╳

Reducing cost of mortgage operations with Intelligent staffing

Digital transformation is critical to the lending industry's success, and significant progress has been made - particularly during the pandemic. According to research, 92 per cent of mortgage firms have at least doubled their digital transformation pace in the last year, and 20 per cent have quadrupled it. The mortgage industry remains one of the most paper-intensive segments of the financial services sector, but consumers nowadays expect a simplified digital lending experience. Long, drawn-out loan approval processes may cause customers to find other alternatives. Further, out-of-date tools and workflows do not allow the needed personalization to understand and service customers, as they have limited access to insights from loan data. This can happen when digital changes are implemented piecemeal, and information is not shared across technology platforms. Adopting a more modern technology approach is one way for lenders to overcome these challenges. However, large technology investments are neither practical nor sufficient.

What is Intelligent Staffing?

Intelligent staffing is a method used by Coforge as a smart way to reduce staffing costs and distribute work intelligently. It is directed to help clients make certain critical decisions using the right use of resources. One way is to have critical, highly skilled team members remain in their current roles - to support activities like client communication, decision making, underwriting, modifications, and more - while outsourcing basic tasks like standard calculations, ordering and tracking documents, lien release, payoffs, file set-up, review and indexing of documents, escrow line set up, payoffs and more. This helps an organization not only reduce costs but gain staffing flexibility. Based on the amount of work, clients can expand or contract quickly, based on resource requirements and changing business patterns. Through additional process reengineering, Coforge helps reduce organizational costs and redundant business processes involving the analysis of existing human and automated workflows. This helps move costlier processes to lower-cost resources and helps you efficiently cut costs and manage resources appropriately, without disruption to the existing workforce.

What is low-impact mortgage process automation?

Like typical process automation, this is a reimagining of how common tasks and workflows are carried out. It uses intelligent technology and deep domain knowledge to reduce inefficiencies, resulting in faster and less resource-intensive ways of working. It is an antidote to the daily struggles that many loan teams face by automating the manual and often repetitive aspects of their job in a convenient and efficient manner. This type of technology can also use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) to uncover important customer insights, make upstream predictions, or provide intelligent loan recommendations. The difference is: based on process reengineering expertise gained over two decades, this is implemented in a smart way so that the impact is quick and large, but the effort/ cost is managed so that the return on any investment, if needed, can be seen very quickly. With rising home sales in the United States and a greater demand for the use of technology in the mortgage approval process, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)-driven end-to-end automation is expected to have a significant impact in this space. Because mortgage origination processes are labor intensive, automation and IDP have a greater impact and benefit for the mortgage industry than for most other industries. Mortgage origination is an area where IDP can make a significant difference by reducing the amount of back and forth between the loan officer and the applicant. IDP systems can also cut the loan processing cycle in half thanks to their Straight Through Processing (STP) capability. And if the research/ implementation costs of teg technologies are embedded with the vendor, this becomes a low-cost but rapidly effective solution.

Mortgage Funding in Less Time

The traditional mortgage origination process is heavily paper-intensive, with numerous errors and delays. If the documents are incomplete or the application contains errors, they are sent back, or there are requests for additional supporting information. We have seen that in a typical processing flow, this back-and-forth is about 4-5 times for each loan submission. These factors contribute to the manual process being slow, taking more than 30-35 days to clear to close mortgages. Automation can drastically reduce cycle time.

Increased Productivity & Efficiency

Automation improves job satisfaction, according to 74% of employees in companies that have automated their processes. Furthermore, happier employees are 13 percent more productive on average. The link between job satisfaction and happiness boosts team productivity. As automation takes over the day-to-day labor-intensive ‘grunt’ work, skilled team members can now concentrate on other tasks, such as developing a professional relationship with customers, and improving both customer and employee satisfaction.

Gain Access to High-Quality Information

Who doesn't want useful information that can help them make better decisions? The best part about artificial intelligence and deep learning is that they can turn data from documents into actionable insights. These insights can then be used to make more informed decisions about the borrower's application and other loan parameters.

Increased competitive differentiation

With the right mortgage process automation solution, lenders can improve loan quality while lowering costs. Furthermore, it can assist them in attracting and retaining top mortgage industry talent by providing tools that free up time to build long-term customer connections and repeat business that machines cannot do, and to develop deeper customer relationships.

Improved Customer Service

You can close and process loans more quickly, giving your customers better service. Mortgage automation enables you to work with your borrowers in a transparent environment while also providing them with a robust self-service option. When your customers' records are preapproved, they can sign the loan applications immediately. Your customers can also electronically sign documents.

Significant reduction in loan costs

 Smart reengineering of processes, with a combination of people and tools like robotic process automation in the mortgage process, whether origination or servicing, can cut loan document handling costs by 75-80 percent.

Loan Processing Time Reduction

In the mortgage industry, prep tasks account for 60% of the total mortgage tasks, which can be better managed using intelligent staffing. You can reduce the mortgage loan application processing time by prioritizing, assembling, and collating with exceptional precision. You can make better decisions and auto-validate mortgage records, saving you a lot of time. You can save time by documenting and performing other manual tasks. When documents are organized and fed into a process that sends a ‘complete’ loan file for underwriting, your underwriter can work more efficiently.

Conclusion

We are hearing of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and automation – all processes and features that can benefit you and your organization in a variety of ways. However, to maximize performance and results, and lower the cost of implementation, we advise the optimized use of intelligent staffing and high-impact low-cost automation, and we have seen spectacular results in a noticeably brief time. Read more here

Most popular