Lenders spend a lot of time and money selecting the partners and technologies to trust with their origination businesses. The stakes are high. From a compliance standpoint, vendor management is a significant concern. And then finding that a prospective partner who has made it all the way through the due diligence process doesn’t have what it takes to implement effectively can be very frustrating.
Digital Mortgages, Customer Experience Innovations and Mobile Platforms Are Changing the Face of Mortgage Lending
Last year, we took a close look at the state of eSign technology in the mortgage industry. While there are a number of eSign solutions on the market, we still saw gaps in the capabilities our lenders demanded. As more lenders move toward electronic closings, we knew the industry needed a tool that any borrower could use without the need for extensive customer support or proprietary software. As a result, Solex is a top-to-bottom redesign and modernization of Docutech’s existing eSign platform – the foundation that allows us to take eSign performance to the next level.
Regulatory changes have sent many lenders back to the market in search of technology services that can help them remain compliant. Because of the nature of many of the government’s changes, document preparation has become a critical component of every lender’s operation.
Recently, our own Harry Gardner penned an article for the October issue of Mortgage Banking magazine entitled, “The E-Notarization Challenge: 50 States of Grey.” As Gardner pointed out there, getting all 50 states to fully support electronic notarization is a serious challenge facing the industry. We need to overcome it if we hope to have end-to-end electronic mortgages.
The mortgage industry continues to progress slowly toward the Holy Grail of a completely paperless process. As different technology providers enter the eMortgage space, a variety of partnership arrangements have evolved in order to piece together the various components needed for a fully electronic mortgage solution. Let’s explore those components, the different ways they can be assembled, and the possible advantages and downsides.
Based on today’s heavily regulated mortgage industry, financial institutions are re-evaluating their key goals and strategies to ensure they are not only meeting the latest compliance guidelines, but also doing so in the most cost effective way possible. While each institution is unique and shares different goals, the overarching theme for mortgage improvement across the industry points to increased efficiency and improving customer experience as the leading goals institutions are working toward.
Having been in the business of helping lenders on the path to paperless for a good portion of our 25 years of service, we have seen many management teams approach eMortgage. Because this territory is so new for many, some companies stumble or hold back when they are on the very cusp of updating their institutions for the future. Fortunately, today there are many great resources available for the lender who wants to prepare for and then enter the world of electronic mortgage lending.
The mortgage industry is a document-centric business; you can’t get around it. If they don’t have the right documents, financial institutions can’t sell loans into the secondary market. This is an exciting time, because that no longer means that documents have to be printed on paper. So in working toward that new electronic workflow, business should be no longer driven by the documents themselves, but rather the data contained in them.
