Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
Hello, I’m Keren Unrad, Head of Agency Marketing here at Vested, and I am here at the Vested bar with Ian Miller, CMO of Agile and MCT. Hi Ian, how are you?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
Great. Thanks, Keren.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
Thank you for being here.
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
My pleasure.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
So just a few questions for you. Agile is a technology platform for mortgage-backed securities. I’m guessing it’s quite a complex product. How does it affect your messaging and branding? How do you create a message that is simple so that you can get your point across to your customers?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
Well, that’s really the problem that we came to Vested to solve, which I’ve certainly appreciated. Particularly for Agile, it’s a brand new startup company and we really didn’t have a lot to go on. I think Curtis and Phil, the owners, came to me about three weeks before our FINRA application and said, “I need a website and branding put together.” I slapped together what I could, but it was it about six months later, once we were through that approval process, that we started working with Vested. That experience really helped us to hone in on our fintech brand. That was a big piece of this. My work at MCT is focused on a client centric, service-oriented brand, and so focusing on the technology side was relatively new to me. Clearly Vested has a lot of depth of experience there. Honing that messaging down from the technical complexity that comes in from people like Phil, our COO, to something that is approachable and understandable, not just to our target audience, but also where we can, to the layman, has been a big priority of our work with you, and I think it’s gone well.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
You mentioned you obviously do a lot of work with Vested. Agile does work with us and now we’re doing some more projects for MCT. What was it about Vested that made you want to work with us initially?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
We did a pretty extensive vetting and research process to find an agency partner that we wanted to work with. I think that what we really were looking for was someone with deep credentials in finance and technology. I mean, those were the two spaces that we were focused on with Agile and Vested really came with the pedigree that we appreciated, particularly the depth of experience and even the technology and platforms you have on the PR side. We were looking to leverage our experience and our data in a way that we hadn’t before, make contacts and expand our reach when it comes to public relations, and we thought you were the best for the job. We interviewed about six different agencies as part of this process. We probably went to the proposal stage with about three. To be honest, it was it was the experience with your business development team that really won it over for me. We were really starting from scratch with Agile, almost no material to go on, just a dream and some excellent technology. The Vested 360 process really appealed. I think that the structure that you had around it and the process of pulling all of the different pieces of input and expertise from our executive team really sync up with what we have done from some of our strategic planning efforts over the years. It was great; it was really familiar. You know, I think that there were some other good proposals out there, but the people were what made the difference in the end.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
Along those lines, what in your mind makes a good client agency relationship?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
You know, we focus on this a lot, both at Agile and at MCT, but trust, I think, is what it really comes down to. Trust that your partner is going to have the expertise that you need, the connections that you need, but also just the day-to-day relationship. You can find a partner that you can work with where you don’t need to be following up on every single little point and you know that they’re going to deliver on time and in an impressive way. We found that with you and I appreciate it.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
When Agile first engaged Vested as your agency, we like to do a comprehensive 360 into the business to better understand our new clients. What did Agile get out of that process and what was it about it that was valuable to you?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
Agile was really starting from square one, and so even at the very beginning when we started exploring on potential relationship with Vested, the 360 approach was really something that appealed to us – the structure of it, the depth of it, the way that it could pull the input and expertise from all our different executives really appealed. That was really what sold us on working with Vested in the very beginning, and what we got out of it was extremely valuable. We started with kind of a nebulous idea of wanting to be a fintech brand focused on serving and improving the mortgage-backed securities industry, and we came out of it with a cohesive brand and messaging that we could use to help us achieve that goal. I also appreciated all the branding work, you know, colors, logos. We’ve got a great team that we work with in our own in-house marketing department, but to have the big guns come out for all of that really appealed. To this day, I can still say that Curtis occasionally shows up for our weekly meetings wearing his Agile logo t-shirt with a big smile on his face.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
Agile does mortgage-backed securities. Obviously, the housing market has been in of flux since the pandemic happened. How has that affected you and your customers?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
The pandemic has been impactful for anyone who works in business. I mean, remote work was a big transition for us. Luckily, we were in a fairly good posture and had some experience with telecommuting already, so we transitioned pretty smoothly to remote work. The bigger impact for us was the pandemic related market volatility in the mortgage-backed securities market. You know, that was one of the most volatile times, certainly the most volatile time I had gotten to see in my career. I showed up a little after the Great Recession, and there was really this kind of relentless slide that we saw at the beginning of the pandemic in terms of mortgage-backed securities, which impacted every single person in the mortgage industry, particularly those clients who were doing TBA trading and pipeline hedging, which is the core platform and service that Agile provides. We really shifted our entire approach at the beginning of the pandemic from kind of a more traditional educational material, content marketing, regular campaigns in favor of just focusing on market volatility guidance every single day. I really felt like it was some of the most impactful work that we’ve gotten to do as a company – leading our clients through that, giving them the best guidance that we could on liquidity in the market, how they can react to the market, changes to mitigate the risk that was happening. Ultimately, I like to think that we were able to help some clients weather the storm. It went from being really a crisis that looked like it might put many of our clients out of business to ultimately being one of the best years that many of them have ever had. So, that was a very rewarding period and a good kick off to Agile work.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
That’s wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about your MCT product?
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
MCT is a hedge advisor focused on supporting mortgage lenders in doing pipeline coverage and also helping them sell their loans on the secondary market. The two components there are really both around mitigating risk and maximizing profitability. The hedging process is based in technology, but it’s really a service first engagement, making sure our clients understand what’s behind the hedging model, helping them through it, teaching them to take that next step to grow their business is what’s most important to MCT. That other piece is loan sale. Once a loan has been originated, funded and finished in the process, what does a retainer to do with that loan? Are they going to portfolio it or are they going to sell it to an investor aggregator? Are they going to sell it to the agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? We help them analyze what the best choices are for them based on their particular situation.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
That’s great. Well, thank you so much. This has been very educational. I really appreciate you being here with us.
Ian Miller, CMO, Agile and MCT
My pleasure, Keren, thanks so much for having me.
Keren Unrad, Head of Marketing, Vested
Thank you.
