More Than an Ordinary Pricing Engine: Bruce Backer Talks About How Loan Professionals Use LoanSifter to Compete and Grow Business How are you finding the mortgage industry these days? It?s been surprisingly good for us ? and I think that is attributable to a couple of different factors. First, we?ve witnessed banks, mortgage brokers and brokers tightening their belts and looking for new revenue streams, which is very good for our business given our value in keeping prices low and features rich. Secondly, our customers have been significantly growing their businesses on the whole, which in turn, has brought more success our way. Much of this is attributable to our product?s marketing and pipeline capabilities, which helps draw more business. To what would you attribute your success? LoanSifter?s philosophy is find ways to make our clients? sales strategy more effective. In the end, we both reap tremendous rewards. We design our system around maximizing pull-through on every opportunity, providing cost-effective marketing tools and greatly simplifying complex issues so every loan officer can immediately benefit from these tools by enhancing and maintaining their pipeline ? from prospecting all the way through close. That sounds unusual coming from a pricing engine. We?re much more than a pricing engine. The majority of PPEs focus exclusively on pricing. LoanSifter, however, offers advanced tools automating the time-consuming and cumbersome aspects of tracking loan scenarios, monitoring funded loans for re-fi opportunities and communicating with borrowers and lead generators. We help banks, mortgage brokers and brokers step along the borrower relationship continuum, providing real-time data on rates and pricing from approved lenders, ensuring the best rate for the borrower and the best profit scenario for the loan professional. But make no mistake ? LoanSifter is extremely serious about our pricing thoroughness and flexibility at the foundation of our product. We offer flexible pricing capabilities to precisely support all risk-based pricing, regional pricing, SRPs, incentives, internal margins, and branch-specific pricing. By maintaining thousands of accurate, intraday rate sheets across over 120 investors, we have, by far, the largest secondary database in the industry. To compete effectively in this market going forward, including the fact that consumers are now more involved in the interactions than ever before, we believe much more should be expected and delivered. And that?s precisely what we do. So how does LoanSifter help maximize pull-through? LoanSifter gives instant, accurate answers throughout the initial prospecting call and beyond. The speed and thoroughness with which a loan officer is able to quote a rate gives borrowers a lot of confidence in the loan officer, while really getting a full picture of the best strategies and offerings at that moment in time. The additional features allow the loan officer to be informed on market changes, automatically, so they can more easily monitor their pipeline for target rates and communicate more readily and consistently with ongoing marketing campaigns. Pipeline monitoring? Can you explain further? Yes. LoanSifter has spearheaded the innovation behind rate monitoring. When a prospect first enters the system, there are several programs to consider and multiple products for each program. We immediately begin real-time re-pricing of each scenario for every prospect, and can optionally alert the borrower or loan officer when preset conditions are met. The loan officer can watch their entire portfolio of prospects, floating and locked deals. By loading their entire database of past clients, they?re able to harness the re-pricing power by mining all of their closed loans as the re-fi opportunities present themselves. Tell me more about these marketing tools. LoanSifter is a very affordable and effective marketing vehicle, keeping old and new prospects aware of their latest pricing through monitoring and email campaigns, bolstering third-party referrals and automating the production of marketing materials, like open house flyers. Many of our clients are having tremendous success using our automated pricing features to support online lead generation through sites like Zillow and LendingTree. Our website tools are designed to entice and capture prospects through your own websites. And how do you capture these website leads? We offer a series of affordable, powerful tools that can be placed on any website with a simple cut and paste, and do not require ongoing maintenance. Consumers are savvier about the mortgage-shopping process and expect these capabilities from your websites or they will look elsewhere where they can shop without hassle or pressure. To maximize exposure, you can post your real-time ?par? rates across multiple products and points to grab their attention from the home page. From there, you can capture the lead by offering real-time pricing of their exact scenario and the ability to ?track? their rates. What platforms are you integrated with? LoanSifter has already integrated with leading LOS and CRM systems, such as Calyx Point, Byte Software BytePro, Leads360, LeadMailbox, and MortgageDashboard. We?ve kicked off integration with most of the other leading banking and broker platforms; Ellie Mae Encompass Banker and Broker editions to be released later this second quarter. We are very open to new integration partnerships, including custom integrations for larger clients. What if a loan officer?s company uses a different LOS, CRM, or has their own pricing solution? Interestingly, there is a significant number of loan officers who are given prepaid access to a competing pricing system provided by their company but are still finding value in purchasing LoanSifter out of their own pockets instead of, or in addition to, what their companies offer. Many of our clients were using an LOS that we hadn?t integrated with and it didn?t slow our progress, though we recognize the value. So integrating with their preferred systems adds icing to the cake. LoanSifter recently launched its latest product iteration. Tell us about version 3.0 and what new tools and features are available to loan professionals. Perhaps the most anticipated update has been to our email campaign manager, which now enables the loan professional to pull from saved scenarios, making the email creation even faster and easier. For companies with a secondary focus, we offer the Lock Desk feature. The loan professional prices a deal, selects the lender, enters a file number and attaches documents. The information is sent directly to their lock desk. From within LoanSifter, the secondary team is able to track deals, view the details, deal points and even run current pricing, or go directly to the lender?s site. They can review and send notes, which will also be sent as emails directly to the loan officer, so they can manage their locked loans even when they?re away from the office. We?ve also upgraded the consumer-facing features, including the Consumer Portal and Today?s Rates, made available through loan officer and financial institution websites. And another feature is our new Contact Manager. With this, the loan professional can select a borrower ? then enter in their basic contact information. They can review the loan details and place them in a specific contact group and even add notes. And soon, our customers will be able to upload contacts directly from an Excel file, which means they?ll be able to pull from other email programs, databases and LOS systems. How can loan professionals learn more? We have a wealth of information and comprehensive demos available at www.LoanSifter.com. Also, if loan professionals wish to have a more detailed conversation regarding our tools and the value we offer, they may call us at 920.687.1222 or email [email protected].
