Perspectives on AI, technology, and compliance transformation to help you move faster, smarter, and with more clarity.
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ARLINGTON, VA, UNITED STATES, October 3, 2025 -- Blue Phoenix Solutions, LLC (Blue Phoenix), a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), announced it has been awarded a $215 million contract by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Loan Guaranty Service (LGY) to modernize and operate critical home loan technology systems that serve millions of Veterans and their families.
Formed under an SBA-approved mentor-protégé joint venture between PhoenixTeam (mentor) and Blue Bay Delivery Solutions (protégé), Blue Phoenix combines deep mortgage technology expertise with a mission-driven commitment to “serve those who serve.” This award underscores the strength of our partnership with VA and our shared commitment to innovation and modernization.
Under the new award, Blue Phoenix and its partners will: deliver secure, modern, API-first solutions built on AWS and Salesforce; enhance operational efficiency with automation and continuous DevSecOps practices; improve the Veteran home loan experience by streamlining processes for lenders, servicers, and program participants; and support adoption of AI-ready data infrastructure that positions VA for the future of digital transformation.
“This contract represents both a milestone and a mission,” said John Trodden, Managing Partner of Blue Phoenix and CEO of Blue Bay. “Today we take that commitment to the next level. As a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned business, our purpose is personal: delivering technology that ensures Veterans receive the benefits they’ve earned, with dignity, speed, and trust.”
Tanya Brennan, CEO of PhoenixTeam, added: “This award reflects the strength of our mentor-protégé partnership and the trust VA has placed in Blue Phoenix. From day one, our focus has been on serving Veterans and driving modernization that lasts. Together with our partners, we’re proud to help VA accelerate delivery, improve efficiency, and realize the full vision of a modern LGY platform.”
Blue Phoenix leads this effort by bringing together deep expertise in federal mortgage systems, Salesforce, AWS, cybersecurity, and human-centered design. The result is a contract award that will improve outcomes for Veterans, advance modernization across VA, and set a new benchmark for mortgage technology transformation.
About Blue Phoenix
Blue Phoenix Solutions, LLC (Blue Phoenix) is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) headquartered in Arlington, VA. Formed under an approved mentor protégé joint venture between Phoenix Oversight Group, LLC (PhoenixTeam), mentor, and Blue Bay Delivery Solutions, LLC (Blue Bay), protégé, Blue Phoenix is on a mission to “serve those who serve” by bringing PMO, product and delivery excellence, and strategic advisory leadership for federal agencies. For more information visit, www.bluphx.com.
About PhoenixTeam
PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned technology services firm headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, specializing in AI-powered mortgage operations and technology services for the mortgage and financial services industries and federal housing agencies. Our mission is to enable affordable and accessible homeownership through innovative, customer-centric technology. With a strong focus on generative AI, we tackle complex industry challenges, equipping businesses with cutting-edge tools that enhance innovation, efficiency, and compliance. By bridging the gap between technology and business teams, we strive to bring joy and purpose back to software development, making a meaningful impact in the lives of our clients and homeowners everywhere. For more information, please visit www.phoenixoutcomes.com.
About Blue Bay
Blue Bay Solutions is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) founded by retired Marine Corps officer John Trodden. The company bridges gaps between business leaders, benefits partners, and engineering teams to improve veteran benefits delivery. With a leadership approach rooted in military principles and a focus on program management, benefits delivery, and product discovery, Blue Bay helps federal agencies and partners drive measurable outcomes while creating opportunities for veterans transitioning to civilian careers. For more information, please visit www.bluebayvalue.com.
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Workforce transformation is no joke. It's one of those things that as a consultant we over simplify with slides showing the Kotter change management framework. Throw in some change champions and some short term wins and voila - managed change. Bless our hearts, how naive we are. This is the story of what it actually takes to transform a workforce. I had the great privilege of running a workshop yesterday on this subject, which went really well, so I thought I would share it with the mortgage AI community in hopes of giving you a way to think about this particular type of change from the lens of lived experience.
By the way, I'm absolutely not knocking Kotter, Kotter is awesome. I use Kotter and the framework is quite useful. But I find that the Kubler-Ross framework is much more helpful in our particular context, it so aptly comes from the human side of the change process. As I reflect on my own experiences with profound loss, I'm struck by the internal versus external lens of loss and adjustment from each of these perspectives. Kotter comes at change from the outside - a management perspective. Kubler-Ross comes as change from the inside - a personal. We can do both at the same time.
December 2023, PhoenixTeam quarterly partner retreat, Tela at the front of the living room going on like a crazy person about how "there has to be a better way". It had clicked for me on a client project. I was part of a team working to do a ground up rebuild of a servicing platform. My team and I were transforming servicing guidelines into software requirements. So how do we do that? Well, you put the Fannie Mae guide on one screen, and your excel spreadhseet on the other one, and you copy, paste, interpret. Do this about, oh 150,000 times across Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA, USDA, FHA, and then you can start the real work.
I had tinkered just enough with ChatGPT to experience what I call "the magic moment". This is the moment when we realize what genAI can actually do for the first time. The moment we actually understand why the world is losing their mind, and what all the fuss is about with the urgent need to get an AI strategy. This is the first step, and it really can't be skipped.
If you are looking for a place to start, this is it. The first thing to do is find a way to get your leadership team to have the magic moment. It's actually pretty easy, the right mix of foundational education, combined with the right demo, and the moment will happen. It can be done in as little as, say 45 minutes. This is why I do free AI speed learning. I want to help the industry get to that moment as quickly as possible because that allows us to move to step two.
Once I had the magic moment, then came the existential dread. I quickly realized that unless we did something radically different, we simply weren't going to have a business in three years time - at least not a wildly successful one. There will be a long tail on genAI impact, a very long tail. In fact, that tail will likely be longer than my remaining lifespan. But the really differentiated companies, the companies that will thrive early, will get to the change early. They will make the genAI pivot faster than everyone else.
So this is the phase where we start to understand how much everything is going to change, and we get really scared about how we fit in. How our business fits in. How we are going to be able to provide for our families and the families of the people who work for us. Yeah, it's that impactful. My business was assured to be impacted early and hard, your business will have different impact radius but I promise you, it's coming.
Don't be discouraged at this step. It is necessary for your team to have the fear, and to use that fear to fuel the next steps. So basically, if you are afraid, at least you know you have completed steps one and two, and can now move to step three.
From here you have a question to answer - are you going to eat the bear or is the bear going to eat you? We set out to redefine our business. We could sit around and wait for someone to do that for us (and risk irrelevancy) or we could decide what the business would be like. We educated ourselves, we immersed ourselves in Silicon Valley, we tinkered with all the tools. We correctly anticipated that the world of software development was going to radically change.
We decided that in the new world of software development, we just wouldn't need as many roles. If the basic work of every traditional procession could be reliably automated, then what would be left? We call it a paired product team. Instead of a team with multiple specialized roles, we envision one super-powered "product" role called the value engineer, paired with a supercharged chief AI engineer. This team just runs a straight kanban approach, agile is simply too long. In a world where you can go concept to cash in days, who has time for a two week sprint?
Now, this is an end state vision. We still have all kinds of teams, which is a good place to introduce the concept of what we call "interskilling", rather an upskilling or reskilling. This is the concept that we need to engage our workforce in a way that allows them to straddle both the now AND the AI future at the same time. I have multiple types of teams, configured for however we need to operate. I have traditional scrum teams, paired product teams, and even waterfall teams.
We have to be able to operate in whatever model works, and different models work for different environment and client ecosystems. On the one hand agile is dead. On the other hand, agile is alive and well-ish, and will be for some time.
Great! We have a business vision and we've embraced our fear. Now we enter the fumbling around phase. This is where we figure out all the things we don't know. Our teams are all homegrown. We have these incredible team members and leaders, why would we want to go outside for genAI talent? Furthermore, where would we even find this talent? At the time it was super-scarce (still is) and we believed we could do better on our own.
So we puttered and tinkered. We tried tools. We made a lot of CustomGPTs. We figured out what a ragbot was and built a lot of them. We threw away a lot of stuff. We bumped our heads against the wall numerous times. We got frustrated and enjoyed big and small victories. We navigated what Ethan Mollick and the Harvard Business School have called the jagged frontier.
Enter the first failed attempt at reskilling. I created some awesome PowerPoint slides and called it a bootcamp. We waved our AI flag, held the bootcamps, and waited for the transformation. Then we wondered why the transformation wasn't happening.
Turns out attendance is not the same as application.
Yes there will be PowerPoints and flag waving. I have personally created about 500 power point slides, and that was very helpful (and very expensive - see next step). And I can honestly say the slides are awesome. But it's not about the PowerPoint slides. It's about the application of the learning. It's about finding and embracing the new way of thinking. The slides are just a step along the way. We do demos. We show people how to build things. We explain things. We explain things again in a new way.
We spent a lot of money on a dedicated AI team. We spent a lot of time creating slides. We spent a lot of time going to conferences to learn. We spent a lot of money on education. We spent a lot of money on AI tooling and subscriptions. (I won't tell you how much my monthly personal spend on AI is - it's to ridiculous to admit). I can tell you from personal experience it is way more expensive than you think it will be. We continue to spend a lot of money on our team members, and it's all worth it.
Be ready to spend if you really want to be ready. And not just on tech, especially not just on tech.
By now, things started to click. We started to see it working. It was important at this moment to reflect. Maybe this is what Kotter means by the small wins. We set out on a journey to get somewhere, and we go somewhere. We started to see it working. I just knew there was a better way in December of 2023 and there was. We dedicated and re-dedictated ourselves to the journey. Even through, perhaps especially through, extraordinarily difficult times.
2024 was a year of extreme financial pressure for our company. We lost a huge contract (well, we didn't really lose it, but that's a story for another article). We had to do layoffs for the first time. It was horrible. And through it all, we continued to invest in genAI. Just because times were hard didn't mean we could give up. Especially becasue the times were hard, we had to stay the course. Giving up would just mean certain defeat and we simply were not going down without a fight. There's a reason our motto is "pivot or die" and we really mean it.
We didn't quite get it right the first time. Or the second time. I've had lots of bad ideas over the course of a 25-year career. I can say, however, that I tend to have more good ideas these days. Our original idea was to build a product that would automate the software development process. Good idea. Great idea even. However, if we'd gone that route we would have been squashed like a bug. There is so much money behind this problem, bilions and billions of dollars.
As we listened and learned to the industry, we adapted our ideas, our product vision, our services strategies in ways that better aligned to our particular market needs and wants. Thank goodness we did. And thank goodness for Leslie Peeler and all the great partners at Cenlar FSB, as well as David Upbin and the Mortgage Bankers Association, for walking with us on this journey.
This part of the process is about having the courage to look at what we think we know and check ourselves. We have to have the courage, especially in the AI times, to open up decisions we've made when new information surfaces. It's easy to get strategy whiplash so this is a balance. Stick to your guns. Be unwavering in our purpose and our vision, and also keep our eyes open. Things are changing so fast, and so often. Eyes up guys, eyes up. The "why" won't change, but the how definitely will.
My two hour PowerPoint, no matter how enthusiastically I delivered it, did not transform my workforce. Sorry guys. It probably won't work for you either. Since my first failed but well intended attempt, we've continued to try and I feel like we have hit our stride. What started as a two hour presentation has evolved into a five-day, in-person bootcamp that starts with the definition of AI and ends with each student designing and building their own AI agent using Claude Code.
In addition, we have created an AI operations team and set of objectives and key results (OKRs). Our AI ops team is a great balance and compliment to the value engineering we do, and helps drive AI into the fabric of the company. What we measure is what matters, and that's still true. AI ops is an emerging profession and practice that helps operationalize AI, track and optimize the total cost of AI ownership.
We have a relentless focus on application over attendance. Every who participates, then applies. Not just in the class but beyond. We use the things we build all the time. Our Chief Marketing Officer Michael Ramos build the application for our next AI exchange out of Replit.
And lastly, I encourage us all the focus on the concept of interskilling, rather than upskilling or reskilling. How can we get our workforce to work in concert with classic approaches, to be able to step back and forth between traditional and genAI methods?
And then it's Tuesday and everything changes again... Every time I run a course I have to update for new learnings, new stories, new tools, new ideas. I'm known to say that today is the worst the tech will ever be. It only gets better from here (except for GPT 5, that was definitely a step back).
So that's it - ten not very easy steps to achieve AI workforce transformation. Please join us at our next AI exchange to hear more and engage in the conversation. It's hype-free, real world, and we had a great time last time.
By Tela G. Mathias, Chief Nerd and Mad Scientist at PhoenixTeam, CEO of Phoenix Burst
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By Erin Bittenbender , Kellie Stoll , and Leeann Walker
The MISMO Fall Summit brought nearly 300 participants to Annapolis this September, creating a unique blend of in-person and virtual collaboration. The setting was lively, plenty of handshakes, brainstorming, and hallway conversations. And of course, PhoenixTeam brought our trademark mix of collaboration and fun to the experience! Out of that energy came several key insights from the event:
A New Era of MISMO Leadership: One of the week’s most notable announcements was the appointment of mortgage industry veteran, author, and thought leader Brian Vieaux, CMB, as MISMO’s new president, effective October 16, 2025. Brian is a respected industry executive whose leadership, relationships, and vision will drive innovation, broaden engagement, and advance MISMO standards for the benefit of consumers, lenders, and servicers.
Recognizing Professional Achievements: We were especially proud to celebrate PhoenixTeam’s own Leeann Walker, who was recognized for achieving her Associate MISMO Standards Professional (AMSP) designation. She was joined by Chris Trujillo of Viant Eye, who earned the Certified MISMO Standards Professional (CMSP) designation. Moments like these are a reminder that MISMO is not just about standards, it’s about people investing in their growth and in the future of the mortgage industry.
The Future of the GSEs: Discussions around the GSEs dominated part of the agenda. Competition in the secondary market remains critical, which means at least two entities will be necessary going forward. Yet the path to releasing the GSEs from conservatorship is far from straightforward. While the current administration has shown interest in moving in that direction, the timeline is murky, tied up in capital requirements and the realities of FHFA rulemaking. Some panelists even floated the possibility of the government selling its ownership stake to private entities, underscoring how complex this conversation remains.
Economics: On the economics front, there was some cautious optimism. Retail sales reports beat expectations, and for the first time since 2021, lenders are starting to see modest improvement. Low delinquency rates, strong employment numbers, and larger loan balances have created higher per loan servicing fees, while the expansion of non-QM products is offering profitability in niche markets. That said, pull-through rates have decreased as more borrowers are either denied, withdraw, or run into property-related issues, a reminder of the challenges still facing originators.
Credit Realities: The debate around credit scores highlighted another pain point. MBA continues to assert that the tri-merge system is unnecessarily costly for consumers and would like to see a shift towards a single-report. While the adoption of VantageScore 4.0 is an encouraging step toward competition, it’s only a starting point. Many believe a “waterfall” model that incorporates consumer-permissioned data is the path forward, providing flexibility instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.
Trigger Leads Under New Rules: The recently signed Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act (HPPA) of 2025 also drew attention. Effective September 5th, the law restricts the controversial practice of trigger leads, where consumer data is sold by credit reporting agencies after a mortgage application. Moving forward, lenders will only have access to this information if borrowers opt in or if there is a firm offer of credit. Servicers, originators, and institutions with an existing customer relationship remain exceptions, but overall, the law marks a significant step toward protecting consumer privacy.
Panel and Workgroup Highlights: Several working groups shared important updates. The Mortgage Compliance Dataset (MCD) Development Workgroup is wrapping up version 2.0 of the dataset, which aims to improve the efficiency and transparency of state examinations. To accelerate adoption, MISMO and CSBS announced they will co-host a TechSprint on December 3rd to drive collaboration between regulators and industry.
Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) were also front and center. The release of the MISMO Common Confidence Score offers a new way for lenders to evaluate AVMs consistently. This comes just in time: beginning October 1st, the new joint agency rule on AVM Quality Control Standards will require lenders to ensure accuracy testing, random sampling, and fair-lending compliance when using these models in credit decisions.
Artificial Intelligence and PhoenixTeam's AI Boot Camp: And of course, no mortgage technology discussion would be complete without AI. The message was clear: progress, not perfection. AI should support people, not replace them, and it only works when fueled by data. Demonstrations also highlighted how new digital assistants and AI-driven tools can help guide applications, reduce manual underwriting touches, and streamline processes across the lending workflow.
This year’s Fall Summit also featured a first-of-its-kind AI Bootcamp, designed and led by PhoenixTeam. The half-day program gave mortgage professionals a hands-on, real-world look at how generative AI can be applied across the mortgage lifecycle, from compliance and operations to borrower engagement.
Attendees explored how AI can streamline workflows, reduce regulatory complexity, and support decision-making without sacrificing governance or borrower protections. For many participants, it was their first chance to roll up their sleeves with AI in a mortgage context, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
For PhoenixTeam, this was more than just a workshop... it was part of our commitment to equipping the industry with the tools, training, and confidence needed to navigate the AI future responsibly.
Federal Housing Agency Servicing Dataset: Finally, the Federal Government Housing Agency Servicing Dataset was released for a 30-day public comment period, open until October 16th. This initiative represents a significant step toward aligning federal agencies around standardized MISMO servicing data—a change that could improve consistency and efficiency across the entire ecosystem.
The MISMO Fall Summit was a reminder of why these gatherings matter. From leadership changes to regulatory shifts and from AI demos to certification milestones, it’s where industry standards meet real-world application. For PhoenixTeam, it was also about celebrating our people, strengthening partnerships, and having some fun along the way. We’re grateful to MISMO and MBA for another thoughtful event and look forward to seeing how the conversations in Annapolis shape the months ahead.
📸 Take a look at some of our photos from the Summit: group shots, networking moments, and a few behind-the-scenes glimpses of the PhoenixTeam and MISMO in action.
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There was a recent Fortune article over the weekend (sorry, it's paywalled) making the ostensibly new case for symbolic (deterministic) reasoning in genAI based use cases to control for hallucinations. It codified some concepts I've been thinking about for some time but didn't yet have the words to describe.
Friendly reminder - artificial intelligence (AI) is a very broad field of computer science focused on enabling machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. Generative AI (genAI) is a more narrow subfield focused on using deep learning and transformer models to generate new content.
You'll have to bear with me through some definitions and an AI history lesson to get to the mortgage point but I promise it will be worth it.
When I first read the article I was thinking "symbolic AI" was a fancy new thing, but really it's been around since the 1950s thanks to Newell and Simon pictured below. It's an early form of artificial intelligence that represented knowledge as symbols and logic. This was the era of rules based so-called "expert" systems. You can think the early days of Desktop Underwriter - given a set of inputs, a deterministic output will be produced. The bottleneck here is acquiring and accurately expressing the logic.
Automated reasoning is the field of computer science that studies how computers can be used to reason logically through a problem. Use the mathematical concepts of proving theorems and solving equations to draw conclusions from a set of rules. (I know, right? Taking me back to me theoretical math days of college, I knew that would come in handy).
Automated reasoning is a big deal because it goes beyond rule-based systems by providing formal, mathematical proofs of correctness, ensuring that results follow logically from the rules rather than relying on rules that may themselves be incomplete or inconsistent. John Alan Robinson came up with this idea in his 1965 work.
Throw in some neural networks to the stew of structured cognitive models and voila - the neuro-symbolic AI field is born. Use symbolic AI to encode the rules, automated reasoning to prove the rules are right, and add a neural network to gobble up all the data and learn. Yowza.
Modern mathematics is more about groups of collaborators working together, rather than any one or two mathematicians making breakthroughs. I selected Josh Tenenbaum as our final mathematician for the article because of his contribution to neuro-symbolic AI and this amazing photo.
I promise I have a point. We all know that hallucinations (also called confabulations) are the achilles heel of genAI solutions in mortgage. I often get the question "how do you know it's right?" and, in fact, I have a dedicated evals team that is solely focused on content errors analysis, prompt (re)engineering and system evaluations. All they do is study data and genAI system behavior to answer this question and prove it.
Let's consider the addition of deterministic functions on the typical agentic mortgage flow as in our next diagram. We use the basics of an agent to make a plan and delegate tasks, and we introduce multiple techniques to control for hallucinations. In step (6) we enforce format through a schema - the first control point after prompt engineering. In step (8) we introduce a deterministic rule check confirming eligibility and generate the reasoning trace. Then in step (10) a subagent computes uncertainty using a semantic entropy probe (fancy name for hallucination detector). Finally, we can send high confidence results directly to the borrower, and send low confidence results to a human-in-the-loop (HITL).
Seems legit, right? Why don't we do this all the time?
The main problem I have with this is that it's very expensive and not very fast. I mean why not just code it deterministically the first time? The borrower has what they feel is a simple question, and here we are taking 13 steps through at least four solutions to give them an answer. Not a great customer experience.
Well deterministic decisioning is what got us into this problem in the first place. We have all these ancient, rules-based systems that are literally collapsing under the weight of regulatory change. Yes, it's more overhead to do it this way, but in theory it would allow us to perfect our agentic experiences, learn additionally from error and confidence analysis, and ultimately achieve highly trustworthy generative solutions that are more dynamic and (ultimately) less expensive to maintain. That's my theory anyway.
In this way, we combine probabilistic and deterministic solutions to our use cases to vastly reduce hallucinations. We tradeoff speed and cost, however, which we all know will be hard to overcome in the financial climate of mortgage. I'm just not sure the money is there to go this way. Time will tell, we'll work it in the lab, of course, and keep you posted.
By Tela G. Mathias, Chief Nerd and Mad Scientist at PhoenixTeam, CEO at Phoenix Burst
