Welcome to the Brian Baphini Show, where we explore the mindsets, motivation and methodologies of success.

My name is David Lally, I'm the producer of the show, and I know we may be in challenging times, but that's just why we've been working on shows to keep us upbeat and focused on the good stuff. Let's listen in.

Well, the top of the morning to you and welcome to the Brian Baphini Show. Today's guest, the man I've known for a number of years, his name is Michael DeVito. Michael has a big job. He's the executive vice president and the head of Wells Fargo Home Lending.

Michael and his team oversee the nation's leading combined home lender and server. So they fund one out of every nine loans in the country and they're servicing one out of every seven loans in the country.

So we needed to get some straight talk on the banking side. There's a lot of misinformation out there in the marketplace. So we thought we'd go straight to the top of the wagon, if you will.

And so Michael, thanks for making the time to be on our show today. Brian, it's great to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity. You bet. Well, I want to dive right in because we were talking offline. There's a lot of misinformation. And when you start listening to the media or seeing how the media reports things now, it's like watching sausage being made.

Once you see it, you don't really want to eat it. And so we really wanted to come to the source. And you know, you guys are obviously just such a leading player in the space. We've had our partnership for almost 10 years now.

So I just wanted to bring some stuff to the forefront here. So let's just go to the most basic stuff and then work our way out.

Okay, because again, I've seen lots of articles about this subject. Let me ask you this. Our Wells Fargo and other banks able to process mortgages at this time.

I absolutely believe so. And I can show you in our numbers. We're open for businesses the way we think about it, Brian. You know, we have to adapt to what's going on in local markets. You know, we have to recognize that there's shelter in place and other things happening that have changed the way we do business.

We're absolutely open for business and serving customers in the month of March. We served more than 50,000 customers in both our retail and correspondent business. And we took 64,000 applications from customers in our retail origination business just in the month of March.

So we're busy and we're definitely open for business. So obviously the rates are at, you know, just historic laws. Right now people need to save a few bucks. One of the ways to save a few bucks. I just have my son do a refinance on his home a few weeks ago.

And he saved $350 a month, which is a lot of money right now in the current environment. So are you guys able to do refies? How are refies working? Are you getting tsunami? Are you keeping up? What's the state of the union with regards to getting a refinance done?

We're busy. I mean, there's no question about it that we're busy and about half of our business, if I look back at March, about half of our business was refinance. And I think if I looked at it today, you know, in the middle of April, it's probably even a little bit more than that.

But we're taking record volumes of applications every day. And you know, one of the great things we've been able to do here over the last several weeks is transition our team in a way where we've got the vast majority of our team members working remotely and doing it in a very productive way.

So over the last three or four weeks, we were able to migrate many of them to work from home. We're processing and underwriting loans and remote ways in ways we never even imagined we would be doing it.

And we're in printing new ways to do it every day. So from my perspective, we're open or serving customers. It's a little different. Yeah. But it's working.

How's appraisals working right now? I mean, I'm hearing words of drive by appraisals and this and that. How's that working? Yeah, well, when we saw these shelter and place actions happen state by state, we took the step to basically do exterior only drive by appraisals.

But for the most part, it's an appraisal doing a full evaluation, but not going in the home. So that's different. It limits some things in some ways. It limits our ability to do some really high LTV landing in some cases.

But for the most part, Brian, we're still serving customer. We're still doing purchase transactions and still serving customers at a pretty high clip here. That's awesome. What about back as it becomes okay to go back and people's homes again? Right?

Right. Everybody's comfortable with that. We'll be ready to take it back. And we're putting together a bunch of protocols for agents and what to do and little things that we have agents doing now and they're doing, you know, antiviral cleaning, you know, of a house and specific ways they're doing.

We have a lot of people doing business. We have a lot of people doing business all over the country. As of the time we're on this call today 24% of the counties in the United States don't have a single case. So real estate has always been local. We have to deal with things nationally.

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