Disruption By Design

If you want a quick sense of how Matthew VanFossen thinks, start with the name of his flagship point-of-sale product: The Big POS. When he proposed it, business partners thought he was kidding.

“It was a big argument,” he remembers. “[They were like], Matt, come on. We’re gonna be selling this to banks.”

But VanFossen, CEO of Absolute Home Mortgage and the fintech company Mortgage Automation Technologies, both based in New Jersey, doesn’t back down. Like, ever. “I think everybody hears the term POS and they all hear it a certain way,” he says. “It puts this image of us out there that we don’t really care what people think. That we have a great product…that we can be different. And we can really disrupt the status quo.”

Throughout his career, VanFossen has made being disruptive a habit. Check out his LinkedIn and you’ll see memes in droves. Nicholas Cage, Steven Crowder’s “Change My Mind,” each rebranded to promote The Big POS. There’s a recent post where he demos the software’s functionality from inside a Cybertruck. Wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat, he submits a loan application to Encompass straight from the car’s dashboard. 

A lot strategic and a little stupid, VanFossen’s approach to the mortgage industry is nothing if not intentional. The name Big POS might raise eyebrows, but that’s sort of the point.

As Justin Demola, president of Lenders One, put it, sometimes VanFossen does things “just to get a reaction out of people.” Not necessarily because he believes them, but to provoke thought, or a conversation, or a challenge. 

“He’s a Swiss Army knife,” says Steve Grossman, current SVP at Luminate Bank and former owner of NJ Lenders Corp. “He can sit with a developer, a loan officer, a regulator, and a CEO and speak each of their languages fluently. There’s nobody else in the business who does all of that and does it well.” 

And then there’s the obvious: he’s a CEO whose business cards feature a smiling poop emoji and whose product is named to sound like an expletive. On purpose.

The tongue-in-cheek references to poop and POS jokes might not land with everyone, but for all the highschool humor, VanFossen is dead serious. The leader of two independently operating companies, VanFossen has cornered the market on what he calls “farm-to-table” mortgage tech, meaning ideas for innovation are sourced directly from originators and staff on the ground then designed, built, and deployed without middlemen or corporate lag time.

A First Fix 

Before he was a jack of all trades in the mortgage industry, though, VanFossen was a high school kid fixing computers. Working with a friend, he’d put up signs around town and convince other people’s parents that he was an expert. 

“Everybody that's my age now (in their 40s), they were still kind of scared of computers. So it was pretty easy to go into a house and have somebody 17 years old be like, I know how to fix this. And they just trusted: Okay, yeah, this smart kid knows how to fix a computer.”

VanFossen was also working at Best Buy, part-time, selling Playstations, when Marvin Rosenberg plucked him to work at AmeriLoan Capital LLC. Rosenberg describes himself as VanFossen’s “mortgage daddy.”

“I said, ‘Listen, why are you working on commission on selling a television? You got to see what commissions are like when you sell a mortgage,’” says Rosenberg, who has been working as a loan officer for nearly twenty years and has, for the past 11, worked at Absolute. “In particular, Matt listened on every conference call that I had with a client, learned my dialogues.”

VanFossen learned, early on, that processes in lending were excessive and pointless. Batching documents, scanning pages, overnighting files to investors — all tasks desperately in need of a smarter system. 

“Everything paper!” he says, exasperated. “I was stacking orders, overnight filing to investors. That was my first job.”

Immediately fed up with the processes (as he says, “like, the first day,”) VanFossen introduced a solution. “I said, ‘Hey guys, we can image these with a high-speed scanner and e-submit them into Countrywide.’” That single suggestion led to his first project: a full digital conversion initiative, replacing stacks of paper with electronic submissions.

“I think from day one I was always looking at how to use technology in combination with mortgage,” he says. “That’s kind of been the story of my career, how I built the companies over the years.”

Two Companies And A Feedback Loop

When VanFossen turned 18, he went out and got licensed, and never looked back. “I started working on mortgages senior year of high school,” he says. “So I decided to leave college and when I left, I went full-time with the mortgage and then I had opened my company shortly after.”

By 2014, he was running that lending company, Absolute, while launching a consulting firm focused on API integrations. “The vendors in the industry, they don’t know how to get the systems to talk to the LOS system,” VanFossen says. “So we saw a need… [I thought] we should probably open up a full fintech company too that complements the mortgage company.” That effort grew into Mortgage Automation Technologies, the parent of the Big POS.

The Big POS is a white-label, modular platform that gives lenders freedom to customize nearly every aspect of the experience — from the questions in the application to the notifications and business rules. “You can keep your own IP. You can fork the code yourself with your own developer,” VanFossen explains. “If you went in and adjusted the code, we’re not going to go in and take the code.” ("Forking code" refers to creating a copy of an existing project's source code, allowing developers to modify and experiment with it independently without affecting the original project.)

Running both companies allows VanFossen to feed real-time insights from originators directly into development. “If the tech company needs innovation, I get it from the mortgage company,” he says. “By being able to see what my originators need on a daily basis, I can then set the road map and set the direction of the technology company very easily.”

Even still, the companies remain separate. “The only commonality between them is the two executives,” VanFossen explains. “There’s no crossover between them.” The benefits, however, are reciprocal. Absolute gets early access to tech innovations; MAT gets real-time field data. “Sometimes [our mortgage staff] feel the pain of that. We do tend to experiment on ourselves a little bit.”

On paper, it’s a streamlined system. But in practice, rolling out new tech comes with human obstacles. Rosenberg, who has worked closely with VanFossen for over a decade, sees it firsthand. “Technology can solve problems,” he says, “but it can’t help you to build a bridge over that because you are uncomfortable.” Even elegant, efficient tools like AccountChek — which verifies income and assets through direct logins — often trigger client hesitation. 

“You’ll enter in your usernames and passcodes,” Rosenberg explains. And while this might unnerve some clients, he asserts that the resulting ease of use “will make your mortgage process so seamless that you’ll probably refer me to extra people just because of it.”

Even still, it’s hard to deny the lingering sense of risk. In those cases, Rosenberg reverts to a manual workaround: teaching clients how to download PDFs, redact statements, and print interim documents. “Which may not be easy,” he adds.

“Ease of use comes at a cost,” Rosenberg concludes, not just in dollars, but in trust. And for VanFossen, that behavioral drag is every bit as important to solve as any API. “It’s not that the solution doesn’t work,” Rosenberg says. “It’s that they’re not ready for it.” 

That psychological resistance is part of the development process too. VanFossen’s internal testing model depends on trial, error, and rapid iteration. One early example: a touchscreen kiosk system designed for open houses. It might have been polished and expensive, but it failed. “We realized that people were still putting fake information in,” he says. “So we had to go back and refactor.”

The pivot came quickly. The touchscreen kiosks were replaced by QR codes, which were simpler, cheaper, and, crucially, connected to a person’s real mobile device. “Now we took a three-minute check-in process down to a 30-second check-in process,” VanFossen says. The solution wasn’t as flashy as the original concept, but it worked.

Failures like that don’t shake VanFossen. They reaffirmed a central principle of his approach: test internally, fail fast, and adapt. “Our team has gotten very used to that, he says. “If you want to be on the leading edge, you have to be okay with a little discomfort.”

Building The Big POS

VanFossen didn’t originally intend to commercialize The Big POS. He just wanted something better for his own company. “I think that our customer lives in [the POS],” he explains. “Our mortgage consumer, our loan officer, our real estate referral partners. In essence, it’s the lifeblood of my business.”

He was frustrated by what was available: high prices, rigid workflows, long contracts, and limited customization. Worst of all, vendors often charged clients to build custom code — and then kept the IP. “That’s an irresponsible thing as a CEO,” VanFossen says. “I’m going to pay to hand over my IP and lock myself into a vendor I have no control over?”

So he built his own. The first version of Big POS launched internally in 2020; by 2021, it had caught the attention of industry peers. “You’ve got something here,” Demola told him.

VanFossen didn’t launch Big POS to enter the software market. He built it because he needed a better tool for his own team. The demand from other lenders came after they saw how well it worked.

The enterprise version followed soon after. VanFossen kept the architecture open and focused on control: clients could fork the code, maintain their own workflows, and install the system themselves. “The UI is still the same,” he says, “but the experience is really adapted to how your company operates.”

He also rejected the industry-standard sales model. “Why are you not transparent?” he says. “Why should a five-person mortgage company be treated differently than a 500-person mortgage company?” Instead, pricing is public, implementation is instant, and there are no long-term contracts. “You go to the website, you see the price, you pick which option you want, your system admin can self-install it.”

Most lenders are live within 3–5 hours using the out-of-the-box system, with customization layered on over time. That speed lets MAT skip implementation fees entirely. The gamble is simple: if the product’s good, people will stay. “If they’re not happy with the product, I don’t want to handcuff them,” VanFossen says. “I have to be strong enough to say, ‘I understand’ — and I’m going to go back and go make it better.”

The Button-Pusher

Locally in New Jersey, Matt VanFossen has a reputation for stirring the pot. “Sometimes people want to strangle him,” says Justin Demola, laughing. “But you look back at those conversations, and now he’s great friends with the person who was there.”

That unapologetic style shows up everywhere he goes. At a now-infamous dinner after a mortgage banking conference in Detroit, VanFossen got into a heated debate with Owen Lee, then the chair of MORPAC. “Owen kept his cool,” Demola remembers. “Matt got more worked up.” At the time, VanFossen loudly opposed both the lobbying group and the Certified Mortgage Banker designation. Today, he holds that same designation. “It was a 180-degree turn,” Demola says. “He’s got an open mind.”

That openness, in combination with his confrontational demeanor, defines VanFossen’s approach to problem-solving. “He doesn’t just absorb things. He reinvents them,” notes Rosenberg.

Steve Grossman sees it the same way. “There are plenty of people who can run a mortgage company. Plenty who can run a tech company. Plenty who understand policy or compliance. But there’s nobody else who does all of it, and does it well.”

And when VanFossen disrupts, it’s never accidental. From the name Big POS to the poop-themed trade show giveaways, every move is part of a calculated strategy. “He’s intentional,” says Rosenberg. “He looks at what no one else is willing to say out loud and he says it.”

Grossman puts it differently: “Matt learned, earned, and returned by the time he was 30. Most people take decades.”

That ethos shows up most clearly in how he built Mortgage Automation Technologies — and how he sells it. “The guy hates red tape,” says Demola. “So he just cut it all out.” No drawn-out sales cycle. No vague pricing. No multi-year contracts. “He wasn’t just building another POS —  he was trying to give lenders control back.”

Running both a mortgage company and a tech firm gives VanFossen a real-time feedback loop, what he calls “farm-to-table” mortgage tech. His loan officers surface the problems, and his developers build the fixes.

It’s obvious that even his competitors admire the model. In New Jersey’s unusually collegial mortgage market, VanFossen is part of an informal alliance of top lenders with deep roots and frequent overlap — what he jokingly refers to as “the five families.” The Sopranos-style nickname aside, the relationships are, today, very gentlemanly. “There’s five or six of us in New Jersey that really are the dominant [players],” Grossman says. “We’re all friends. And it’s very unique.”

Grossman’s office is just three miles from VanFossen’s, and they regularly meet for coffee. They serve on boards. They co-host events. “Literally last night,” Grossman said, “I hosted a conference within a conference. I invite all my competitors in New Jersey. They all come.”

Demola has a similar story. “We were recruiting some of their employees, they were recruiting some of ours,” he says. “And I was like, what are we doing here? Let’s have a gentleman’s agreement not to raid each other’s companies.” That lunch turned into a long-term alliance — even if VanFossen initially thought it was a setup. “He was like, wait, you’re my competitor,” Demola laughs. “He didn’t know if I was looking for a job. But I just wanted to talk.”

He’s also won over skeptics. “When he first started, I think some people just thought he was loud,” Demola says. “Now, I think most would say he’s one of the smartest guys in the room.”

VanFossen isn’t looking for applause though. He’s looking to change the terms of the conversation. “You give me a good software product? Great,” he says. “But I should have the liberty to choose whatever software I want, and not be contractually locked in. That’s one of our core values.”

And that is why his work resonates. Underneath the irreverence is a clear agenda: a refusal to accept the mortgage industry as it is. A plan for what it could be — faster, smarter, more transparent, built around the people who actually use it. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” VanFossen says. “But I know people still want houses. We’re going to be there to help them get it, whether that means lending it, or building the software to make it easier.”

He’s not waiting for the future of mortgage. He’s writing the source code for it himself. 

And if that looks different than you expected?

Well, yeah. It’s supposed to.