Who’s behind the mic?

Erica Bigley (00:06)
Welcome to the Link Up,

Shawn Swanson (00:06)
Anyway.

Erica Bigley (00:07)
MeridianLink’s Podcast, where we connect the people, ideas, and conversations shaping the future of financial services and all things digital lending. I’m one of your hosts, Erica Bigley, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, and I’ve got a really great episode for you today. Today we’re turning the mic on our own team and we’re introducing you to the voices behind the podcast, the people who will be asking the questions, exploring what’s next.

And bringing you conversations with the people and leaders who are truly moving our industry forward. So let’s meet our hosts. Linking up with me today is Laura Costello, our Vice President of Product Marketing, Brooke Lapides, Director of Partner Business Development, Joe Mearn, Director of Product Management, Tom Westover, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Sean Swanson, Manager of Product Marketing. Thanks all for joining me today. There’s like a crew out there.

Brooke Lapides (01:00)
Yeah,

Erica Bigley (01:00)
How’s everyone doing?

Laura Costello (01:00)
Thanks.

Brooke Lapides (01:01)
Excited to be here and chat.

Erica Bigley (01:03)
So let’s start out with the basics. Tell us a little

Tom W (01:04)
Yeah.

Erica Bigley (01:08)
Bit about yourselves and your background, everything from what you’ve done throughout your career, and then what brought you to MeridianLink, what brought you here today? I’ll just kick it to Laura first. I feel like you’re the right one to be starting us off today.

Laura Costello (01:23)
So my background before MeridianLink was actually all on the agency side. I worked at marketing agencies the most recent agency that I worked at worked with financial institutions, community banks and credit unions. And I decided that I’d had enough of the juggling and jumping back and forth that agency life is, and decided that I wanted to go client side and

Ended up at Saylent, which is where I met Joe. We created the MeridianLink Engage product. It was then Saylent Engage. I was a director of marketing there. And we were acquired in 2021. So we’ve been here now for a little bit over five years. I’m heading up the product marketing team, like you mentioned. It’s been great. I love being able to take the agency background that I had and like moving fast and juggling all of the things.

And being able to bring it in this type of an environment, which is awesome.

I’ve been married for 25 years and I’ve got two boys who are 21 and about to turn 18. So a room full of male adults outside of my rabbit, Winnie,

Brooke Lapides (02:23)
Mm-hmm.

Laura Costello (02:24)
Who is the other girl who shares my house with me.

Erica Bigley (02:28)
Joe, you wanna take it from there?

Joe Mearn (02:30)
So Joe Mearn, my current role here at MeridianLink is Director of Product. But just like Laura, I came from the Saylent acquisition five years ago. So unofficially five years at MeridianLink, but officially with our time before, I’m at 14 years. so I’ve been in product now, 15 plus. I came from a payments background actually. And prior to that, I spent a lot of time as like a business analyst, consultant analyst. So

Lot of time interviewing customers and asking them questions, what they want, which kind of hopefully I’m gonna use that experience to interview our guests and get things out of there. I am born and raised Boston, Mass.

Erica Bigley (03:07)
Yeah.

Joe Mearn (03:08)
I’m now out in the burbs. So I keep moving further and further out with my wife and and two daughters. So on the opposite of Laura, I have a house full of girls. That

Erica Bigley (03:16)
Yeah.

Joe Mearn (03:17)
Includes a pug, Lola, but I do have one Boston Terrier,

Harley, who is the other male in the house. So super excited for this opportunity and you know, looking forward to it.

Erica Bigley (03:27)
Brooke, you want to introduce yourself?

Brooke Lapides (03:29)
Yes, yes. first of all, I’m excited to be here and I can’t wait to interview other people in the mortgage industry for The Link Up. love talking about mortgage with my industry people. So I’ve been with MeridianLink for a little over two years and I work with all of our third-party integrated partners, specifically with our mortgage LOS, so all of the mortgage vendors that our clients use.

I started off when I was in business school at a community bank, spent some time there, and then I was at a credit union on a military installation, which was fantastic. And then after that I kind of found my way in mortgage specifically. So worked for a few large lenders and then took a little bit of time off when I had a baby. So I have a little boy. And after a two-year break, break in quotes, anyone who stayed home with a

Baby knows that that’s also a tough job. that I found my way to MeridianLink and I’m so happy to be here. Something I’m super passionate about,

Erica Bigley (04:22)
But

Brooke Lapides (04:23)
Is financial literacy. So I’ve written a couple of children’s books on financial literacy and I’m a certified financial counselor as well.

Erica Bigley (04:31)
Tom, do you want to introduce yourself?

Tom W (04:33)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m Tom Westover. I’m a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at MeridianLink. I’m specifically over the mortgage product line. I am the co-host with Brooke. And so this actually started with a conversation that Brooke and I had where she brought this idea to me and it snowballed into a much larger initiative. So it’s actually really exciting to see this all happening. My background similar to Laura’s. I was in agency marketing for years and years.

Like Laura said, you bounce around a lot. There’s a lot of balls in the air all the time. And that does get old after a while. And so I had

An opportunity to go in-house at an IMB and I was running their digital marketing team. I worked my way up to a marketing director position there. After that, I consulted for a regional bank in the South, helping them stand up a consumer direct mortgage product line.

And then I came onto the tech side and joined MeridianLink about a year and a half ago. I am particularly excited about this because I feel like the mortgage space is so vast and there’s so many different ways to be an expert.

As far as personal life goes, I live in Salt Lake City area. I’ve been married for eight years. I have a almost five-year-old son and an almost one-year-old daughter.

Erica Bigley (05:49)
Well, Sean,

Do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself?

Shawn Swanson (05:51)
Sure, thanks, Erica. as Erica said, I’m the newbie. I’ve been with MeridianLink for about three months, and it’s been a wild ride, a great ride. And before MeridianLink most of my career, all of my career has been in technology. I’ve worked with SaaS companies, startups in the

Mortgage software automation space. Erica and I worked together at Elly May in the past life, all in product marketing. I’ve also worked for FICO, kind of leading initiatives in product marketing there for decisioning as well. So.

A long history of financial services, fintechs and SaaS companies. Personal life, my wife and I have been together for 10 years, and exactly 10 years. our kids all have four legs.

Brooke Lapides (06:35)
Ha ha ha.

Shawn Swanson (06:38)
So interesting fact is that I’m a terrible, a foster parent.

And that I have five pets. Four of them were supposed to be temporary. They’re all permanent. So I think I failed at fostering. But what I’m excited about

Brooke Lapides (06:49)
Foster fails.

Shawn Swanson (06:53)
Is really learning from our guests. Because we’re going to have experts. We’re going to have a lot of interesting conversations. And really want to understand from these experts what their take is on the market. And have very great conversations that leave our audience wanting more.

Erica Bigley (07:09)
I feel like I resemble your remark about being a bad foster parent. I’ll introduce myself as well. Eric Bigley, as I mentioned, I’ve been with MerdianLink for about a year and a half. I have about 20 years in various payments companies. I started in PR with MasterCard many, many years ago and Visa.

And then spent a period of time with Shawn at Ellie Mae. loved every bit of the mortgage industry. And then spent some time at Achieve, which is a kind of financial wellness and where I really learned about a lot of what Brooke works with every day from financial literacy and getting people on that path forward. And I’ve loved my time here with this crew.

I’m originally from Connecticut, but I live in Northern California with my husband. We’ve got two kids who are both in high school, a senior and a junior in high school. So I spend a lot of time these days panicking about college. And then we have, yeah.

Laura Costello (08:05)
Same.

Erica Bigley (08:07)
And financial literacy. so those things tie

Tom W (08:10)
Mm-hmm.

Erica Bigley (08:10)
Together really nicely. And then we have three dogs that you’ll hear barking at any moment in time. one

Brooke Lapides (08:16)
Yeah.

Erica Bigley (08:17)
Of which that was a total foster fail. And he just moved himself in and stayed forever.

Well, thanks everybody. That was really great.

I’d like to turn it for a minute because I think you all in different capacities spend a lot of time either talking with our partners or talking with customers or talking with prospects, or even in some cases talking with people who we thought might be customers and then it didn’t go that way. I’m wondering in your conversations over the last couple of months.

What from your perspective is really top of mind for our customers and our partners for the

Joe Mearn (08:50)
No.

Erica Bigley (08:50)
Near term? And then maybe also like, magic eight ball for like the year in the future. what are they thinking about for the year ahead?

Laura Costello (08:58)
I think, like all of us, a big topic of conversation is AI and what does that mean? how are they best going to use that in their institutions? What are regulators going to allow? What what is pushing the limit? You know, all of those types of things. We talk to customers who want us to move super fast and automate all of the things we possibly can automate through AI and all the way back to the opposite end of the spectrum with customers who

Need to review every single thing So it’s going to be really interesting to see, I think, between now and 18 months from now, if you go back 18 months from where we are right now, where we were with AI and how quickly that has changed, that’s really exciting

Erica Bigley (09:38)
Right.

Laura Costello (09:39)
To me. It’s such an opportunity and also kind of scary, but like nothing great happened that you weren’t a little scared of. So it’s really kind of exciting.

Joe Mearn (09:46)
Yeah, I echo that a lot of the conversations I have are focused around how can AI help from an automation standpoint? How can it help through personalization? And it’s really focused on the digital journey. But I think at the crux of all of it, it’s like

Erica Bigley (09:59)
Right.

Joe Mearn (10:01)
Just how do we make it easier for the consumer and how do we make it easier for the financial institutions, and just leveraging these tools that we all continue to hear about to really simplify that process.

Tom W (10:12)
I would just add to that that there’s also, I think, a need for expertise and knowing where to look for that expertise. In the mortgage space, you have your credit unions and banks, but you also have your IMBs that really pride themselves on rolling up their sleeves, being scrappy with their technology. But everyone is looking to find an equivalent of a standard for, like Laura said, best practices, what’s compliant, what are regulators going to say, but understanding that.

While we know AI is going to change our business in some way, we’re not exactly sure where to start. And so I think that

Technology itself is gonna become increasingly important.

Erica Bigley (10:49)
Brooke, anything from the partner perspective as you’re having your conversations?

Brooke Lapides (10:53)
Yeah, I agree with what everyone else has said. The majority of the conversations that I’m having with newer partners who are just entering the MeridianLink ecosystem, it’s generally newer entrants because MeridianLink has such a robust partner marketplace we have a lot of partners in place already. So the ones that are integrating recently do

Erica Bigley (11:11)
So

Brooke Lapides (11:13)
Tend to be companies that are utilizing AI, whether that’s in

Underwriting or document intelligence or you know any number of things as a CRM or a POS. So the bottom line is everybody’s using it and everybody’s trying to figure out how best to use it for them, what the right workflow is, what’s

Erica Bigley (11:31)
Yeah.

Brooke Lapides (11:32)
Compliance, looking for standards and that type of thing.

Shawn Swanson (11:34)
In addition, how do you deliver seamless customer experience? Consumers have grown to expect experiences like with Amazon and Netflix, and how do we reduce that friction so that customers get those experiences they expect? That’s kind of what I’m hearing.

Erica Bigley (11:49)
So when you think about this podcast and what it’s designed to do, is there a specific topic or a specific question that you’re really excited to ask? Or is there someone that you’re really excited to talk to and learn from?

Brooke Lapides (12:05)
Let’s tease

Some upcoming episodes.

Tom W (12:07)
We were able to have an interview just this morning with Kristen Messerli.

She is running a nonprofit group that is helping younger Millennials, Gen Z, gain a better understanding of how the mortgage space works and what their options are and gaining

Financial literacy around homeownership. And I think that, topic-wise, I’m so interested in what is going to happen in the next 10 years with the younger generations in the mortgage space. it’s top of mind for a lot of people as the homeownership becomes more and more top-heavy with, older generations owning more and more. And the fact that she put this group together, she identified a problem and made this group

Solely on the basis of just helping solve that problem and alleviate those concerns was just so cool. And I was really impressed and I’m happy that there’s so much brain power and energy going towards the more human elements of this process and understanding it’s not just a financial hang up. There’s an emotional hangup, there’s a knowledge hang up, and tackling it from the human side I thought was just absolutely fascinating.

Brooke Lapides (13:12)
Yeah, I agree. And that’s why, and I think I mentioned this to Kristen when we were speaking with her, but that’s why I love our tagline of lending made human. Because at the end of the day, we need to remember that on the other end of the screen or the other end of the phone or in front of you, you know, at the desk in the branch, like there’s a human who’s buying a house or applying for a car loan or opening an account. And this could be a scary or nerve-wracking experience

Erica Bigley (13:30)
So

Brooke Lapides (13:35)
For them. And our clients do a really good job of keeping that in mind.

And that’s why it’s so top of mind for us as the technology company too.

Joe Mearn (13:42)
Yeah, I think from my side, I’m most excited to really just get firsthand experience from customers, industry experts and leaders out there of like what they are actually experiencing and drop below a lot of the buzzwords that we hear out there and where they really see things being in the next couple of years and how can we make their lives easier.

Laura Costello (14:02)
And for me, I’m most excited to just have another way to get in front of our customers and our prospects in the market. You know, our webinars are such a popular channel that we use all the time. There’s only so many webinars that we can be running. And not everybody has time to go to a webinar or watch a webinar. I know for me, I’m listening to podcasts every single morning when I’m at the gym, I go for a walk, and I would not be listening to a webinar in that same way. So I think having the opportunity to have

A different kind of conversation with different people and get in front of folks who wouldn’t necessarily be able to be either preference wise or time wise be joining webinars with us.

Shawn Swanson (14:42)
Just piggyback on what Tom said. I’m excited to hear from other experts in all different areas, especially our partners that really extend what we do. Specifically, I’m interested in fraud. This is to be one of our first partners and really understanding all the different elements that it takes and how we help prevent that.

Erica Bigley (15:03)
From my perspective, I’m just really excited to hear more from some of our customers as we go. Having gotten the chance to talk to so many of our customers at our LIVE event, they have such interesting stories of how they’re using technology unique ways or how it’s helping them to really grow their businesses or give back to their communities. Our customers are so passionate about what they do and who they do it for.

And I think at the end of the day, the way that they’re solving unique problems and challenges is really great. And one more podcast, you know, I will always take that for my listening while I’m out walking.

Laura Costello (15:39)
Right.

Erica Bigley (15:40)
I’d love to just spend a moment, you know.

Thinking that there might be some prospective employees or people that just want to learn a thing or two about MeridianLink out there, what’s one thing in your job that you’ve done or just in your experience here that’s unique or different, something that you’ve done that you wouldn’t have expected,

Laura Costello (16:00)
Yeah.

Erica Bigley (16:00)
That people might be surprised by.

Tom W (16:02)
Well, I’m hosting a podcast. So Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Costello (16:04)
That’s the best answer. No one’s gonna beat that at this point. That’s awesome.

Brooke Lapides (16:06)
Good point, good point.

Erica Bigley (16:09)
You come up with a crazy idea

Joe Mearn (16:09)
Yeah. Next question, move on.

Erica Bigley (16:11)
And then you know, we just make it seven hundred times more complicated, Tom.

Tom W (16:16)
Exactly.

Brooke Lapides (16:16)
And better.

Erica Bigley (16:17)
And better.

Tom W (16:18)
And better.

Laura Costello (16:18)
I think for me, you know, for years we spent a lot of time at MeridianLink focusing on helping our customers, being in front of our customers, which is the most important thing that we do. But we spent so much time doing that that we forgot that we also need to talk about what we’re doing ourselves and what we’re innovating and shout that from the rooftops. It’s probably been about a year and a half, two years of a process we’ve

Created this new quarterly product innovation program, everything from our roadmap to partnering with Erica and team to make a big splash in the market. And most importantly, really getting that news out to our customers and to the market.

The feedback we’ve gotten has been

Just incredible. People are so thrilled with how we keep upping the ante every quarter. And I think all of you on this call are helping us get to that point. And it’s just gonna make it easier for our customers to really take advantage of all the tools that we have available to them and for the market to see where we’re going. And that’s been really exciting. And being able to partner with all of you on building that content and making it really exciting.

Joe Mearn (17:22)
Yeah, kind of following up on that and I guess shameless

Plug We officially announced MeridianLink LIVE I mean, that to me is one of the coolest things that I feel like I get to be involved with every year and being able to get in front of the customers and hear from the customers firsthand. It’s just such an amazing event.

Brooke Lapides (17:38)
Erica, I’m gonna answer your question in a little bit of a different way because you mentioned prospective employees who could be listening. And I just wanna say that MeridianLink is the type of company where, I took a two-year break off work when I had my son. And it can be hard to get back into the workforce if you’ve taken a break for parenting, caretaking parents, you know, various things.

And I didn’t know anybody at MerdianLink and I just applied and they looked at my resume and they said it’s okay that you had a two year gap because you have the relevant work experience. And here I am two years later and I’m so happy that MerdianLink is the type of company that doesn’t look at things like that as a negative because there’s a lot of companies that do.

Laura Costello (18:15)
Joe and I came from a company with 30 people, maybe max. And when we were acquired five years ago, the majority of us are still here and we’ve been able to become leaders in the company. And we started at this little small company in Boston.

Erica Bigley (18:28)
I think the thing that always surprises me when I sit back is we have been around for almost 30 years now. And we have one of the largest customer bases for financial services. We have about 750 employees, which in the grand scheme is not that many.

Laura Costello (18:45)
Right.

Erica Bigley (18:46)
I think it’s pretty impressive what we do every day and every year together.

Think people think we’re a much larger organization. Probably why we wear so many hats and why no two days feels the same, because you’re just tackling that new challenge. But I feel like there’s that really energetic startup mentality here. you know, maybe that’s coming from the Bay Area or whatever, but it’s sort of like what’s the day going to bring? And

Brooke Lapides (19:10)
Mm-hmm.

Erica Bigley (19:12)
Then the joy of actually making something of it, which is just really amazing.

Brooke Lapides (19:16)
Totally agree.

Tom W (19:17)
And I would add, what I’ve found since I’ve joined is that new ideas are actually very embraced. And if you raise your hand and say, Hey, we want to try something, I already made the podcast joke, but we’ve done a lot with our marketing efforts and trying to push the limit and coming up with new ideas and positioning and messaging.

And if you raise your hand and say, Hey, I want to try this, there’s a very high likelihood that they’ll let you. And I feel that there’s only been opportunity to keep pushing what we’re doing forward, both as the product marketing team I’m on, the mortgage division that I’m in, everyone’s pulling in a very aggressive direction. And everyone is so excited to do what they want to do that there’s just energy behind making the next idea better than the previous one.

And it’s fun. There’s a lot of momentum that gets built from that.

Shawn Swanson (20:01)
The idea that we get to try anything that we think will work and we get support to do that.

So I’m just excited for all the opportunities to try new things to be successful for the company.

Erica Bigley (20:12)
So when we’re thinking about the future of this podcast, what do you hope that listeners take away from The Link Up? What’s one thing that would make you say that was a great episode?

Joe Mearn (20:24)
They keep coming back for more. And, really that they can walk away from an episode, I’d say, with that one new idea or a different perspective, something they can take back to their team and discuss and walk away with something to think about or have some type of a conversation starter.

Laura Costello (20:39)
I think the most successful podcast I listen to is when I get home and I tell my husband about what I learned and then I start thinking about it like during the day and try to bring it into my daily life of how can I use this whatever thing I just learned. If we were able to have people get home from the gym and tell their husbands

I hadn’t thought about that before. That’s a new way of thinking. And I can bring that into my day to day. That would be incredible.

Tom W (21:02)
I would add we’re proud of the products that we have and we’re proud of the tech stack that we’ve built. We’re proud of the best in class marketplace. Like all of that’s true. But I think that MeridianLink also prides itself on the expertise and the brokerage of information. And I hope that people start to understand that we value being able to bring quality information to our customers, to listeners, and that that’s something that is ongoing that.

Isn’t just for selling, it’s for education. It’s for just building out the knowledge of these different lending models and these different worlds. And I think that if we are able to get listeners that understand, hey, MeridianLink is a place where I can learn about all these different topics and I can go to my boss and talk about it, then we’ve done our job

Laura Costello (21:43)
Yeah, maybe it’s your boss and not your spouse that you’re gonna be talking to. I think you just hit the nail on the head. Thank you.

Tom W (21:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brooke Lapides (21:46)
Ha ha ha ha.

Erica Bigley (21:48)
I think too, you all talked at the top about this focus from both our customers and our partners on AI and all these questions around what are these things going to be, or when it comes to experiences, whether that’s for the member or the consumer, or it’s even experiences for your workforce. And I think what I’m hoping for from this is that it becomes a community almost where

Everyone listens and says that’s a great idea, or that’s a guardrail I hadn’t thought about. Let me see how we can apply that. Or that’s something that we should be planning for for the next quarter or the next year ahead. And then it almost creates this community of idea sharing between the people that are here and the people that are listening. It feels like there’s a lot of unknowns out there right now. And I hope that we can be the place that makes the unknowns knowns.

Through great questions and great guests and we can start to answer some of that together.

Laura Costello (22:42)
I

Brooke Lapides (22:42)
And I feel like the podcast can be as it evolves, a choose your own adventure for our listeners. So if there’s somebody you really want to hear from, an organization in the industry or somebody you think would be really great for us to interview, let somebody from MeridianLink know and we’ll see if we can make it happen.

Erica Bigley (22:57)
Well, thank you for joining us on this episode of The Link Up We hope you’ll join us for more. If you’ve got ideas on what we should cover, there’s plenty of ways that you can submit those. and thanks for joining us.