This piece originally appeared in the September 2024 edition of MortgagePoint magazine, online now.
As the mortgage industry adjusts to changes in regulatory compliance, rising interest rates, declining purchase volume, and overall economic uncertainty, servicing becomes more important to both mortgage holders and their homeowners. Homeowners are increasingly interested in a seamless and digital, user-friendly experience throughout the mortgage journey, from application to closing and on to the long-term servicing of their loan. They are asking for speed, transparency and accessibility to documents, account information and customer service.
Where the Industry Stands
Investing in digital is a common trend being leveraged across the industry to personalize and streamline the origination process through compliant and automated processes and approvals.
While lower sales volumes aren’t ideal for anyone in the industry, it allows for a bit of breathing room to explore ways to improve their processes, enhance offerings for consumers, and ensure that they are at the forefront of technology and automation.
Interest rates, homes sales, or the regulatory focus on compliance and risk mitigation cannot be controlled by servicers. However, servicers can use this time to further develop technological tools and processes to improve the experience, access, and interaction throughout the life of the customer’s mortgage.
The Future of Digital
Trends like blockchain, cloud computing and big data analytics have been around for a while. New trends (Open AI and Non-Fungible Tokens) are starting to garner more discussion and attention. Being informed about both current and new trends is key to being at the forefront of understanding what the mortgage industry’s future could be.
Knowing the right time to act versus wait is crucial to staying compliant and credible with both technology and process workflows.
Conversational chatbots and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) are among the most impactful in 2024. The chatbot technology uses natural language processing to comprehend and answer questions like humans. These chatbots have contributed significantly to cost savings in customer service across the industry.
RPA technology automates rule-based workflows, which is ideal for automating repeated and time-consuming tasks like auditing loan documents, inputting applicant data, and uploading files while maintaining compliance standards. RPA has improved quality, accuracy, productivity, and generated cost savings over previously manual tasks and efforts.
There are varying points of view across the industry about how much and how far to implement some of these automation tools, the key is maintaining human decisioning while allowing for automation to improve the scale, customer experience, and reduce the costs of doing business.
The environment is changing, and services are investing in technology to drive a better homeowner experience.
Industrywide, the goal is to be as nimble, compliant, and scalable as possible maintaining costs and efficiencies while always caring for customers.
