Exec believes in growth even during a tough market cycle
Andrew Badstubner accepted the offer to become chief information officer at First Community Mortgage earlier in 2022, just before the Fed raised rates and the sector’s slowdown began to accelerate.
Badstubner (pictured) didn’t hesitate to take the offer.
“I went into it with my eyes wide open on this,” he said. “In order to do what we want to do, to grow the way we want to grow, we need to restructure a lot of our foundation. In order to do that, [it is] easier at a period of lower volume than it is at a period of higher volume.”
First Community Mortgage formally announced Badstubner’s appointment as CIO on July 12. Previously, he served a similar role at NewRez and Ditech Holding Corp. First Community Mortgage employs roughly 500 people and is a wholly owned subsidiary of First Community Bank of Tennessee. It funded nearly $3.5 billion in home loans in 2021, though the number could dip in 2022 with the market slowdown.
Read more: First Community Mortgage names new chief information officer
Badstubner was brought on board to help enact transformational digital change, First Community Mortgage President Dan Smith said when the lender announced his hiring.
His “expertise in transformational digital change promotes exponential organizational growth by providing engagement experiences that are fast, easy and accurate to all stakeholders,” Smith said in prepared remarks as part of the announcement.
Smith added that Badstubner “is an exceptional leader with great strategic vision” and that having those skills “allows him to optimize efficiencies and connect all of our businesses’ complex process activities into a seamless end to end experience.”
Translated, Badstubner will help streamline First Community Mortgage’s processes, boost efficiency, and accelerate innovation.
Growth and the job description
Badstubner credited First Community Mortgage with focusing on growth, even in difficult market conditions, and he said the approach will inform his mission.
“FCM is in a fairly unique category among mortgage companies these days in that our ambition is to grow, notwithstanding the current market conditions, and so my mandate is to provide the foundation upon which that growth will be built,” Badstubner said. “Obviously, I am looking at it from a technology perspective.”
Badstubner said that he will pursue that growth in a number of ways.
“We need to provide a platform that scales as we add more people to the teams. In this kind of environment, the way you scale is by adding to your salesforce, and so number one, we need to provide an environment that scales to support that additional weight,” he explained.
The other focus, he said, will be on the strategic use of automation.
“Next [on the list] is to provide automation opportunities for our internal users so we have a lot of efficiency,” Badstubner said. “We can really leverage the technology investments we’ve made and then extend that improved experience to our customers or borrowers so they can have the advance of a better technology.”
‘Where we are right now’
First Community Mortgage already has technology that is “pretty good for where we are right now,” according to Badstubner. Tech improvements and a broader transformation will move the needle even more, he said.
“We intend to grow pretty significantly over the next couple of years, and … we need – like almost every mortgage company right now – better efficiencies on the back end of the house,” he explained. But recent customer facing technology advances will also be part of the equation.
“We do think that there’s a couple of areas where in the last 18 months, there’s been some significant innovation in the marketplace, and we’d like to capitalize on that great customer experience,” Badstubner said.
That means building on what the company already has.
“I’m really proud of our customer experience. We have an online mortgage application, which is pretty standard, and we have a mobile app where you can apply for a mortgage,” he noted. “But we aren’t taking advantage of some of the more recent innovations in terms of automated income asset and employment verification, for example. We want to be able to capture that upfront with our customers in a digital way rather than having them upload documents.”
Badstubner pointed out that each time the company can integrate with a partner to get data, that translates into “one less document that our customers need to upload as part of the application process.”
Downturn versus improvements
He observed that some mortgage lenders struggling to sustain themselves, and others are “hunkering down” and waiting for the slowdown to pass. He said First Community Mortgage hopes to be in a third category, where companies are using the downturn to innovate and prepare for the next upturn.
Read next: First Community Mortgage secures major acquisition
Like most lenders, the company has had recent layoffs, but Badstubner stressed it was important to prepare for the future.
“We are making investments that are necessary to lay the proper foundation for scale, automation, efficiency and growth,” he said.
That can ultimately mean new staff positions, particularly in specific areas, such as recent hires for the technology team.
“We’re being very selective about these new jobs,” Badstubner said. “Where we need the jobs in order to build automation, or to build platforms and support platforms that allow the scale – we will add [positions] in those cases.”
