As typical in a tighter margin, declining origination environment, mortgage lenders will be looking to technology to help manage costs. And there has been an explosion of fintechs looking to provide options, said Suha Zehl, chief strategy officer at consulting firm BlackFin Group. But many mid-tier and smaller lenders lack the in-house person to help them manage the process. BlackFin provides those services.
If a lender goes for a cookie cutter solution, “this is what I’m going to do for every borrower, for every customer that I have, then you are not differentiating yourself,” Zehl said.
The advanced analytics tools now available will help lenders tailor solutions for their clients, said Chris Boyle, president of home lending at tech platform Roostify. “Being able to take documents, extract data, do some calculations, do some other things — are really good for consumers. It helps them in making their buying decisions. It also helps the lender in making the credit decision,” she said.
“The ability to use that data in a very constructive way to do that fulfillment is certainly something that the mortgage space will see accelerate in 2022,” Boyle said.
She also credited Fannie Mae’s recent decision to factor in rental-payment data in the mortgage decision-making process as a path toward fairer lending and expects current technology to help serve goals of removing bias and achieving greater equity. “The digitization process is only going to be a champion of all of that.”
There are many providers that do the same thing and lenders have to analyze which one is the right one for their organization and for the customer that they’re serving.
“It’s very critical to analyze that and evaluate to determine if Partner A is going to fit in with our culture, with the way we run our business or is it Partner B?” Zehl said. “They may both deliver the same service, but for you to have a successful implementation and successful delivery, the right adoption from your users and from your customers, it’s really critical to find that synergy between your organization and the partners that you’re selecting.”
But in choosing a new piece of technology, lenders also have to remember the user experience for their staff, not just their borrowers; both should be considered as customers of this technology, Zehl said.
“And if you throw a solution that may be phenomenal for the customer/borrower that makes the life of the customers/user really difficult and challenging, then that’s going to impact your productivity, that’s going to impact your average cycle time and how long it takes you to close that loan,” she continued.
Read More: 2022 mortgage industry predictions | National Mortgage News