Unravel the Jargon: What is a True “End-to-End” Loan Document Platform?

Any lender seeking a new technology partner has to wade through a river of nearly useless buzzwords. The cloud. AI. eMortgage. Blockchain. End-to-End.

They all have strong business cases, but too many companies just throw the words out there hoping to get their voice heard amongst companies seeking the newest offerings. Without substance, though, these bits of jargon mean nothing.

In the lending world, one of the most common buzzwords is, “end-to-end.” Even vendors in our space, document preparation and compliance, have been liberally using those words to describe their offerings.

What do all these companies mean by “end-to-end loan docs?”  We can’t tell you what they’re thinking, but there are a few things it should mean.

End-to-End from the Document Perspective

Nothing we do in the lending industry can be accomplished without fully compliant documentation. After the closing, the resulting file of documentation literally becomes the asset that is traded on the secondary market and the collateral for the borrower’s home loan. Can the term end-to-end even be applied to this function?

Yes, it can. End-to-end documentation means that a lender can contract with a vendor to receive a complete package of loan documents, including required disclosures, for any loan product they choose to sell in any jurisdiction. This means, the vendor partner will provide all of the required documentation from pre-application all the way to post-close and everything in between.

In addition to the documents themselves, the partner must provide a method for distributing those documents securely to the right parties, whether that be electronically through a portal, or printed and shipped. It means the compliance checks are built in and that the technology can push back real-time information to the lender’s loan origination system.

The critical aspect that too many vendors forget

There are a number of industry vendors that provide services that approach end-to-end. Very few, like Docutech, can deliver across the entire spectrum. But even an incredible feature-rich platform will fail if it omits the critical ingredient for a great partnership: the customer experience.

Regardless of where in the transaction the borrower finds themselves when they need to receive a document, it must look and feel exactly like the lender’s existing experience or there will be a mental disconnect that will degrade the borrower’s overall experience resulting in lower levels of customer satisfaction.

This is a critical component because it can literally derail the transaction and cost the lender business. When it is accomplished correctly, the borrower never feels like they are being shared with another company, but rather remain engaged with a consistent experience as the loan production process continues on to close.

This is true for the primary disclosure and closing documents that the borrower must receive, but just as true for the ancillary services that your document preparation partner provides, such as fee collaboration between the lender and title, 4506-T verifications, MERS registration and other services. Anything that can possibly touch the consumer must deliver the consistent and powerful branding of the lender. This is another meaning of end-to-end that we take very seriously at Docutech.

The risks involved in choosing a partial solution

Vendors that cannot offer end-to-end services are sources of risk for the lenders they serve. Anytime a lender works with a company that cannot support them across their entire suite of loan offerings the firm must contract with other firms to fill the gaps. This often more than doubles the vendor management time and expense and can lead to compliance problems that crop up anytime disparate systems must be integrated.

A single vendor solution is more important for document preparation than for any other part of the lender’s business because what ends up on these documents is the only thing that parties downstream in the value chain will have to rely on. True end-to-end partners are doc prep plus the capabilities to deliver time and costs savings, backed by a strong customer support team. It behooves a lender to find a partner who understands what end-to-end truly means and who has the wherewithal to deliver it.

At Docutech, we deliver it daily, for lenders that only close a few loans each month all the way up to more than half of the largest lenders in the country. To find out how we can support you on every loan you write, from beginning to end, contact us today.