Note: This piece was originally featured in the January 2026 edition of MortgagePoint magazine.
Last year, global business intelligence provider J.D. Power surveyed the mortgage industry about customer satisfaction with their mortgage servicer’s digital experience. The study revealed that the industry still has plenty of work to do in providing a satisfactory product to help mortgage applicants and holders meet their needs.
Surprisingly, roughly three out of four lenders did not offer a mobile app.
The J.D. Power survey found that mobile apps scored an average of 704 out of 1,000—a score lower than mortgage servicer websites and wealth/retirement apps.
J.D. Power noted that only 44% of apps provided basic functionality such as availability and a modern look. A paltry 12% of the apps delivered valuable user experiences, such as setting up alerts or directing extra payments toward the principal.
A Shift in Strategy
“Mortgage lenders have come to recognize that the more educated their customers are about the details of their mortgage products, the more loyal and lucrative their relationships become,” said Bruce Gehrke, Senior Director of Wealth and Lending Intelligence at J.D. Power, when the study was released. “The highest-ranked lenders in
today’s market aren’t just those with the best rates; they’re the ones that have perfected hybrid engagement. By blending high-touch advisor relationships with intelligent digital infrastructure, leading lenders are transforming what used to be a transactional, document-focused ordeal into a consultative partnership.”
The J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study revealed that mortgage lenders have shifted from a transactional, volume-at-all-costs strategy to more consultative, advisory-style customer interactions.
Significantly, the survey noted that greater customer satisfaction ratings, enhanced trust, and higher levels of brand loyalty are the results of that change.
MortgagePoint spoke with Gehrke to find out more about how mobile tech will factor into the future of the mortgage industry
Q: You have said that mobile apps are the future for lending. Could you expand upon that?
Gehrke: It’s been fairly consistent over the last two years, at least. We see mobile app usage across both sides of the industry: the origination of new loans and the servicing of existing loans. It’s one of the lowest-used channels of interaction between customers and mortgage companies. But when we look at the experience, the reported ease of use, the satisfaction in doing things mobile, they’re significantly higher than any of the other channels we’ve seen. Mortgage apps and interaction have really taken off.
Q: If you look at some of the challenges the industry [is facing, mobile apps are] going to be a great tool for that.
Gehrke: I know there’s some debate back and forth. Some originators think it’s a shorter-term transaction; getting a mortgage loan could take two to six weeks before you close. Consumers are reluctant to download apps for short-term interactions, and that may or may not be a factor here.
I’m certainly not an expert in that, but I do know what we see and what customers are telling J.D. Power. They like it, and they’ll use it if it’s there. In our servicing study, for two years running, mobile apps have been reported as the easiest way to interact with servicers. There are challenges, but ease and convenience tend to be the factors that really drive adoption at a high level in consumer services. One of the major issues and goals for servicers and originators is to keep those customers with them. Traditionally, the industry has been very transactional. It’s just closing that loan, pushing it off. Servicing is a whole different affair. The company servicing the loan is really a bill collector. They’re payment collectors making sure debts get paid, and that’s the end of the story.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen that relationship change. The servicers are investing and putting time and effort into having a better experience for their customers. They have interaction now with higher interest rates versus lower interest rate borrowers for longer periods of time. There are many opportunities to expand those relationships. What better way to do that than on a mobile app that gives you virtually a 24/7 presence with the consumer?
Q: Do you think that the mortgage servicing industry itself has been proactive
enough in the technology arena?
Gehrke: If you go back to the last couple of years, they’ve really picked up the pace. Mortgage servicing is a margin business. There are thin margins. It’s an economy-of-scale basis. You have a lot of fixed costs, so the more customers you have, the lower the cost per customer. The focus in the industry has been on cost to serve.
If you look at the past year, the consolidation going on, some of the M&A activity focused on locking down and keeping those customers within that firm or in that group of connected companies. So, recapturing the loyalty of those customers has risen to a higher level and is a more important goal for servicers. They’re investing in technologies that can help them do that: they can make that process smoother and take that relationship beyond being purely a debt collector. It wasn’t that long ago that every verbal interaction with a mortgage servicer was kicked off with what we call the “mini-Miranda”: “This is an attempt to collect a debt.” If you didn’t know better, you would think you were talking to a collection agent. You may just have a question about your mortgage payment; you’re not behind on anything.
The mentality has changed quite a bit, and the industry has taken a lot of
steps to focus on the customer. If you look at some of the results in our digital
experience study, the gap between independent mortgage bankers and the big bank servicers—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chases, etc.—there’s a gap when it comes to digital performance.
I think that obviously reflects the budget that the banks put into their digital capabilities because it touches all their customers and supports their banking business, their credit card business, their auto financing, and their
mortgage financing businesses. They have a head start there. For some of the nonbank, independent mortgage bank servicers, or those who are competing against them, it’s time to catch up.
Q: Your report noted the overall satisfaction score for mortgage servicers. What steps can the industry take to improve that score in the short term?
Gehrke: When we look back at the key elements that drive that feeling of satisfaction, the experience, what consumers take away from it, the biggest element of that is trust. It’s hard to define in a lot of ways, but in a case like this, it goes back to this concept of being more than a payment processor. This is a difficult challenge because most people don’t look to their mortgage servicer for anything other than collecting a payment. We’ve been conditioned to think of it that way, so it’s difficult to change those perceptions. But servicers who are effective at driving loyalty in their customer base are communicating well.
Rocket Mortgage, which has been at the top of our rank chart for mortgage servicing experience for the last 10 or 11 years running, is, above all else, one of the best communicators in the industry, and that’s one of the cores to their success. They know their customers. They know how to speak to their customer, and they speak to them in a way that’s different than what you would expect to see in your standard payment processor.
You’ve also got some challenging situations out there amongst consumers in general. We also survey our own mortgage servicing customers on their financial health, and we see that it has declined each year over the past four years. There are challenges in the home. There are challenges with homeowners. The cost of owning a home has increased quite a bit over the last four years. You have record levels of increases in home insurance premiums. Property taxes have gone up as values have gone up, so we have this locked-in group of homeowners who aren’t necessarily earning enough money to buy the house that they’re living in today.
Those basic homeowner expenses, along with all the other things you’re paying—upkeep, maintenance, utilities—are all going up and up and up. Servicers are in an excellent position to try to help educate people on how best they can navigate that situation and become a bit more advisory. They can work at becoming a partner in homeownership with that servicing customer. It’s not an easy task, but these are the kind of things that are worth pursuing when their servicers are looking to recapture that business as that customer either refinances that loan or move on to the next house. The best way to do that is to drive that great experience and make it so the person wants to stay within that company’s footprint.
Q: What is important for people to know about the evolution of technology within the
mortgage industry?
Gehrke: We’re getting interesting feedback on questions about artificial intelligence. Our studies are collecting more data about particulars, but one of the things that certainly impacts digital interaction is artificial intelligence.
It’s going to show up more behind the scenes than it is in customer-facing capabilities, but it’s already getting there. There are custom lenders already out there who are building AI agents to answer phone calls, to make phone calls, and things of this nature. One of the key elements that I think is interesting is the preference between would I rather interact digitally—either via mobile or the internet—or do a bot-driven phone call?
It’s a little too early to say which way it goes. We’re getting mixed signals on how much consumers really understand what artificial intelligence might mean. Some of the originators are talking about engagement, basically robo-calling, and we know how that worked. Back when we were inundated with calls, we didn’t want the Do Not Call list. You still have the Do Not Call list and things of that nature, and that doesn’t necessarily mean a better experience.
So, this is a key element that we measure in our servicing study. What is the optimal level of communication? You can over-communicate, and what happens is you start to lose the customer’s attention because it’s just another meaningless general communication that doesn’t impact or interest them. Personalization is the way forward, and the way to truly understand your customer data. There’s a ton of it out there, but I don’t think anybody is at the point where they’re masters of that data or how best to make it actionable within their operation or the ways they interact with customers. Borrowers definitely want human interaction. They want both pieces, so they want to have everything at the same time. The question is, will the digital part ever get good enough? And that’s part of what they tell us: if the capabilities were better today, they would be very happy with an all-digital experience. And this is another thing from a generational standpoint: that preference is much stronger in younger borrowers who are more digitally native. But those are the folks who are making up more and more of the homebuying population going forward. Both lenders and servicers will have to keep an eye on the future. These are the folks we’re going to be servicing, and their preferences are a little bit different, and they also take very different steps in how they go about choosing lenders. They use more investigation, more research. They rely on trusted referral sources—friends, family, colleagues, people that they know—and less on industry-level referrals such as real estate agents.
But it is a sliding scale of how much that is driving lender choice at the end of the day, and I think some of that is under-reported by borrowers. They don’t shop around as much as you would expect because they set the path early, and they react to those folks who make them comfortable and whom they trust. What we’re seeing is technology being used to create that early interaction, that ability to connect with consumers before they get to the point where, traditionally, they would reach out to a lender.
In our latest study, we’re seeing almost one out of two borrowers interact with lenders before they even talk to real estate agents. I think for those who can figure out how to use technology to follow that pathway of changing perceptions and preferences, that’s where you want to be.
I think we’ve gone beyond the part where you just throw these mass technological improvements in there and say, well, they’re going to help me, because that return on those investments is a little shaky. You’ve got to be more tactical now. It’s about trying to create a personalized, trusting, and advisory experience. Look at what Rocket is doing with Redfin. Look at Zillow; its volume of mortgage lending grew tremendously.
They have a lot of access to borrowers through their website. Redfin’s websites feed right into the Rocket machine. The technology has to catch up with digital experiences and other products and services. But at the end of the day, it’s the people who make the difference. And that may change going forward. If we’re not adapting to these new customers—what drives them, what’s important to them, what they’re looking for—it puts you at a disadvantage, and it’s competitive out there, as volume has shrunk down. The companies that are addressing those needs right now are the ones that are succeeding.
