Industry Spotlight: Blue Sage

Docutech’s integrations with leading technology providers in the mortgage and consumer lending industry are key to helping us deliver end-to-end solutions that enable lenders to streamline loan origination, reduce costs, and optimize the experience for the borrower. In our monthly Industry Spotlight blog series, we highlight key relationships that help us move the industry forward by delivering the most streamlined, accurate, compliant and innovative document experience possible.

This month, we sat down with Blue Sage, a digital lending platform that works with lenders to deliver a digital mortgage experience within the web browser via any channel. Blue Sage is working with Docutech to combine their digital capabilities with smart document and eSignature technology to move as much of the loan process as possible to a digital environment.

What innovative services is Blue Sage providing to financial institutions?

The Blue Sage Digital Lending Platform is 100% browser-based and covers the entire lending and fulfillment process, regardless of channel.  It delivers everything from product pricing to underwriting and decision-making from the point-of-sale stage all the way to the closing and funding of the loan. Because it’s delivered through a secure, fully-managed cloud service, the platform enables lenders to achieve speed and compliance with fewer costs.

With Blue Sage, borrowers no longer must print, fax and mail paper documents to their lender, often repeatedly and at the last minute. For example, Blue Sage’s consumer applications offer full chat, remote assistance and automated workflows, enabling borrowers to search and apply for mortgages at their own pace or with assistance from a loan officer when needed. It also comes equipped with consumer-facing desktop and mobile applications.  By putting the primary focus on customer satisfaction, we’re helping lenders increase repeat business and referrals.

How does your integration with Docutech help deliver an outstanding experience to the institutions you work with?

Blue Sage and Docutech are teaming up to provide a higher level of automation to our mutual clients. Together, we’re saving lenders from performing an enormous number of manual tasks that have led to the highest per-loan costs our industry has ever seen.

Specifically, we have built a seamless integration to Docutech’s eSignature platform, Solex, which provides borrowers with an intuitive, easy-to-use eSign experience. Once the borrower eSigns a document in Solex, the loan file in Blue Sage is automatically updated with the fact that consent has been received, which triggers the next set of automated steps, such as ordering third party services. Compared to performing these tasks manually, we are taking an incredible amount of work off the lender’s plate.

How has working with Docutech benefitted your clients? Any specific stories or anecdotes?

Our relationship with Docutech enables our clients to fulfill perhaps the most critical component of a digital mortgage experience, which is allowing the borrower to digitally sign documents online. What’s unique about our relationship, however, is how fast we’re able to do this for our mutual clients.

For example, Blue Sage allows lenders to automate the loan application process so that the consumer can shop, price and apply for a loan online, with or without the lender’s assistance.  After the borrow completes their digital application, a secure borrower portal is created where  initial disclosures are generated and delivered to the borrower to be e-signed through Docutech.  All of this automation occurs within about two to three minutes from the time the borrower submits their application. That’s an extremely short time for a borrower to get a loan commitment, and Docutech helps make it possible.

What are the most exciting developments you see happening over the next five years?

I think the consumer direct technology we’re seeing take off will become commonplace five years from now, but I think we’ll also see an enormous increase in process automation working behind the scenes. For example, every task associated with producing loans will eventually be automatically assigned based on a lender’s volume and the particular skills and expertise of every staff member, including the loan officer.

Beyond a continuation of the automation trend, within five years we may see other innovations emerge such as device independence, blockchain, artificial intelligence and further advancements in communication technology. These innovations are already having an impact outside our industry in terms of how consumers access goods and services, and I believe our industry is next. But the most significant advancements for lenders will be technologies that automate human tasks so that the machinery manufactures the loan and humans sell them and advise the consumer.

How will you and Docutech be able to help financial institutions reach these goals?

Blue Sage and Docutech share the mutual goal of automating everything that can be automated. We’re committed to helping lenders deliver a faster, more intuitive service to their customers while lowering production costs and increasing loan quality. And we’re both obsessed with providing borrowers with a digital mortgage experience.

There are still a few hurdles to creating completely digital loans, of course. At the same time, the traditional hurdles to digital mortgages have been peeling away in recent years, while advances such as asset verifications and remote notarizations have taken hold. With Docutech, I’m confident we can help our clients achieve a completely digital mortgage experience for every borrower that chooses it.