Exceeding Borrower Expectations
As the landscape of borrowers’ profile changes where millennials are becoming prominent in the home buying process, lenders must differentiate themselves on quality, speed, and innovation to match the expectations of this generation of home buyers. Lenders that fail to do so will be quickly left behind. Statistics show that 99% of millennials are going online to search for homes and 58% of them found a home online.
The importance of borrower engagement
Borrower engagement is quickly becoming a key differentiator for lenders. Intangible products like mortgages rely almost entirely on the client experience to create the positive emotional cues that improve brand perception, and engagement is a big part of that experience. Simpler, quicker, and more convenient interaction can easily set your organization above your competitors.
Leading mortgage firms are rushing to meet borrowers’ rapidly increasing demand for digital and mobile services. Organizations that continue to rely on traditional methods of borrower engagement will find themselves unable to attract today’s increasingly sophisticated and well-informed buyers.
The borrower experience must be consistent, engaging, and delay-free. Lenders must find ways to unify the channels they use to communicate with the borrowers. Luckily, various digital technologies and technology-led services exist that help lenders achieve these objectives.
Enabling a consistent experience
Using inconsistent and diverse communication channels is an ineffective way to manage the borrower engagement. For example, if different software applications or IT systems are used to manage borrowers’ call logs, emails, text notifications, and status updates, it can create inconsistencies and data integrity challenges. Even worse, mismatches between channels might lead to inconsistent information and responses. In today’s digital environment and hyperconnected social media, these issues can potentially impact your firm’s brand value.
Using a multi-channel communication portal is the best way to ensure that your team always has access to each buyer’s complete history of interactions. Multi-channel portals allow organizations to log every phone call, document submission, email, chat session, text notifications, etc. on a single, seamless platform at a centralized location. This system will help your team to have a reliable source of information for all borrower engagement.
Expediting loan origination
Loan processing can involve long approval cycles, time-consuming document management, and complex reviews of loan packages that typically contain several hundred pages. Eliminating manual processes is arguably the most effective way to improve efficiency. Switching to automated solutions for managing mortgage documents and verifying regulatory compliance allows lenders to process loan applications faster and serve more clients than using manual loan processing methods. Industry-leading mortgage document management solutions convert scanned documents into searchable text that can be sent directly to loan origination systems (LOS), mortgage document recording platforms, or other servicers/vendors.
Ensuring regulatory compliance is another potential source of delay, which can impact the client experience. Failing to identify gaps in QC and compliance can lead to rejections and time-consuming rework. The leading mortgage firms are moving to automated solutions for QC and compliance reviews because of their ability to perform these tasks accurately, cost-effectively, without human bias, and at scale.
Another way to improve processing efficiency is by partnering with a global technology-enabled business process management organization. These organizations perform numerous important mortgage-related tasks for their clients with a high degree of accuracy, efficiency, and value. Since these services are usually performed in processing centers around the globe, twenty-four hours a day, you can also expect a greater speed of execution.
Combining engagement-enhancing technologies
These technology-led solutions help mortgage firms improve accuracy, save time, lower operating costs, and deliver a superior borrower experience. Visionet Systems is one of the few organizations which combines its 20-years of mortgage industry experience with the next generation of technology accelerators to provide a superior end-to-end offering to its customers. Please contact Visionet to schedule a complimentary consultation and discover how you can leverage Visionet to grow your business and meet your customers’ demands.
To learn more about how to begin transforming your mortgage operations and exceed borrower expectations, check out our e-book below!
Alok Bansal is Managing Director of Visionet Systems Inc. and has 21 years of experience in managing strategy and global BPO operations. He excels in optimizing and leading the growth of financial services companies who are looking to take their mortgage operations to the next level.