MBANC's CTO is head of all things technology at the mortgage lender
Desh Weragoda – chief technology officer of California-based mortgage lender MBANC – views his job these days as all about being nimble and embracing change.
“We are constantly adapting,” Weragoda (pictured) said. “It’s a very dynamic environment. Back in the early 2000s you had technologies that [could] hold for 5-10 years, but you can’t do that anymore. It is changing constantly.”
MBANC is a specialized mortgage lender for self-employed business owners and investors. The company and its 35 employees also help individuals with cryptocurrency qualify for a mortgage. As a managing partner and CTO, Weragoda’s responsibilities cover a wide range of activities.
“I run all systems, marketing and software, anything related to our technology at our company,” Weragoda said.
That mandate covers a wide range of duties, including leading efforts to design and maintain the company’s external and internal web, print and social media platforms – to name but a few.
Additionally, he oversees IT strategic and operational planning, focusing on innovation, prioritizing IT initiatives, and evaluating and managing current systems and future IT system needs, according to the company.
Weragoda said his main objective as CTO translates broadly.
“I make the process as it relates to the borrower and lender [simpler] through technology,” he said.
Quickening rate of change
Being on top of those needs as CTO requires much more attention than in the past because technology is evolving so much, Weragoda explained. He illustrated the point with an anecdote about stacks – “toolboxes” of programming languages and software used by developers.
“[If] I ask the developer, ‘what’s your stack?’ there will be [a response] of C# [sharp], Node.js, HTML, CSS from Java[Script], maybe some jQuery, things like that,” Weragoda said. “There are so many different languages coming out and so many variations of it [so it’s] really hard to keep it up. Just in the front-end space, there are so many front-end languages that I need to find somebody that has X amount of experience in [a] specific language.”
Potential developers may insist that their knowledge is current, but they could just as easily confront a new programming language, Weragoda added.
Read next: Reali eyes national expansion after 2022
General software updates must be addressed every six months or so, but MBANC is even more regularly focused on its user interface.
“The user interface is definitely something that’s done on a monthly basis,” Weragoda said. “Websites now, they can’t just be informative. They have to provide utility, meaning they have to give you something that they can perform out there.”
As CTO, Weragoda said every technology choice must be thought through on multiple levels.
“Everything we do now is really taken into account in terms of technology and how we use it and how we implement it,” Weragoda said. “Even things like our website, our software – our loan origination software [LOS] – we have to constantly update… monthly or every six months.”
Read the potential benefits of using a loan origination software.
As well, he makes sure MBANC adapts to regular search engine and social media changes.
CTO and privacy
MBANC, in part, automates its initial web site communication with customers, along with other processes, and customers can interact and fill out their applications via smartphone or desktop. The approach is “software-as-an-app.”
“Our loan application allows… the borrower and the loan officer to be on the same page at the same time and see each other working,” Weragoda said.
That means a customer or loan officer can immediately tell each other via chat if they’re stuck, and then work together on their application. As Weragoda and his team work on evolving and improving the system, however, he is deeply focused on privacy concerns.
“It’s one of the things we have to do so it’s a conundrum,” Weragoda said. “In order to make the loan process or just the process in general [simpler] per borrower, we need certain information.”
Read next: Vesta mortgage loan origination platform uses lots of TLC
On the one hand, consumers might be asked to give perhaps three pieces of information – details Weragoda said would allow a company to “pull a lot of data in” to reduce the time an application takes to fill out. That presents its own problems, however.
MBANC is currently testing a switch from an “input method” to a “validation method” for its Form 1003 universal residential loan application form. This would potentially require customers to give first and last name, street address, or the last four digits of their social security numbers – data that would allow a company to automatically populate about 80% of the form before a customer verifies everything is in order with a few clicks of a button.
The plus is this would reduce form fill-out time from about an hour to 15 minutes, Weragoda said. But security concerns must be worked out first.
“You could have someone that’s very similar. They could enter a name or number and all of a sudden [the system is] prepopulating data of somebody else,” Weragoda said. “The other side of it is, do people want to really give up this kind of information… so that we can make their experience more seamless and easier?”
Weragoda said the end goal will be to put safeguards in place so privacy issues don’t crop up. Potential questions to address: Will there be a double verification process? How about a security question that only the specific applicant would know?
These are some of the many issues Weragoda continues to focus on in his ever evolving and fast-moving job as CTO.
