Sponsored Content from Origence: Steps for Post-COVID Mortgage Lending Success

By Andrew Weiss, Origence Vice President of Platform Strategy

We are living in fast-changing times. Lenders that fail to meet the changing demands of their borrowers will be ill-equipped to compete for their business. While other industries have learned to deliver high levels of customer engagement and satisfaction online, many lenders are still originating loans much as they were 20 years ago.

However, COVID-19 may be the catalyst that drives the industry forward.

What will mortgage lending look like in the post-COVID world?

Setting the mortgage industry up for success

While the full effects of the global pandemic are yet unknown, we do know that it has driven commerce online. The tech giants have done a great job of keeping consumers transacting, even for some very complex products and services.

To do the same for home finance, lenders must meet a number of new borrower requirements. Doing so will require a mix of new technology and new processes.

In a recent webinar, we laid out the requirements necessary for lenders to meet borrower expectations, gain a marketplace edge and sustain loan growth.

• A customized experience on any device
  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the new mortgage lending business. Consumers want the freedom to transact on any device and receive a personalized experience.
• Easy online pricing and shopping
  Mortgage borrowers are beginning their journey online. If they don’t find a lender’s offerings there, they will simply seek out another lender. This is how today’s consumers shop.
• Scenario building and comparison capability
  Today’s borrowers don’t just want to find products. They want to understand how their various options stack up against each other. It falls to the lender to make this clear to them.
• An easy and intuitive online application
  We know from experience that if we don’t make the application simple and convenient, lenders won’t get prospective borrowers to apply. Once we get the information required to issue a Loan Estimate, the clock starts ticking.
• Interactive workflows
  The process must be customizable for different borrowers and products. Lenders must efficiently collect the information needed to close, working in parallel if possible. Closing electronically is the goal.
• Maintain constant communication
  Throughout all of this, the lender must remain in contact with the borrower. This is where the big tech firms have set the bar. Failure to keep consumers informed degrades their experience.

Delivering on the new mortgage promise

Some of this technology is already available to mortgage lenders, but few if any lenders have combined all of this into a seamless offering for American home loan borrowers. To do that will require a great deal of thought, strategic planning, and a high degree of automation that goes well beyond simple business rules loaded into a decisioning engine.

The key to success will involve deploying technology that is advanced enough to know when a deal requires the attention of a human. Only with exception-based processing can we scale the type of loan origination experience that today’s borrowers demand. But it will take more than that.

During the development of our new Origence Mortgage Loan Origination System, we uncovered three areas where technology offered significant benefits to lenders.

• Document Processing – document-to-data transformation using OCR, ADR and machine learning; the automation of document and service ordering, document stacking and delivery and data ingestion.
• Compliance Automation – compliance checks automatically conducted by the software at various points in the process, as well as the ability to create and respond to dynamically-generated compliance conditions.
• Workplan Automation – the identification of required documents as well as dynamic tasking, conditioning and reconditioning.

Our mortgage technologists are bringing together all of the functionality required to succeed in the new, post-COVID-19 lending marketplace, with the goal of providing an excellent borrower experience through fully digital lending. Origence now offers a reimagined lending experience that allows consumers to move confidently through the mortgage process. To find out more about the platform, reach out to us today.

(Sponsored content includes material submitted independently of the Mortgage Bankers Association and MBA NewsLink and does not connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. For more information about sponsored content opportunities, contact Bill Farmakis at bill@jlfarmakis.com or 203/834-8832.)