I’m in bright and sunny San Francisco for LendIt Fintech USA, a conference devoted to financial technology. What’s in it for mortgage lenders? A lot, especially as the industry moves closer and closer to a complete digital mortgage process.
So, how’s that going? During Monday’s events, Katie Cunningham moderated a panel, Completing the End to End Digital Mortgage Process, which featured some optimistic answers from its panelists when asked about where they see the digital mortgage process in the next two years. Panelists included Roostify CEO and Co-founder Rajesh Bhat, Better Mortgage CEO Vishal Garg, Lenda CEO and Founder Jason van den Brand, Yodlee Senior Director of Business Development Jonathan Principi and Shane Hartzler, director of eMortgage strategy and operations for Fannie Mae.
Bhat said that the industry will shift to digital customer acquisition using the tools the company rolls out. Martzler told the audience he thinks the industry will be able to complete the mortgage process, from application through at least closing, within 30 days.
“We’d like to get that down even further; our north star is to make it from app to delivery at 10 days. I don’t think in two years we’re necessarily going to see that,” he said. “But I think you can see applying and closing within a month.”
“I’m going to take that a little further, I think it’s going to be a lot faster than that,” van der Brand said in response. “I think the regulatory minimum is 13 days for primary residents to close a loan. I think as a lender, we’ll be able to fundamentally complete the process of closing a loan faster than the regulatory minimum, which will continue to drive down the cost to produce and drive down the cost for consumers. I think in two years, this conversation’s going to move more toward how do the new players in mortgage actually start to talk to the folks in D.C. and we’re going to get a lot more involved in regulatory issues than just the technical barriers we face today.”
“I think in two years, you’re going to be able to sell a house and buy a house in the same day with the mortgage lender taking both sides of the transaction and fundamentally acting in the same way that marginal lending works today,” Garg said.
Principi explained he sees subprime expanding more in the future.
“I think subprime is going to open up a lot more and I think that a lot of folks are going to want to prudently use our technology and my data to do it in a thoughtful manner,” he said.
