{"id":5041,"date":"2024-01-18T18:27:12","date_gmt":"2024-01-18T18:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frankbuysphilly.com\/stavvys-cto-on-moving-a-whole-industry-to-digital\/"},"modified":"2024-01-18T18:27:12","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T18:27:12","slug":"stavvys-cto-on-moving-a-whole-industry-to-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frankbuysphilly.com\/stavvys-cto-on-moving-a-whole-industry-to-digital\/","title":{"rendered":"Stavvy\u2019s CTO on moving a whole industry to digital"},"content":{"rendered":"
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HousingWire Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler sat down with Jim Butler, chief technology officer at Stavvy<\/strong>, to talk about moving real estate from paper to a digital transaction, how the company is using AI, and the vibe you get working with industry experts. <\/p>\n Previously, Butler served as CTO of HqO, an employee experience platform for commercial office buildings, and CTO of Global Supply Platforms for Verizon Media. He has also held the CTO role at matchmine, a media discovery network, and eCredit, a B2B credit decisioning platform later acquired by Fidelity Ventures. Since 2002, Butler has served as the founding chairman of the Technology Leadership Council, Boston chapter. He is an author and has three granted patents in the areas of digital media and reliable web service architecture.<\/p>\n Sarah Wheeler: What led you to join Stavvy last year?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jim Butler:<\/strong> This is my fifth time around as CTO, and what attracted me to Stavvy was the really impressive line-up of industry experts in the company. Most of the executive team and those in compliance measure their industry experience in decades and some chair MISMO boards. This isn\u2019t a business domain where you can fake it for very long and they’re the real deal.<\/p>\n SW: How do you decide what you want to develop next?<\/strong><\/p>\n JB:<\/strong> Stavvy is a digital transaction platform built for real estate professionals and eClosing has been our bread and butter traditionally.\u00a0Since I\u2019ve been here, the vision has been to be as broad of a platform as possible, with a lot of different pieces, which allows our customers to pick their journey. They can choose the whole platform or just parts of it. eClosing is a huge part of that, from hybrid eClosing to remote online notarization (RON). <\/p>\n Our acquisition of Brace<\/a> in 2023 brought in a lot of tech on the servicing side of the house, including tech for decisioning, the waterfalls on that application, what they might be eligible for, etc. <\/p>\n Our recent acquisition<\/a> of assets from Evolve <\/strong>mortgage, SigniaDocuments, include its SMART Doc engine and whole set of docs for mortgage, including HELOCs. We also brought over some of their talent, Tim Anderson<\/a> and Charlie Epperson<\/a>, who have been pioneers in smart doc standards. We’re pushing in that direction, starting with ourselves, away from pdfs so we get to more structured data where we think a lot of goodness lives. So right now I am focused on pulling all those pieces together.<\/p>\n SW: How do you think about build versus buy?<\/strong><\/p>\n JB: <\/strong>We\u2019re technologists \u2014 we love to build things! Building everything is way more fun, but other really bright people out there working for different companies are also building great assets. So we ask first, will we do it as well as they have? Even if we believe we can, how fast can we do it? The opportunity lies on the timeline, do we need to get there faster than we can build it? The other part layered on top, especially on acquisition versus partnering \u2014 are we buying customers or expertise? <\/p>\n