In this week’s episode of the PowerHouse podcast, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez chats with Jason Bressler, chief technology officer at United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM). During the conversation, the duo discuss UWM’s recent partnership with Sphere LOS while exploring artificial intelligence and upcoming UWM announcements in 2025.
This interview is edited for length and clarity. To start the conversation, Sanchez and Bressler dive into UWM’s partnership with Sphere LOS.
Sanchez: Could you give us some more detail about that partnership?
Bressler: I don’t know that I would call it a partnership as much as I would an announcement. Sphere is a standalone from UWM. It is a loan origination system, CRM, POS, and the product and pricing engine (PPE) put together in one seamless flow.
We’ve never in the history of UWM wanted to directly integrate with any other LOS for a variety of reasons. Mainly, it becomes difficult to manage disparate and different loan origination systems. That’s the reason that Sphere became so appetizing.
Sanchez: Why did you choose them for this first tight integration with your platform?
Bressler: It’s made up of several different companies that have decades of experience in the mortgage space. In almost any retail shop — but definitely in the wholesale community — there is no system that goes end to end with a seamless flow that allows for all of those things to really come together.
Sanchez: You have a big technology team at UWM. Why didn’t you build your own broker LOS?
Bressler: The biggest issue when it comes to creating an LOS and offering that out to the entirety of the wholesale space is it lacks the competition. It’s not a UWM product, and it has that all in workflow. That allows the entire community to understand we’re not trying to get people into our ecosystem.
Next, the conversation transitions to discuss AI usage in the mortgage industry.
Sanchez: You frequently post on LinkedIn about this amazing technology team that you’ve built at UWM. And it’s clear to me that you love mentoring and managing technology leaders. Can you tell me more about?
Bressler: For me, everything is about the team. We have very large IT meetings weekly, but then we gather in person once a quarter. Every great strategist starts off with a pillar or two that they really commit to. That’s all that they can do, since you have to be so obsessed with it all the time.
We’re ridiculously unorthodox and in the office everyday. I’m in southeast Michigan. That’s somewhat of a limited talent pool. We have 1,800 team members. And half of our team has never been in IT before they started working for me. We’ve trained them from the ground up.
To end the conversation, Bressler explores UWM’s feedback loop with brokers who use the company’s products.
Bressler: If you’re a partner with UWM, you have a direct line to me in the exact same way that every broker in that same scenario has a direct line to Mat Ishbia. I want to solicit feedback, and I do it all the time.
