“Work smarter, not harder.”
This popular phrase can be applied to many things, but it can sometimes seem like a far-off dream in the mortgage industry. The traditional lending process involved tedious manual tasks, repetitive assignments and constant back-and-forth with team members to ensure that the loan is flowing through the process smoothly.
With the amount of paperwork that needs to be handled, the old-school methodology can leave a lot of room for error and increase the probability of important details slipping through the cracks. However, there has been a lot of innovation within the industry that makes working smarter a reality. Leveraging trusted technology allows mortgage lenders to simplify the lending process through automation, workflows and task-tracking.
Many benefits are associated with bringing your mortgage workflow into the 21st century. Manual loan processing and tracking can lead to human error and slow down loan turnaround time. Automation can push tasks forward with little or no physical intervention.
For example, on our platform, lenders can set up business rules that will automatically alert a user of required documentation based on the specific loan, bypassing the once manual notification entirely. A technology-based workflow eliminates the potential for mistakes and liberates teams to devote their time and talents to more impactful responsibilities.
Digital transformation is a term discussed quite frequently, but operational change can be intimidating. It’s easy to adopt the mindset, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, by utilizing a secure and reliable platform to automate workflows and digitalize documents, you can boost productivity and be able to close more loans faster.
By creating a single, unified database, anyone in your organization can access documents, forms, workflow records, and other assets at any time. This aspect becomes especially important in today’s remote and hybrid work environments.
Consider a typical loan process:
The loan set-up team receives the appropriate documents, completes and saves them, then the paperwork moves to the disclosure and processing teams. This process can waste a lot of time sending items back and forth and checking in on the status of each step. With an automated workflow in place, alerts are established to notify each team of a new loan. Once a task is completed, the system will automatically alert the next person or team and so on until the loan is closed.
Productivity also increases when teams are aligned and lending processes are in-sync and repeatable. Incorporating workflow automation allows companies to streamline processes and ensure that details aren’t falling through the cracks. For example, our platform will notify a user of issues, like missing or unidentified documents, any time during the loan cycle to ensure that nothing is left out.
Allowing automation to guide your lending process can simplify:
- Tasking a team or individual with next steps
- Alerting users via checklists of missing data or documents within large files or folders
- Data comparison and validation
By digitizing and automating the loan process, mortgage lenders can significantly enhance the capacity to close more loans faster while ensuring that every necessary action is completed. Modernizing your lending workflow will transform your processes and truly allow your team to “work smarter, not harder.”