look at say, if I were to look at these smart contracts, if I were looking at things, what does that do to the regulatory aspects? Well, we think regulatory just on government for oversight for the financial services. You've also got the internal audit specifications. And I would refer to you if you really want to look at what blockchain does to an audit process, internal or external, Deloitte and KPMG have very good briefings out there to talk about this. And I'm talking more than a three page glossy. They have things that actually start talking about the changing of culture, the changing of components. What does that do when you begin to introduce these into our industries? And again, what we're talking about here today could equally be applicable to healthcare or it could be applicable to private equity or other financial services areas as well as even retail and telecommunications, high tech, whatever. These are not unique to our industry. And that's another point I guess I would say is if we understand the fact that everybody, other people have wrestled with this, we can borrow shamelessly the lessons learned and begin to apply those to our own processes and our own mindset. And one statistic that I did find, and apologies for not putting the attribution on there on the very bottom in the red, there's a mindset, there's a belief out there and I haven't seen the discrete data that backs it up. But they're saying in total, if we were to pull off the regulations, if we were to pull in the customers and begin to transform our processes correctly and disintermediate the commoditized products that are out there, blockchain could effectively reduce 30% of the bank's infrastructure cost. Now, if you look at that and put it to some of the big players like Morgan or Citi or Wells, those numbers would be in the billions, just on a particular organization. So when you begin to look at these types of things, the potential is huge, but the problem is we cannot think that a one size fits all. And I'll take a quick break here and then we'll kind of go through the last Marvin. Yeah, on that previous slide, when you're talking about the benefits that utilization of smart contracts can generate, does that also take into consideration some of the benefits that smart contracts in addition to usage of stable coins? Because when we're out talking with different companies, stable coins tokenization is on the tips of their tongue as well as something that they expect to help expedite transactions, at least within the mortgage industry and potentially disintermediate different processes. So what type of connection do you see with smart contracts and tokenization or use of stable coins? I don't write at this point, given the fact that we have no legal precedent for some of these things, given the fact that there is no template for many of these, because again, what's left out of a smart contract, I think right now they're all linked until we can actually get a little more headway. I don't know how you cannot talk about them all at this point, because they haven't been compartmentalized by themselves. They right now in my mind interrelated. And so I don't think you can. However, will that be the case in 2023? I look for some of those things to begin to be broken out and put in their own little stacks as we begin to know more and more. You know, one of the things when we start talking about blockchain and our industry, I would tell you to take a look and most of you probably are familiar if you're on a mortgage side, take a look at Redwood Trust and some of the stuff they had done with the securitization side of the mortgage aspect and blockchain. They did not, if my memory serves me correct, is that that was not a smart contract in implementation, but it would not surprise me. The next player that comes in will begin to do some of that. Yeah, and for those of you in the chat, we posted a link to the wiki. We've actually got an article on Redwood Trust posted on our wiki side as well. And I think they were actually awarded a housing wire award this last week here for some of the work they've done, kind of generating market awareness. So that was back in 2020. I think the Q4 of 2020 is when they started that. I think the paper was published Q2 last year, I believe. Hey, Mark, this is Angel. I just want to jump in here. Thank you so much. This is just fascinating. I just want to share a couple of thoughts. I started in the mortgage business in 1992 and half our leadership team at the time were complaining about RESPA and TILA, which came into effect in 74, right? And I just saw that a big part of dealing with regulations and the big part of dealing with technology and all the things that you talked about, one of the things that I really want to make sure that we get the message out there is leadership, right? And so as a mortgage enterprise, as you start to grow or whatever size you are, right? Once you get into an organization, you're funding 2,000 loans a month, 5,000 loans a month. Things start to get compartmentalized, right? That holistic view of the enterprise, the deep understanding of your technology, the fragmentation of your technology and all the APIs and all the different vendors and all the different processes and all the compliance overlays and all the paper clips and superglue that's keeping that whole process, right? Leadership is gonna help understand all those moving parts and inspire the leaders in those compartmentalized areas not just to optimize their areas of responsibility but to think upstream and downstream, right? And to be holistic thinkers about, hey, I'm an origination person. I have to submit these documents. I have title and closing partners. I have notary signing partners. Those documents need to get back. They need to be in a stacking order. I gotta get them to post-closing. Secondary's gotta do that. They need their data, right? So if we get, if leadership takes that next step and helps everybody in the organization start thinking holistically and have that awareness that, hey, there's 72 boxes in that one slide that you showed, right? Right. Once you have that awareness that, oh my God, there's 72 boxes. Well, guess what? I can make a process change or I can implement a policy or I can find a point solution that's not just gonna help my little box or my two boxes, but it's gonna have downstream impacts and upstream impacts, right? And so technology is a tool for the business, right? And leadership is a big part of the results and the performance, right? And so I have no organizations today that it doesn't cost them 8,000 loan, 8,000 to fund a loan, right? Why? Why is that? Everybody has the same playing field. Everybody delivers the GSEs in the same product box, the same guidelines. Yeah, some lenders may have some overlays, right? Most of the industry is on a big box utility vendor using the same vendor, the same tools. So why is it that some lenders can outperform, produce loans at a lower cost, provide a better customer experience, right? What is that? What is that secret sauce? Just from my opinion and my view, my perspective, a big part of it is leadership. And so I just wanna make sure that, people listening to this, this is all valuable information, but we gotta get inspired from a leadership standpoint, right? One day people, wherever you are in the organization, you're gonna be responsible, not just for one box, but for two boxes. And the way you grow your career is by understanding that there's 72 boxes, right? And one day you'll be in charge of those 72 boxes, right? So for what it's worth, I just wanna share that, Mark. I'm fired up. I'm very, very motivated by what you've been sharing. And this is very, very exciting. So thank you. No worries, no worries. I am going to try, I know we're at the top of the hour, at least according to my clock in front of me, but I wanna try to get through at least the last couple of few things. If I may, if I have that time, Marvin, yes? Okay. Again, oftentimes as technologists, we think about the happy path and that's on the right middle side there, is that realize this from a banking standpoint. Everybody's like, oh, banking branches are the wave of the future. We lose 55 to 70 branches every day. And that is showing no sign of changing. We've lost nearly 20,000 in the last 10 years. An average, we lose 2,000 a year banking branches around this country. That is the trend for a decade. And we lose a banking branch every $36 or a banking brand. And when I look at the future of blockchain, it's all about those things, but it's shifted the discussion from componentization to as Angel was talking about the holistic nature, the leadership nature, what does that mean? How do I do that? And we can talk about the metaverse, but I would just tell you, there's four questions you always gotta ask. And I challenge people that are in the incubators that I work with and so forth. This is, you know, they always tell me the how. They tell me, this is how we're going to do it. And I'm like, well, that's great. You know, that's the first step. But back to the other point is like, who's gonna do it? What do they want? And why should I do it? And that's really where we start. If we're gonna frame our ideas on the metaverse and what that means for financial services, that's how we have to look at it. Because at the very bottom of that crazy diagram is that, you know, the castle walls are gonna be stormed because they don't have the same limitations. Real quick on this, I look at blockchain as the disintermediation of the markets. I look at it as a catalyst for that market. Pedro Fong, who's on this call, Pedro allowed me to publish his one diagram, kind of a mortgage use scenario, which integrates things and we don't have time to go do this given our point. But the idea here is that we can look at this and there are many patents around these types of ideas spent on who you look at. But how do we look at that information flow? What do we do? If we look at this holistically, if we look at this from a leadership standpoint, this is what we're talking about. It's not about just a cloud solution or reporting or native cloud or everything else that we talk about in our technology comments. It's talking about how does this actually transform, the digitally transform what we're doing? I see Marvin, you came off mute, but let me just finish this one thing if I can. You know, again, what are the data complexities? The idea here on the right side is if we do this the correct way, if we add the right discipline rigor, we go through this on a stepwise type of process, maybe we can get that down to 10 to 15 days. And finally, in the end, I would say, we gotta keep separation. We gotta look at the unknown unknowns. And I love this diagram because I'm always, you know, diagramming stuff. And then you step back and say, what the heck did I write? And it looks like this, that's the problem when we start talking to leadership, we start talking to executives, we start talking, you know, I'm stuffing that keyhole with as much as we can because that's what we know as technologists, computer scientists, innovators that we have to do. The problem is, we're the only ones that can understand it. And we're not looking at it from the supply chain perspective. And again, bottom line, one size will not fit all. We're talking about layers, we're talking about stacks, we're talking about interoperability, we're talking about, you know, atomic swaps. We're talking about all the crazy things that people, you know, issue as a matter of fact, you know, it's our nomenclature. Nobody else gets it. We need to bring that back to the business value. We need to bring it back to the supply chain. And oh, by the way, we have to have core competencies around us. And I will turn it over to you, Mark. Any final thoughts, questions? And I know we're a few minutes past. I apologize. Thank you, Mark. That was fantastic. And all of this information will be posted on our wiki within the next day once we convert the recording. And we will hand out Mark's contact information. So we do have another minute or so. Are there any pressing questions or comments for Mark before we all sign off? I apologize, kind of running through the last few slides, but again, the information's there. Take a look at when Marvin sends them out or posts them for everybody. If you got any questions, comments, you can hit me up or I can, you know, put you onto somebody in my network as well. Okay, thank you, Mark. And thank you everyone for joining this call. I think this has been a fantastic call. And Mark, we'd like to invite you maybe later on in the year, we'll see where things are going in our industry and you can give us an update. Excellent, I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, thanks everyone for joining.