TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
Issue link: http://digital.themreport.com/i/152295
Feature Welcome to the Age of Consumer Experience The CFPB's growing interest in consumer data will push financial institutions and their technology providers to come together even more closely to create experiences that empower the consumer to navigate the mortgage process with complete information and confidence. By Alec Cheung, VP of Product Management and Marketing for eLynx T echnology providers have long focused on the nuances of document-related workflows. As applied in the financial services industry, loan documents have been able to expertly move from point A to point B all while tightly adhering to the regulations and process needs of different parties in the transaction. Soon, however, one element in this workflow—the consumer experience—will no longer be a nice-to-have, but a specified requirement. For the last two years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been actively gathering feedback from consumers. With more than 50 percent of the feedback involving negative experiences with their mortgage process, the CFPB has now turned to technology providers to better understand what's working and what's not. The CFPB no longer wants to simply know the general mechanics of technology solutions, like whether they have electronic signature capabilities. Today, they 24 | The M Report are actively investigating how and where technology solutions can empower a consumer's ability to learn and understand an extremely complex mortgage process. Seeking a Better Understanding T his represents a fundamental shift in the focus and functionality of today's technology offerings. Most solutions today enable more efficient and cost-effective collaboration between the financial insti- tution and their consumers, and the better ones have transactional metrics to back up those claims. Still, very few provide data that can help improve the experiential side of the interaction. Specifically, the CFPB has been looking into demographic information, electronic adoption metrics, and document consumption trends. The bureau is keenly interested in: ••How much time consumers are spending in documents. ••What terms they struggle with. ••Which parts of the process present the largest roadblocks to electronic adoption. ••Any demographic-based variations in these results. Welcome to the New Era N ow that consumers have a highly visible place to voice opinions, the floodgates are starting to open. The data coming from the CFPB and other sources show that what is available to consumers today for their mortgage experience isn't enough. According to a recent study by Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group, 80 percent of 618 surveyed consumers would consider purchasing a mortgage from a non-bank. Respondents revealed frustrations with slow processing, communication difficulties with their financial institutions, and an inability to track their loan status as top aggravations. Furthermore, lending organizations are falling behind industry peers in delivering a positive consumer experience, according to Foresee's "Financial Services Benchmark" study. Consumer experience data across different financial services organizations' online and mobile websites, as well as mobile applications, was compiled, and satisfaction scores were provided across a 100-point scale. Scores of 80 and higher were classified as "highly satisfied." Scores of 69 and lower were classified as "dissatisfied." The industry's average score was 72; however, lending organizations scored an industry-low 69 points.