TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
Issue link: http://digital.themreport.com/i/687963
22 | TH E M R EP O RT FEATURE W ith stable interest rates and increases in housing starts and home sales, a healthy mortgage market is to be expected this year. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), originations for one to four-family homes are projected to total $1.48 trillion in 2016. With the rise of homeownership comes the desire of originators to improve the customer experience. Banks are constantly looking to improve the speed, efficiency, security and simplicity of their processes, especially in a competitive loan origination environment. Coupled with escalating costs and changing government regulations, the name of the game is to cut where you can. TowerGroup, a financial services IT research firm, recently reported that a mortgage asset can only deliver on its potential "if financial institutions can leverage their technology systems to improve mortgage customer retention rates and cross-sell other financial products." That's much easier said than done. Bank IT systems are generally old and their mortgage origination processes even older. But there are a chosen few that are wising up. One way some banks are boosting operations through improved tech - nology is by cutting down on the use of paper, or eliminating it altogether. At the Housing Industry Forum in September 2014, James Grizzle, who chaired the Fannie Mae CIO Innovation Challenge Team on Data Quality, talked about how mortgages were one of the few processes in origination that are driven by paper. "Paper should be the product (of that process), not the driver," he said. Paper, Rock, Scissors Banks Playing a Game of Chance? Or Will They Cut Paper Costs to Be More Competitive and Compliant? By Chris Strammiello