Today, consumer's expectations for seamless digital experiences are set by companies like Amazon, Zillow, and Paypal. In order for retail banks to survive, they too must meet consumer’s demand by providing exceptional digital experiences. Of course, this is easier said than done.
The mortgage industry faces unique challenges on the journey to digitization. To start, the entire mortgage process is complex, fragmented, and often varies from lender to lender based on legacy banking systems and homegrown workarounds. Furthermore, mortgages are not as simple as other banking services.
The truth about mortgage processes
According to Inc., mortgage applications alone "take 44 days on average to close, according to Ellie Mae, and can generate an eye-popping 1,000 pages of manually processed documentation." This is because of a lengthy, fragmented journey from pre-approval to closing to ongoing loan servicing that spans numerous, unrelated players all collecting disparate data coupled with processes that necessitate multiple vendors to achieve regulatory compliance (appraisers, inspectors, title insurance, etc.).
This complexity has produced an industry that lags far behind others in the path to digital transformation. Additionally, the mortgage industry is a highly regulated environment that will always require a delicate balance between modernization, cost, and risk.
Of course, while the value of digitizing is clear, the path to creating better customer experiences through automation is murky. Meeting consumer expectations isn't just a matter of delivering digital portals or mobile apps.
Is there a solution?
To rise to the challenge, lenders need to take a holistic approach to the entire loan origination cycle, looking for opportunities to streamline processes through automation where possible. In doing so, an often overlooked area within the bank emerges as low hanging fruit: the back-office.
Through automating just some of the enumerable manual processes within the back-office, lenders can improve the customer experience, increase asset quality while mitigating risk, simplify regulatory compliance, increase efficiency, and contain costs.
Yet, within most banking institutions, IT is already overwhelmed with front office digitization requirements, and back-office operations often have a significant resource gap. Employees aren't skilled in automation, robotic processes, or artificial intelligence. This makes the thought of automating back-office processes seem impossible.
Quickly automate the back-office
Fortunately, digitizing back-offices isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Leaders in the mortgage industry are taking a systematic approach to automation by leveraging low-code platforms as an attainable first step along their digitization path.
Benefits from using low-code applications include:
- Improved customer experience through a frictionless process and faster response times
- Increased profit margins through decreased operating costs, improved throughput, and increased productivity
- Improved data integrity and accessibility
- Simplified compliance audits
Discover how leaders in the financial services arena are succeeding in driving digital transformation across the bank using low-code platforms. Download this free guide to learn where financial leaders are focusing their efforts today, which pitfalls they are learning to avoid, and how they are tackling small projects to create quick wins to build a business case and create an organizational appetite for tackling bigger projects.