Rick Trepp On Data, And Why Rockport Doesn’t Sell Yours

Interesting. There is more and more data out there. There is still the need to take that data and transfer it into actionable information. Everybody who knows anything, with the exception of us, is aggregating as much data as they can. The analytic systems, the appraisal systems, they're all collecting the data, attempting to take ownership of that data so that they can then go and become a data company. Everybody wants to become a data company because they look at a couple of large companies today, and if you look at a service company with a multiple of x, you look at a data company that has a much, much higher multiple.

So, there are many players out there. We have taken the exact opposite position, and we made the statement that we will not sell your data. We are really the custodian of our clients' data. We are not attempting to take ownership of it and sell it. In the world of finance, you have a couple players, State Street Bank, Bank of New York Mellon, where they make a business of holding and doing the administrative functions around trillions of dollars of portfolios where they are they have custodian, they take care of it, they process it, they update it, etcetera.

But they do not own it. They do not use it. It is not theirs. It is owned by the institution that they're working for. We look at that as similar. We've got close to one point five trillion dollars' worth of loans in our asset management system, and we look at that as we must protect that data in in the world today in terms of cyber issues. And we look at it as, being custodian, is responsible for keeping that under lock and key with as much security as we can for our clients.