Rakhi Madan spends about three hours on paperwork per file—and that’s using her office's mostly paperless, secure cloud portal
Rakhi Madan spends about three hours on paperwork per file—and that’s using her office’s mostly paperless, secure cloud portal.
“It depends on file to file, but I’d say it’s a minimum of three hours,” said the DLC Key Mortgage Partners broker. “Most clients will move money from account to account and you need to show the audit trail of where the money is moved from. If there are gift deposits, you need to show where the gift money is coming from. Clients don’t do this every day like we do, so there are a lot of mistakes on their part and there’s lot of back and forth.”
The mortgage industry has not yet gone completely paperless, but according to an industry veteran, brokers will become vastly more efficient when it does.
“Going paperless is an important milestone for our industry,” said Jason Henneberry, president of Tango Financial. “It’s the foundational step that will give our channel an edge and help us win market share now and into the future.”
Henneberry estimates brokers spend half of their time on a file managing paper, analyzing and transferring the information into application systems, and then uploading documentation to lenders. However, a small investment in technology could save the industry hundreds of thousands of hours, he believes.
“Just imagine how we could grow our collective market share if we gave brokers back even a fraction of that time to spend on more productive activities,” he said. “We need to be investing in this type of technology now if our channel is going to compete in the future. Clients expect the mortgage process to be easier, and going paperless provides a real opportunity to enhance our professionalism and create more customer-centric processes.”
The technology would doubtless provide brokers better business tools, not only contenting their clientele but also potentially enhancing fraud verification and cost efficiencies with lenders. Henneberry adds that the groundwork has already been laid.
“Advancement in OCR character recognition and other technologies are at a point where clients can complete an application simply by taking pictures of their documents,” said Henneberry. “The system would read the images, make sense of the info and populate the application for the broker. Such a system would communicate with other tools, like LenderSpotlight, which helps the broker make product recommendations based on the client profile and application. All of this would happen in seconds and completely free the broker up to focus their energy on managing the client experience and growing their business.”
