FICS President and COO Susan Graham sat down with MPA to talk about the future of the company as well as tech trends for the mortgage industry
As a family-owned company in the business for 34 years, Financial Industry Computer Systems (FICS) has found a good niche, according to Susan Graham, president and COO of the company.
In addition to offering a combined origination and servicing system, FICS also provides residential and commercial servicing systems as well as ancillary products that complement its consumer-facing web applications and accounting systems.
Graham sat down with Mortgage Professional America to talk about what is in store for company
MPA: What are FICS’ plans for the next 12 and 24 months?
Susan Graham: We rolled out the last of our main systems rewrite so that we are on a third-generation system with a complete rewrite of the back ends, the programming language – and this time we went to the .NET platform and then with a WPF user interface. So we bought it, it’s much more modern, current. A lot of things you see in Microsoft products, you know their maneuverability, and so our customers don’t lose any functionality, but they gain quite a bit. We now have RSS feed live in the systems so we can easily communicate with our customers; they come and use our login. We are able to provide them up-to-date notifications, whether it’s regulatory alerts, something they should be aware of, or just whether we are highlighting something in our own system. You know, it’s a good tool for us to able to notify the users. We also have an imaging system in each of our systems, so automatically when you generate a document, or in the servicing side, if we do notices or reports, anything that you can print on paper automatically gets archived into an imaging system.
MPA: What is the future role of originators as the mortgage process becomes more technological?
SG: I think we’ve already seen a transition where loan originators don’t have all the knowledge that they used to many years ago, and part of that is because of technology and they don’t have to. I think we’re going to see more of that where they do rely on their systems to do things for them. A lot of originators are being hired in many cases with experience from another position similar to that or with another organization. Because our customers are banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies, and it really used to be the credit unions were more apt to hire non-experienced LOs, but we find now that’s really the case across the board. So they’re training them in-house and they are relying on the systems to help them do the job.
MPA: What major tech trends do you foresee coming into the mortgage space in 2018 and beyond?
SG: I think just more automation in general. With the younger generation, they’re looking for things that look great, sometimes even though they don’t perform. They are just looking for something. We’ve had a lot of tech people that are looking for one specific thing. They are not necessarily the users, but they are a generation that, they want to see all the bells and whistles. They want it to work easily. We’re striving for that, is to make it as user-friendly, all of our systems, adding all the features they are needing – whether it’s on the servicing side or on the origination side, because I think they each had different struggles.
Related stories:
Tech is changing CRE as execs weigh automation
How tech solutions are changing the face of the industry
In addition to offering a combined origination and servicing system, FICS also provides residential and commercial servicing systems as well as ancillary products that complement its consumer-facing web applications and accounting systems.
Graham sat down with Mortgage Professional America to talk about what is in store for company
MPA: What are FICS’ plans for the next 12 and 24 months?
Susan Graham: We rolled out the last of our main systems rewrite so that we are on a third-generation system with a complete rewrite of the back ends, the programming language – and this time we went to the .NET platform and then with a WPF user interface. So we bought it, it’s much more modern, current. A lot of things you see in Microsoft products, you know their maneuverability, and so our customers don’t lose any functionality, but they gain quite a bit. We now have RSS feed live in the systems so we can easily communicate with our customers; they come and use our login. We are able to provide them up-to-date notifications, whether it’s regulatory alerts, something they should be aware of, or just whether we are highlighting something in our own system. You know, it’s a good tool for us to able to notify the users. We also have an imaging system in each of our systems, so automatically when you generate a document, or in the servicing side, if we do notices or reports, anything that you can print on paper automatically gets archived into an imaging system.
MPA: What is the future role of originators as the mortgage process becomes more technological?
SG: I think we’ve already seen a transition where loan originators don’t have all the knowledge that they used to many years ago, and part of that is because of technology and they don’t have to. I think we’re going to see more of that where they do rely on their systems to do things for them. A lot of originators are being hired in many cases with experience from another position similar to that or with another organization. Because our customers are banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies, and it really used to be the credit unions were more apt to hire non-experienced LOs, but we find now that’s really the case across the board. So they’re training them in-house and they are relying on the systems to help them do the job.
MPA: What major tech trends do you foresee coming into the mortgage space in 2018 and beyond?
SG: I think just more automation in general. With the younger generation, they’re looking for things that look great, sometimes even though they don’t perform. They are just looking for something. We’ve had a lot of tech people that are looking for one specific thing. They are not necessarily the users, but they are a generation that, they want to see all the bells and whistles. They want it to work easily. We’re striving for that, is to make it as user-friendly, all of our systems, adding all the features they are needing – whether it’s on the servicing side or on the origination side, because I think they each had different struggles.
Related stories:
Tech is changing CRE as execs weigh automation
How tech solutions are changing the face of the industry
