November 13, 2024 • 14 mins
An expert on the consumer finance industry and mortgage markets, Doug provides insight and analysis on the current and future state of consumer lending and how FinTech companies, such as LendingTree, are using cutting-edge technology to change financial services. Doug has been a frequent contributor and guest speaker on major news networks such as Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox Business and The Street. He has been featured on live televised programs such Mornings with Maria, CNBC Squawk Box and Mad Money with Jim Cramer.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's another episode of iHeartMedia's CEOs You Should Know. It's
Chris Rosac joined by Doug Glebta of lending Tree. We're
going to talk something. I guess maybe that would would
freak people out in a sense of what they don't
know right, but lending Tree has made things so simple,
streamlined and easy in all facets of lending and what
(00:23):
basically started out in the mortgage space has blossomed into
making things easy for everyone, no matter what your financial
situation is, trying to help out. Doug, Welcome to iHeartMedia
CEOs You Should Know, and thank you for hanging out
with us.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thanks for having me. I'd love to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Well, let's backtrack and talk a little bit about that
story of what originally was in the mortgage space of
lending Tree and how it is now really evolved to
where it is where you have everything the marketplace to
not get you alone or provide or write you alone,
but to basically shop. Talk a little bit about this
(01:01):
and how I know personally a situation becomes an idea
becomes a solution.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yes. So, in nineteen ninety four, I was a young
accountant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I was trying to
buy my first home. It was a fifty five thousand
dollars condo. My building had gone from rental to condo.
So and I did what most people do. I went
to go shop for mortgages. I opened up I guess
(01:30):
what then would be called the Internet of its day,
the Pittsburgh Post Gazette saw the rates in the rate table,
and I went to the lowest one, and then they
told me, well, that rate's not for you. And I
put on my put on my suit and tie, and
I'm talking to a banker, and then I go to
another lender. And it was the most confusing process, and
I felt completely disempowered by it. And at the same time,
(01:56):
I was doing work in the believe it or not,
the natural gas commodities industry and seeing these very efficient marketplaces,
and I said, like, money is the most fungible commodity.
Why can't you have a marketplace where the banks can
compete for the customer across all types of loans. We
(02:16):
started in mortgage that became very successful, and then we
branched out from there now into all types of loans
and insurance to basically empower people to make smarter financial
decisions and take the workout of it and make the
banks compete, so the lenders all compete on a level
playing field. They care about their ratings and reviews. They
(02:39):
have to provide great service or the customer doesn't go
with them, and we just create that platform.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
And you said it twice, when banks compete, and that's
part of what lending Tree has is when banks compete,
you win, You got it. And that's the whole thing.
If you have two, three, ten people fighting for your business,
you come out to victor.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
In this thing. Yeah, you really do. And we've got
studies that show the more offers you're getting, the lower
your prices. And it's really interesting to see because in
this marketplace, let's take personal loans for example. You know
you have let's say, one hundred lenders on our network,
and in any given day, one of them it has
underwriting criteria that are different than somebody else. And so
(03:23):
by the mere fact of you know, you have five
lenders there, one of them on any given day is
going to be like, is going to be a great
deal for you, and tomorrow it might be a different lender.
So you're getting real time information that's always been the goal,
and it works.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Doug Lebte is our guest right now, CEO of lending Tree.
A marketplace for every type of loan and not just
home equity or home loans. But there's everything on there. Because, yes,
when we started out, and you said, in the nineties
early nineties, it was a booming market in the Charlotte
area for real estate state. Now things have transitioned. We're
(04:02):
a lot more tech savvy my lending Tree. Millions of
customers enrolled in this. You're evolving with the times.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Amen, And one of the things that we're doing you
mentioned my lending Tree. We've rebranded it Spring and it
may end up just being the lending Tree app at
some point. The idea there is while lendingtree dot Com
can provide you comparison shopping, what we want to do
is Spring is just give you the right answer. So
(04:33):
give you an alert that over time will be you know, hey,
George can I you know you can save two hundred
bucks a month on your mortgage with another lender, or hey,
you can consolidate those credit cards into a personal loan
and your credit score will go up twenty points. And
(04:54):
so it works for really every type of consumer to
hopefully just give you the right answer and just keep
saving you money. And what we want to do there
is to try to take the guess work out of
it and so that what my dream has always been
that financial decisions for people could be automated so that
(05:16):
you can just go live your life, be a happy
you know, enjoy your life, enjoy your family, and not
have to worry about should I refinance now? Am I
getting the best deal? You know? How do I get
my credit score up? And we'll just you know, take
the guesswork out of it for you and let you
lead the rest of your life and happiness hopefully.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
When I have CEOs come in from different companies, I
always ask them this question, and you actually have Vita,
who's here with us right now, talk about your employees,
and I think that that really I've had several people
that were multi chain restaurant owners that say, you know what,
I'm going to dispel a myth and say that the
(05:59):
customer is not always the most important thing. It's your employees,
because without employee happiness and the customer suffers on that,
And talk about your employees and how really they bring
a part of what lending Tree provides to the people
out there.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So from the very beginning, and this was part of
the reason I moved to Charlotte. I wanted to build
a company that was built to last in Jim Collins terms,
who is a mentor of mine, and I thought Charlotte
was a great place to do that, where you could
actually have people feel like they're part of a family.
Our whole notion, our core principles are all around empowerment,
(06:38):
and so you try to get the right people on
the bus and then figure out where you're going to
take the bus. And we have literally the right people.
We find that we get people who are self motivated generally,
who just want to do a great job, who want
to collaborate with other people who want us, who fall
(06:59):
in love with the consumer problem of you know, helping
customers get great deals, and fall in love with the
lender problem of how do we have lenders and insurance
companies build big and enduring businesses through our marketplace, and
and then that recipe really works. Another key thing for
(07:21):
us is we try to we invest a lot of
money and time in employee development so that we can
promote from within. So right now and my executive team
I have, you know, roughly, I think it's eight people.
Five of them have been promoted from within the company,
and so everybody at all levels the company can hopefully see,
(07:43):
oh wow, that person got promote. Okay, that person's in
a leadership role. I got to do it that way,
and gee, I can see you know a career path
for me. So we invest a lot in our HR
group to really be coaching you about different skills that
you want to acquire so that you can advance in
the company and advance in your skill set.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So from the employees to the consumers to the users
of the lending Tree spring, it's on the website, and
I want you to answer the question I'm putting you
on the spot. Why do millions of Americans trust Lending Tree.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I think consumers trust us because we've earned that trust
over time. We started off in nineteen ninety six, really
launched the site nationally around ninety eight, I guess, and
have built a reputation on doing the right thing by
(08:39):
customers and doing the right thing by lenders. So it's
interesting in a marketplace like lending Tree, and you see
in other types of companies too, where when you have
a ratings and reviews system. It holds the lenders or
the insurance companies accountable for providing great service, and we
(09:00):
provide complete transparency. So and the other reason I think
consumers trust us is because I think there's no harm,
no foul if you decide to not work with us. So,
worst case, you come to lending Tree, you get some
offers from different lenders, you print it out and you
walk down to your local mortgage broker and say, hey,
can you beat this? That's what I saw in lending Tree.
(09:22):
And that's fine too. You know, if our lenders can't
win the business, then we want to see the customer
go somewhere else and get the best deal they can.
And I think that trust has been built up over
the last now almost thirty years. I can't believe it's
been that long.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Doug Lept is our guest right now on iHeartMedia's CEOs.
You should know a Charlottean, we'll say now, because both
you and I have been here for we'll say over
twenty years. And I guess that makes us okay to say,
y'all every once in a while, absolutely, what about Charlotte.
I mean this place, you've seen it grow. You've seen
it evolve. I have too. I always say to people
(09:58):
that when I first moved here, and I would tell
people back home in Pennsylvania, I live in Charlotte, they
would say, wow, is that North Carolina or South Carolina.
Now we say Charlotte and people know exactly where we're
at on not only a beautiful city map, but a business,
an industry map, professional sports. Charlotte has just blown up
(10:18):
within the past ten years, let alone the twenty five
plus thirty years that we've been here. Talk about Charlotte
and why lending Tree has definitely said this is where
we're staying.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Sure. So the decision to move to Charlotte came when
I was sitting in business school and I decided to
at UVA and I decided to give lending Tree one year.
That was my risk that I was willing to do,
was to say, I'll give it a year. If it
doesn't work out, I'll come back to business school and
(10:48):
you know, put on a suit and go with a
happy career as a banker or something like that. And
the decision to move to Charlotte really came from the
fact that it was a banking town at the time.
Certainly changed, and I knew nothing about banking and financial services,
and so that was sort of the initial impetus. And
(11:09):
then when I came here and met the people, I
knew that it was a place where, like unlike Silicon
Valley at the time, you could build, as I said before,
a company that's built to last, where people feel like
they're part of a family, where people are collegial, where
it's not necessarily so cutthroat it was. And the other
thing I loved about Charlotte was and I didn't know
(11:32):
this at first, but I saw it over time, and
you referred to professional sports. You have in Charlotte. The
business folks, government and citizens all work together when something
needs to get done. And Hugh McCall once told me that.
And there's also a very there's a lot of mentorship
(11:54):
around Here's how things happen. I remember Hugh McCall said
to me, you know, Doug, you have an you have
a need in Charlotte. Charlotte has a need for you
to be giving back. That's what we do. Get involved
in the community. Where do you want to leverage your
skills because we all work together in Charlotte, And I
(12:16):
love that. Over the years. It's obviously changed. When I
first started here, it was not a big tech center.
My co founder also moved to Charlotte from New York
and he was a brilliant technologist. He passed away of
a heart attack in two thousand and three, but just
(12:36):
a wonderful guy. And we were one of the first
tech companies in Charlotte. But what we found was it
was a great place to recruit people from outside of
Charlotte and bring them to Charlotte, North Carolina. Lower cost
of living, ability to afford a home. I called it
like you can live like a normal human, like a
(12:59):
normal family here, and so we attracted a lot of
people from California and New York and other areas to
move to Charlotte and establish a home here. It's been great.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Well, Doug Lepta is our guest right now. When banks compete,
you win with lending Tree. I appreciate your time and
talking to us and really getting people I guess educated
on what this does within this space, because there are
a lot of things out there that have people going
in five thousand different directions. And you said it earlier
(13:31):
in the interview. If all we can do is give
somebody the peace of mind and the ease to go.
I'm going to do this and then go about my
regular day on the lake or up in the mountains
and not have to worry. That's what lending Tree is
here to do for you, to make it easy. Yes,
my friend, thank you very much for stopping by Doug
Lepka Lebda, the CEO of lending Tree, on iHeartMedia's CEOs
(13:54):
you should know
It's another episode of iHeartMedia's CEOs You Should Know. It's
Chris Rosac joined by Doug Glebta of lending Tree. We're
going to talk something. I guess maybe that would would
freak people out in a sense of what they don't
know right, but lending Tree has made things so simple,
streamlined and easy in all facets of lending and what
(00:23):
basically started out in the mortgage space has blossomed into
making things easy for everyone, no matter what your financial
situation is, trying to help out. Doug, Welcome to iHeartMedia
CEOs You Should Know, and thank you for hanging out
with us.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thanks for having me. I'd love to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Well, let's backtrack and talk a little bit about that
story of what originally was in the mortgage space of
lending Tree and how it is now really evolved to
where it is where you have everything the marketplace to
not get you alone or provide or write you alone,
but to basically shop. Talk a little bit about this
(01:01):
and how I know personally a situation becomes an idea
becomes a solution.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yes. So, in nineteen ninety four, I was a young
accountant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I was trying to
buy my first home. It was a fifty five thousand
dollars condo. My building had gone from rental to condo.
So and I did what most people do. I went
to go shop for mortgages. I opened up I guess
(01:30):
what then would be called the Internet of its day,
the Pittsburgh Post Gazette saw the rates in the rate table,
and I went to the lowest one, and then they
told me, well, that rate's not for you. And I
put on my put on my suit and tie, and
I'm talking to a banker, and then I go to
another lender. And it was the most confusing process, and
I felt completely disempowered by it. And at the same time,
(01:56):
I was doing work in the believe it or not,
the natural gas commodities industry and seeing these very efficient marketplaces,
and I said, like, money is the most fungible commodity.
Why can't you have a marketplace where the banks can
compete for the customer across all types of loans. We
(02:16):
started in mortgage that became very successful, and then we
branched out from there now into all types of loans
and insurance to basically empower people to make smarter financial
decisions and take the workout of it and make the
banks compete, so the lenders all compete on a level
playing field. They care about their ratings and reviews. They
(02:39):
have to provide great service or the customer doesn't go
with them, and we just create that platform.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
And you said it twice, when banks compete, and that's
part of what lending Tree has is when banks compete,
you win, You got it. And that's the whole thing.
If you have two, three, ten people fighting for your business,
you come out to victor.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
In this thing. Yeah, you really do. And we've got
studies that show the more offers you're getting, the lower
your prices. And it's really interesting to see because in
this marketplace, let's take personal loans for example. You know
you have let's say, one hundred lenders on our network,
and in any given day, one of them it has
underwriting criteria that are different than somebody else. And so
(03:23):
by the mere fact of you know, you have five
lenders there, one of them on any given day is
going to be like, is going to be a great
deal for you, and tomorrow it might be a different lender.
So you're getting real time information that's always been the goal,
and it works.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Doug Lebte is our guest right now, CEO of lending Tree.
A marketplace for every type of loan and not just
home equity or home loans. But there's everything on there. Because, yes,
when we started out, and you said, in the nineties
early nineties, it was a booming market in the Charlotte
area for real estate state. Now things have transitioned. We're
(04:02):
a lot more tech savvy my lending Tree. Millions of
customers enrolled in this. You're evolving with the times.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Amen, And one of the things that we're doing you
mentioned my lending Tree. We've rebranded it Spring and it
may end up just being the lending Tree app at
some point. The idea there is while lendingtree dot Com
can provide you comparison shopping, what we want to do
is Spring is just give you the right answer. So
(04:33):
give you an alert that over time will be you know, hey,
George can I you know you can save two hundred
bucks a month on your mortgage with another lender, or hey,
you can consolidate those credit cards into a personal loan
and your credit score will go up twenty points. And
(04:54):
so it works for really every type of consumer to
hopefully just give you the right answer and just keep
saving you money. And what we want to do there
is to try to take the guess work out of
it and so that what my dream has always been
that financial decisions for people could be automated so that
(05:16):
you can just go live your life, be a happy
you know, enjoy your life, enjoy your family, and not
have to worry about should I refinance now? Am I
getting the best deal? You know? How do I get
my credit score up? And we'll just you know, take
the guesswork out of it for you and let you
lead the rest of your life and happiness hopefully.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
When I have CEOs come in from different companies, I
always ask them this question, and you actually have Vita,
who's here with us right now, talk about your employees,
and I think that that really I've had several people
that were multi chain restaurant owners that say, you know what,
I'm going to dispel a myth and say that the
(05:59):
customer is not always the most important thing. It's your employees,
because without employee happiness and the customer suffers on that,
And talk about your employees and how really they bring
a part of what lending Tree provides to the people
out there.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So from the very beginning, and this was part of
the reason I moved to Charlotte. I wanted to build
a company that was built to last in Jim Collins terms,
who is a mentor of mine, and I thought Charlotte
was a great place to do that, where you could
actually have people feel like they're part of a family.
Our whole notion, our core principles are all around empowerment,
(06:38):
and so you try to get the right people on
the bus and then figure out where you're going to
take the bus. And we have literally the right people.
We find that we get people who are self motivated generally,
who just want to do a great job, who want
to collaborate with other people who want us, who fall
(06:59):
in love with the consumer problem of you know, helping
customers get great deals, and fall in love with the
lender problem of how do we have lenders and insurance
companies build big and enduring businesses through our marketplace, and
and then that recipe really works. Another key thing for
(07:21):
us is we try to we invest a lot of
money and time in employee development so that we can
promote from within. So right now and my executive team
I have, you know, roughly, I think it's eight people.
Five of them have been promoted from within the company,
and so everybody at all levels the company can hopefully see,
(07:43):
oh wow, that person got promote. Okay, that person's in
a leadership role. I got to do it that way,
and gee, I can see you know a career path
for me. So we invest a lot in our HR
group to really be coaching you about different skills that
you want to acquire so that you can advance in
the company and advance in your skill set.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So from the employees to the consumers to the users
of the lending Tree spring, it's on the website, and
I want you to answer the question I'm putting you
on the spot. Why do millions of Americans trust Lending Tree.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I think consumers trust us because we've earned that trust
over time. We started off in nineteen ninety six, really
launched the site nationally around ninety eight, I guess, and
have built a reputation on doing the right thing by
(08:39):
customers and doing the right thing by lenders. So it's
interesting in a marketplace like lending Tree, and you see
in other types of companies too, where when you have
a ratings and reviews system. It holds the lenders or
the insurance companies accountable for providing great service, and we
(09:00):
provide complete transparency. So and the other reason I think
consumers trust us is because I think there's no harm,
no foul if you decide to not work with us. So,
worst case, you come to lending Tree, you get some
offers from different lenders, you print it out and you
walk down to your local mortgage broker and say, hey,
can you beat this? That's what I saw in lending Tree.
(09:22):
And that's fine too. You know, if our lenders can't
win the business, then we want to see the customer
go somewhere else and get the best deal they can.
And I think that trust has been built up over
the last now almost thirty years. I can't believe it's
been that long.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Doug Lept is our guest right now on iHeartMedia's CEOs.
You should know a Charlottean, we'll say now, because both
you and I have been here for we'll say over
twenty years. And I guess that makes us okay to say,
y'all every once in a while, absolutely, what about Charlotte.
I mean this place, you've seen it grow. You've seen
it evolve. I have too. I always say to people
(09:58):
that when I first moved here, and I would tell
people back home in Pennsylvania, I live in Charlotte, they
would say, wow, is that North Carolina or South Carolina.
Now we say Charlotte and people know exactly where we're
at on not only a beautiful city map, but a business,
an industry map, professional sports. Charlotte has just blown up
(10:18):
within the past ten years, let alone the twenty five
plus thirty years that we've been here. Talk about Charlotte
and why lending Tree has definitely said this is where
we're staying.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Sure. So the decision to move to Charlotte came when
I was sitting in business school and I decided to
at UVA and I decided to give lending Tree one year.
That was my risk that I was willing to do,
was to say, I'll give it a year. If it
doesn't work out, I'll come back to business school and
(10:48):
you know, put on a suit and go with a
happy career as a banker or something like that. And
the decision to move to Charlotte really came from the
fact that it was a banking town at the time.
Certainly changed, and I knew nothing about banking and financial services,
and so that was sort of the initial impetus. And
(11:09):
then when I came here and met the people, I
knew that it was a place where, like unlike Silicon
Valley at the time, you could build, as I said before,
a company that's built to last, where people feel like
they're part of a family, where people are collegial, where
it's not necessarily so cutthroat it was. And the other
thing I loved about Charlotte was and I didn't know
(11:32):
this at first, but I saw it over time, and
you referred to professional sports. You have in Charlotte. The
business folks, government and citizens all work together when something
needs to get done. And Hugh McCall once told me that.
And there's also a very there's a lot of mentorship
(11:54):
around Here's how things happen. I remember Hugh McCall said
to me, you know, Doug, you have an you have
a need in Charlotte. Charlotte has a need for you
to be giving back. That's what we do. Get involved
in the community. Where do you want to leverage your
skills because we all work together in Charlotte, And I
(12:16):
love that. Over the years. It's obviously changed. When I
first started here, it was not a big tech center.
My co founder also moved to Charlotte from New York
and he was a brilliant technologist. He passed away of
a heart attack in two thousand and three, but just
(12:36):
a wonderful guy. And we were one of the first
tech companies in Charlotte. But what we found was it
was a great place to recruit people from outside of
Charlotte and bring them to Charlotte, North Carolina. Lower cost
of living, ability to afford a home. I called it
like you can live like a normal human, like a
(12:59):
normal family here, and so we attracted a lot of
people from California and New York and other areas to
move to Charlotte and establish a home here. It's been great.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Well, Doug Lepta is our guest right now. When banks compete,
you win with lending Tree. I appreciate your time and
talking to us and really getting people I guess educated
on what this does within this space, because there are
a lot of things out there that have people going
in five thousand different directions. And you said it earlier
(13:31):
in the interview. If all we can do is give
somebody the peace of mind and the ease to go.
I'm going to do this and then go about my
regular day on the lake or up in the mountains
and not have to worry. That's what lending Tree is
here to do for you, to make it easy. Yes,
my friend, thank you very much for stopping by Doug
Lepka Lebda, the CEO of lending Tree, on iHeartMedia's CEOs
(13:54):
you should know
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