Moving from Static Forms to Dynamic Loan Documents

In a previous post, we talked about the move away from paper loan documents and the concept of a form, which is basically a static document with spaces to hold specific data that must be manually changed. This migration away from forms and toward data driven loan documents is enabling great improvements in processing speed, customer satisfaction and the development and release of new loan products.

In the old days of static loan forms, complicated technologies were require to pull data out of the document for use in the lender’s processing system. In most cases, lenders were forced to scan a document into their systems and then count on specialized technology to pull the information out of the document image. There was a lot of X and Y coordinate measuring going on. If the loan document did not look exactly as expected, errors resulted. There was also no way to account for additional space. A long address, multiple buyers or complicated information could often not fit into the predefined space allowed for each field.

When a lender wanted to offer a new loan product, a new stack of forms was required. While some of the documents in the file may have been reusable, many were custom documents. Over time, the loan forms libraries grew very large and version control became a problem.

When the forms arrived at the closing table, errors were often corrected with white out or by striking through information on the paper document. That all seems archaic today.

With dynamic, data driven loan documents, the “forms” a lender uses to close a loan are created as needed, combining the right information for each loan program and borrower. Changes are made electronically and the documents themselves are often signed electronically, too. When they are ready to go to the investor, they are sent to the post-closing department electronically, checked for accuracy by quality assurance and then sent on for funding.

With dynamic documents, sets of loan documents can be assembled rapidly and thousands of document combinations are available to the lender.  At Docutech, those dynamic documents are available as HTML code so they can easily be presented to the borrower in a web browser and then executed by the consumer online.

The move to dynamic, data driven loan documents reduces errors and removes limitations for the lender by increasing flexibility. Loan documents are delivered quickly, accurately and reliably.