The part nobody asks him about is the cancelling. He describes the early phase as being a kid in a candy store, saying yes to everything, until a revenue manager asked what all of it was for and he did not have an answer. Four months ago he took a pass through the stack and cut it.

WHAT YOU'LL TAKE AWAY

- Why the fix for a loan officer drowning in tools is usually one fewer tool

- The adoption mechanic that is not a training session, and what it costs him per loan officer

- Where the line sits on a machine speaking as you

- What he would do first on Monday, in the order he would do it

- Why automating the follow-up sent him back to open houses and chambers of commerce

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Open

(00:24) Meeting at the AI Summit

(01:47) Eight years at PRMG

(04:24) The note-taker that started it

(06:22) Efficiency was the aha moment

(09:40) A Tuesday, hour by hour

(14:05) The art of delegation

(18:27) Compliance and the tax return rule

(23:38) Getting a region to adopt

(30:05) Getting past the fear

(37:01) Build versus buy

(42:18) Monday's first step

ABOUT THE GUEST

Abdel Khawatmi is Area Manager at Paramount Residential Mortgage Group (PRMG), running offices in New Jersey and lending across several states. He was headed for law school before mortgage, holds a master's in risk and compliance, and has built his book on the files other originators pass on — self-employed borrowers, thin credit, layered income and unusual properties. He was named a HousingWire Rising Star in 2026.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdel-khawatmi-79a511144/

Got Mortgages: https://www.gotmortgages.com

YOUR HOSTS

Chris Grimes is CEO of FundMore.ai.

Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable.

One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction.

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New episodes every Tuesday.

Chris Grimes and Reuven Gorsht start there and end up somewhere less comfortable: if anyone can build the product, the product is not the business.

They work through what that means for AI startups, for the app layer sitting between the frontier labs and the customer, and for mortgage lending specifically. Chris rebuilt a top-three fitness app in ninety minutes on a Sunday. A tool set that needed Claude Code four months ago is now a feature of the model provider. Half a trillion dollars went into startups in the first half of 2026, and roughly 43 cents of every dollar went to two companies.

If the product can be built over a weekend, the product was never the business. So what is? That is the question the rest of the episode is trying to answer, and in regulated lending it turns out to have a different answer than it does anywhere else.

What you'll take away

• What the frontier labs absorbing the app layer does to the companies funded to sit there
• Why lenders do not shop a vendor list, and what actually gets a vendor into a budget
• Where the margin turns out to be, and why it is not in the AI business
• What makes auditability, rather than capability, the thing that decides who wins in lending AI

Chapters

(00:00) A maxed-out AI week

(01:16) Three hundred people at a Claude meetup

(04:06) A great time and a terrible time to build

(06:08) Why lenders don't shop vendors

(09:29) A product mid-flight, and testing distribution first

(10:46) Half a trillion in funding, and where it went

(12:22) The app layer, and the fitness app built on a Sunday

(16:36) Long Lake, Amex, and margin as the real prize

(20:12) Razor-thin lending margins and the tax agent

(27:00) Fannie, OSFI E-23, and the coming washout

(30:23) The cleaning company paying four thousand a month

(33:17) Start with the problem, not the AI

Mentioned in this episode

Anthropic, whose economic index comes up in the discussion of what people are actually building with these tools

Lovable, the platform used to rebuild a top-three fitness app in an hour and a half

Long Lake, the HOA management company founded in 2023, and the episode's central example of where margin really sits

Amex Global Business Travel, the low-margin operation Long Lake acquired, and the case study Reuven builds the argument on

OSFI E-23, Canada's model risk management guidance, cited as the deadline Canadian lenders are working toward

Fannie Mae, whose AI transparency and traceability requirements took effect recently

The Mortgage Bankers Association, credited on tape for the cost-to-originate figures

Your hosts

Chris Grimes is CEO of FundMore.

Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable.

One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction.

Related episode

AI vs. The Human Element— Balancing Trust and Technology — two AI conferences in one week, fifteen vendor demos, and the three questions a lender has to answer that nobody could

Listen and subscribe

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YouTube — The Signal Podcast

New episodes every Tuesday.

In this episode of The Signal Podcast, Chris and Reuven compare notes from the HousingWire AI Mortgage Summit and the TMC event, where AI tools were everywhere — but clear answers were harder to find. Across demos and conversations, three questions kept coming up: which model is powering the tool, how can compliance explain it to an examiner, and can a lender train it on their own data?

The conversation moves from borrower trust and chatbot adoption to model risk, vendor due diligence, and the uncomfortable reality that traditional software assessment may not work when an AI vendor can change models overnight.

In this episode

• Why borrower trust in AI may be falling even as AI investment rises
• What lenders should ask before signing an AI vendor contract
• Why point-in-time vendor questionnaires are breaking down
• How compliance teams should think about explainability and model changes
• Where AI works best when scoped narrowly
• Why convenience often beats cost in consumer adoption
• What early adopters risk — and what they may gain