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2017 was a momentous year for Roostify. The SaaS provider went live with several prominent customers, including Top 100 lenders JPMorgan Chase and Guild Mortgage. The company also more than doubled its headcount and made significant investments in security, compliance and product management resources.
Roostify continues to set the pace as both an industry thought leader and product innovator. One example is the company’s recent release of Decision Builder, which simplifies loan options so that consumers can evaluate, understand and select the loan that fits their needs.
“The whole idea behind this product is that the consumer today doesn’t have a lot of access to real information about their loan options,” CEO and Co-founder Rajesh Bhat said.
“Because they can do this before they even apply, they can carefully think it over without the pressure of sitting in an LO’s office. As for the loan officer, they get clients who are serious about what they want, and are ready to start moving forward with a realistic scenario.”
As the company looks to 2018, the biggest challenge for the industry is one Roostify is helping to resolve: bringing the industry online. 
“Two or so years ago, the concept of an end-to-end online home-buying experience was intriguing to imagine, but the path to achieve that was unknown,” Bhat said. “The industry has advanced since then and the question is no longer ‘if,’ but ‘when’ and ‘how.’”
In 2018, Roostify is focusing on the customer and how it can improve the home-buying experience. The company will be introducing a number of advances in online mortgage to empower the consumer to self-serve at more points of the process – eventually offering end-to-end self-serve capabilities.
A “digital mortgage experience” started out as simply a nice-looking application that consumers could fill out online, and maybe a document upload folder, Bhat explained.
“Now, the application is just the tip of the iceberg. The platform we offer allows more and more of the post-application home-buying process — such as asset verification, purchasing homeowners’ insurance and scheduling an appraisal — to be convenient and transparent to consumers.”
“Our biggest opportunity is to expand the narrative around the digitization of home lending,” Bhat said. “Much of the discussion today has been centered on the benefits of intake and aggregation of consumer data in the origination process.”
Bhat said that in the company’s view, true transformation begins with overhauling the workflow of lenders and third parties, such as real estate agents, title services and others, that are tied to the mortgage origination process.
“Much of our product supports this online workflow enablement today. However, for lenders to see the larger opportunity to materially reduce the cost of origination and contemplate new business models altogether, we need to think beyond data aggregation. We will be building out this larger narrative over the next year,” Bhat said.
