HousingWire sat down with Bob Blacketer, vice president, global sales and client relationships, financial risk & management solutions at Fiserv, to discuss striking the right blend of lending services and integrated technology solutions to remain focused in an increasingly competitive landscape. Blacketer works with financial institutions from top 5 lenders to regional banks to independent mortgage companies of all sizes, helping them to provide an outstanding borrowing experience to their customers who are buying homes for their families, while also minimizing risk.
HousingWire: What are Fiserv clients focused on as we head into 2020?
Blacketer: Lending is becoming increasingly digital. Every year, Fiserv conducts proprietary research into the motivations of borrowers – their expectations, the challenges they face and the improvements they demand from their borrowing experience. We found that almost two-thirds of people who have applied for any kind of loan in the past two years have done so either partially or fully online.
Furthermore, when it comes to the home loan process, there were significant upticks in consumers reading loan documents provided by the lender on a mobile phone or tablet, uploading documents requested as part of the loan approval process via a mobile device and receiving their loan application decisions via their mobile device.
HW: How does artificial Intelligence and robotic process automation play a role as the industry continues to shift towards digital?
Blacketer: Fiserv conducted a survey among home lenders at a recent mortgage conference, and those lenders told us they see AI as most promising for internal origination workflows, followed by borrower engagement workflows. For process automation, internal origination workflows are also the No. 1 priority. The challenge for many lenders is how to best marry these technologies, especially for complicated business rules.
Whether you’re talking about business rules that are stored in your POS, your LOS, servicing system – or maybe you’re consolidating business rules into one system. The AI you’re using must be able to exchange inputs and outputs with those rules.
HW: What solutions does Fiserv offer to simplify this relationship?
Blacketer: LoanComplete from Fiserv is a single platform for capturing data and documents, evaluating them using a highly configurable business rules library and then providing the automated workflow to notify the user of the output from those business rules. This output can be tracked and managed through to reconciliation directly in the LoanComplete system or sent to a lender’s other systems. Or, they can display parts of the LoanComplete system in their other system.
HW: Are you seeing this output across all sub processes in origination, or are certain ones being prioritized by lenders?
Blacketer: It depends on the lender’s lines of business. With the resurgence in third party origination, lenders in that business are focused on how to use this to better manage capacity without sacrificing quality. Retail lenders are looking at how to enhance their customer facing portals to provide faster more detailed responses and accelerate the exchange and review of information between operational departments.
