Future-Proof Your CRM: A Mortgage Banker’s Guide to Strategic Tech Upgrades
Dan Catinella is chief lending officer at Total Expert. Corban Wells is vice president of technology product management at Primary Residential Mortgage (Prime Res).
Following the CRM market growth of 11% last year, more than half of mortgage lenders are making upgrades to the core tech platforms that drive customer engagement. But finding the right technology requires organizations to navigate a web of more than 1,500 different platforms from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to Loan Origination Systems (LOS) that all predictably make some claim of superiority.
How should mortgage lenders approach the high-stakes process of evaluating vendors and choosing the right tech platforms to drive sustainable growth?
Here are four best practices mortgage lenders can employ as they evaluate tech vendors:
1. What you need: Forward-looking, business-centric tech
A tech evaluation isn’t really about the technology; it’s about what you want that technology to do for you. So, building your list of requirements starts with a deep look at your business. Think about the specific outcomes you’re looking to achieve—and what barriers or pain points you’re encountering with your existing systems. It’s also important to look holistically at your tech ecosystem to find opportunities to consolidate. Everyone wants to do more with less, and a CRM upgrade can be a valuable opportunity to consolidate multiple point solutions into a higher-value platform.
How to make sure you get it: Think about where you’re going, not just where you’re at
It’s easy to focus on the requirements you need to operate well today. But your evaluation criteria need to align with your future-minded business growth strategies. That doesn’t only mean selecting a platform that more than meets your needs today, but it also means looking carefully at what investments a vendor is making toward keeping their platform at the leading edge. Deploying new tech can feel like a heavy lift. And you don’t want to have to make another change in a year or two.
2. What you need: Tech with a proven track record
Decisions should be guided by evidence, not just relationships or gut feelings. Gathering complete, objective data can help prove the value of the new tech solution to your stakeholders. By giving your various user groups data-driven answers that explain why one solution rose to the top and why others did not, you’re ensuring they understand the logic and diligence behind your decision—which will ultimately support buy-in and adoption.
How to make sure you get it: Use your data-driven decision-making to accelerate adoption
When it comes to evaluating vendors against your provided requirements, we propose an interesting twist: Let the vendors score themselves. This vendor engagement helps create foundational transparency—inherently holding the vendors accountable for their own scores. It’s also important to ask vendors to provide real-world data to substantiate those scores. Vendors should be able to show data-driven success stories through metrics like conversion rates, pull-through rates, and retention rates.
3. What you need: Practical functionality that actually fits your business model
CRM tech vendors tend to either tout out-of-the-box capabilities or extensive customization. But here are the important questions to ask: How purpose-built are those out-of-the-box capabilities—i.e., are they ready to fit the specific use cases of a mortgage originator? And how easy is it to customize and use the full functionality of the platform? Understanding customizations and configurations is incredibly important, because lenders and their originators use platforms in their own unique ways.
How to make sure you get it: Find the balance of purpose-built and enterprise-grade
Mortgage professionals don’t have the time (or the budget) to start from scratch with a blank canvas. This often quickly rules out generalist horizontal CRMs that offer little out-of-the-box capability and require time and cost-consuming customization. Looking for a CRM that’s purpose-built for mortgage lending can accelerate deployment and time-to-value, while also making the path to customization much faster.
4. What you need: An honest TCO calculation
Every lender today is challenged with reducing costs and expenses wherever possible, so it’s tempting to look for an inexpensive solution. But the old adage is true: You get what you pay for. In calculating total cost of ownership, features and functionalities play a relatively small role. Make sure you understand the vendor’s implementation model, including what resources you will have to supply to support deployment (and if that expectation is realistic for your organization).
How to make sure you get it: Identify which resources will support deployment
By now, lenders should understand that there is no such thing as a plug-and-play tech tool or platform. Any solution requires some legwork to configure, deploy, and optimize. That work is either supported by the vendor partner or done by the lender’s internal staff. We’ve seen too many tech tools sit on the shelf because vendors ended the engagement at the point of sale and lenders lacked the internal resources to deploy effectively.
The qualitative factor: Finding a true vendor partner
Objective, data-driven evaluations and decisions can help brokers navigate the expanding range of CRM options and arrive at a confident decision. But there’s one critical element that’s a bit harder to quantitatively assess: In the mortgage industry, where relationships are paramount, lenders want to work with a partner that has real, knowledgeable people behind their technology.
So, as you dig into a vendor evaluation or TCO exercise, some of the most important questions don’t have dollar-figure answers. Ask: Do these people understand my business? Are they focused on the right things to help me? And are they bringing me strategies and advice to help me move my business forward?
That spirit of partnership brings an added value that persists long after implementation. By prioritizing genuine partnership, lenders can unlock the full potential of their CRM investment and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that drive sustainable growth and customer loyalty.
About Dan Catinella
With over 20 years of experience in mortgage technology, Dan Catinella has actively helped dozens of lenders make the move toward more tech-enabled operations. As chief lending officer for Total Expert, he keeps his finger on the pulse of the ever-changing FinTech landscape, helping lenders develop high-impact innovation strategies that apply proven and emerging technologies to drive toward lenders’ business goals and growth priorities.
About Corban Wells
Corban Wells brings decades of experience in mortgage and banking, specializing in leading production processes and integrating third party technology solutions to foster collaboration across teams. As vice president of technology product management at Primary Residential Mortgage (Prime Res), Corban helps advance forward-thinking technology efforts and investments and leads initiatives to leverage technological advancements to reshape the way customers and partners interact.
(Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect policies of the Mortgage Bankers Association, nor do they connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. MBA NewsLink welcomes submissions from member firms. Inquiries can be sent to Editor Michael Tucker or Editorial Manager Anneliese Mahoney.)
