The mortgage industry has been fortunate in that we have not experienced the intense layoffs occurring in so many other industries. However, even with a healthy staff, the volume that we are seeing right now, coupled with the work from home distractions, lenders are having challenges scaling and meeting borrower needs in a timely manner.
Lender mortgage pipelines are ripe with surprises right now. Consumers are facing financial challenges and uncertainty, logistical steps are in flux, and credit boxes are actively moving. Having trust in your pipeline is of greater value today than in normal environments. Surprises are rarely good in business, but right now they could easily take a lender from the green to the red without the right tools to mitigate risk.
To effectively manage pipelines, a key focus for lenders should be on leveraging automation to redeploy staff on higher value work and improving the borrower experience. From a personnel perspective, this focus creates greater job satisfaction for staff and delivers a better return on personnel costs. Getting this equation right is only possible through technology that removes the mundane, routine process tasks which, quite frankly, automation can perform faster, better and cheaper.
Almost all business decisions involve an ROI calculation, so technologies which compress time and tasks are highly useful. LoanLogics® IDEA™ OnDemand, for example, allows lenders to increase velocity, and in markets such as this, velocity equals cash. Speed is a natural byproduct of being able to spread workload across a more distributed team, both geographically and job role, as well as the automation described above. When it comes to loan production, too busy and too few processors manually reviewing loan files become the bottleneck in achieving high velocity throughput. Automated tools like IDEA OnDemand allow roles such as loan officers and assistant loan officers to pitch in and get through the burgeoning pipeline of loan files waiting in queue.
In the mortgage industry, the origination process and the interaction between all the companies involved in the value chain is quite complex and is still too paper intensive. However, automation can transform the information exchanged across the value chain into data. This can help lenders refocus staff on lending practices, create new ways of virtualizing the mortgage process and raise the value of every role in a lender’s operation. By doing so, our industry will not only meet the challenges surfaced during the pandemic but allow us all to be in stronger position to achieve our goals when the dust finally settles.
To learn more about LoanLogics IDEA OnDemand visit our website.
Be sure to check out this related post “With a Digital Assistant, Can LO’s Own More of the Process(ing)?” which discusses spreading origination workload across production staff in more detail.