Using technology to maximize your business productivity, reduce mistakes and maintain compliance creates the platform to realize true business success. The right technology ensures organizations have the tools to overcome the challenges of executing on strategy every day and prospering in today’s ever-changing mortgage climate.
Increased business productivity can be traced to technology and the automation of processes, allowing for faster communication and updates, increased time spent on priorities, fewer mistakes and greater loan completion rates. Together, these factors maximize productivity and profitability.
Some of the challenges facing reverse mortgage lenders today include:
Decreased productivity
Increased regulation
Industry changes
Training, education and process review
Lead management
Let’s discuss these challenges.
Decreased Productivity
Financial Assessment caused the timeline from application to funding to increase from 60 to 80 days. Technology—through functionality like integrated credit reporting—can help minimize the impact of this prolonged process. In fact, there are many integrations and options specifically designed to help eliminate the redundancy of work, human errors, duplicated efforts and time needed to complete.
Increased Regulation
The reverse mortgage industry and the HECM product have always been extremely regulated, and as our industry grows, more and more companies will be visited by regulators like the CFPB. These auditors are going to look at things like controls, data security, and policies and procedures. The right technology gives you the controls and security you need to protect your business.
Industry Changes
The way you do business is affected by each change to the industry. In 2013, HUD introduced the HECM 60. In 2014, HUD added structure and pricing for non-borrowing spouses. This year, HUD introduced Financial Assessment, which has strongly affected turn times. Technology, through automations and integrations, can and reduce the impact on your business.
Training and Education
The reverse industry has gone through many recent changes and keeping your team up to speed can prove challenging. Financial Assessment is just one example of industry change that is crucial for everyone on your staff—from loan officers to processors, underwriters and closers—to understand in order to stay compliant and competitive. Technology supports education and training opportunities, and enhancements to your company software can go a long way to keeping your entire team on track.
Lead Management
As the industry changes, customers that didn’t qualify in the past might qualify now. New changes create opportunities to reach out to inactive leads. CRM technology can keep you in touch with your leads and help you mine your data to make marketing decisions.
So what do these challenges mean for your business?
Improving efficiencies in managing loan files and streamlining workflow can help to reduce operating expenses and improve mortgage profitability. You should regularly map out your entire workflow and review it with your management staff. This will help reduce duplication, eliminate some inefficiencies and educate departments on how a loan goes through your entire system. Data and loan files must be organized, complete and consistent. This is your best audit defense and supports rapid response to audit requests, demonstrating strong internal policy adherence.
Technology also supports integrations with third-party vendors. These integrations help automate your process, decrease processing time, automatically attach documents to your electronic files in the proper location, increase turn times and eliminate data entry errors. Taking advantage of these integrations will help with your turn times.
Make efficiencies a top priority. Technology allows you to more efficiently document and track your mortgage management processes, which allows you to focus on your profit goals, improve your customer response time, and respond swiftly and comprehensively to auditors.
Technology protects you and mitigates risk. Changing regulations and increasing scrutiny make it harder for you to be compliant. If you don’t respond quickly to an audit request with clean, well-organized files, examiners are likely to apply even more scrutiny. You need to demonstrate that you did everything right when originating or servicing loans.
Investing in the right technology, and taking the time to customize it to support the way you do business, is sure to optimize your workflow and will allow you to generate reports and do analysis configured to your company’s specific needs.
Invest in your people and make sure they are educated. With the changes in the industry, even the experienced employee can benefit from training.
