Survive the headwinds: 7 reasons to accelerate outsourcing of your mortgage post-closing

It's a perfect storm. Lower production volume and revenue with escalating production costs as stated by MBA's Marina Walsh, CMB, MBA Vice President of Industry Analysis, along with volatile interest rates and inflation, is making a tough market condition. You're experiencing reduced revenue, fixed labor costs, and inefficient document processes. Having the right number of processors to align with fluctuating loan volumes is an added challenge in scaling your costs to align with revenue. 

Mortgage originators moving toward post-closing document digitization and workflow automation can get bogged down when:

• Processes are manual and finding information is slow

• Data is stuck within physical documents and in disparate systems 

• Multiple redundant audits and quality control checks leave room for compliance errors

• Managing multiple tight salability deadlines

• Identifying the right number of knowledgeable staff to handle loan volumes

It's a complicated job. Don't do it yourself. Gartner states in their July 26, 2021 report  that organizations are outsourcing business process services to not just contain costs, but also to enable efficiency and productivity gains through improved operational optimization.* The authors go on to report that those organizations seeking to accelerate speed to market and achieve operational excellence are investing in automated and intelligent services to support and enhance responsiveness to changes in the market. 

Our experience has shown that loan originators are well-served by outsourcing this function to a reliable third party. A capable partner will provide the service team, know-how, and technology needed to deliver project success.

Benefits of Outsourcing

A partner with financial and mortgage information management expertise, coupled with a well-constructed outsourcing plan, will help loan originators accelerate a cost-effective and automated mortgage post-close process.

1. Reduce and scale opex costs. Reduce your costs in line with your revenue. Your managed service partner can quickly adapt to fluctuating loan volumes.  

2. Digitally transform your manual processes. Your partner should receive your manual documents (unstructured data) and utilize best practices to digitize, classify, and extract key information making the data "structured" enabling smart workflows.

3. Boost efficiency. By utilizing predefined and trained intelligent mortgage workflows using machine learning, your loan efficiency is quickened to achieve a salable loan.

4. Improve loan quality. With intelligent digital processes supported by a robust content management system, searching for various aspects of loan information is easily retrieved and managed. Alerts provide guidance on loan priority to meet investor delivery timelines giving you traceability and peace of mind.

5. Maintain investor and regulatory compliance. Drive quality with a proven business partner that has experienced people, processes, and technology. 

6. Support a hybrid workforce. Make better use of your talent. You decide the loan business rules and priorities. Your partner receives and processes the documents from your closing agent. Your team accesses the portal to make any curative decisions in managing the loan to completion.

7. Unlock valuable knowledge from your data. Access to informative loan status dashboards enables your team to focus on the right work. Get visibility into your data to focus on revenue-generating activities.

Finding the Right Partner

The right partner understands the complete mortgage lifecycle and has experience optimizing the post-closing process. Consider these factors when selecting a partner. 

• Access on-demand from anywhere. Use your core talent to access the portal for curative actions and final certifications. Select a partner who supports your hybrid workforce and handles digitizing, classifying, and extracting of key data from your physical or digital documents. 

• Scalability. Choose a partner that can quickly scale up or down aligning with your loan volume giving you more control over your costs. Position yourself to be more competitive in the marketplace.

• Secure data. Using roles-based access, team members should see only the data that is necessary for their role. Choose a software platform that is located in the cloud and maintains a secure environment for your data.

• Ongoing Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Using proven and trained machine learning instructions, an exception is produced only if the information does not match your business rules and triggers a human-in-the-loop (HITL) process to resolve. 

• A controlled environment. Once the physical loan documents procedure has met the investor obligations, prepare and release the custodial file to your custodian or fulfill the custodial requirements for investor delivery along with the new loan setup files. 

• Single source. Having one vendor that can do it all, from receiving the files, classifying and extracting key information, to using artificial intelligence with pre-trained mortgage workflows finding exceptions to curate. Minimize your risk with multiple automated audits, loan alerts, and dashboards to help meet your tight salability deadlines into the secondary market.

At Iron Mountain, we can store your collateral file in a private vault, ship to a third-party custodian, and shred non-collateral files. We're a single trusted source that you likely already use in other areas of your business.

Learn more about how Iron Mountain can manage and automate your mortgage post-closing process, providing you scalable costs aligned with loan volumes, an efficient process, and aid in compliance. We are a trusted partner, providing you managed services for swift loan salability into the secondary market.

*Gartner Hype Cycle for Business Process Services, 2021, published 26 July 2021 - ID G00747494 by analysts: Jaideep Thyagarajan, Alan Stanley