Deepening customer relationships, tech push among this year's aims
Amid a changing mortgage landscape – what with rising interest rates and a consequent retreat from refinancing after a couple of record-setting years – it’s important to set oneself apart. At Citizens, continual efforts to distinguish itself in the marketplace are underfoot.
Mortgage Professional America recently interviewed Bobby Frank (pictured above), senior vice president/director of wholesale lending and Kristy Dickey (pictured below), regional manager for the Southeast, to glean insights into their focus in the midst of a mercurial market. Both were interviewed at last month’s Hall of AIME event staged in Miami.
Frank spoke of his firm’s uniqueness, which helps distinguish itself right out of the gate. “We’re the largest bank-owned wholesale lender, we take a lot of pride in that,” he said. “As a bank-owned lender, we’ve got access to certain things that a lot of independent lenders don’t.”
Programs such as:
- “We have a balance sheet jumbo product that we offer to keep in our portfolio,” Frank said. “We can be very aggressively priced there.”
- “We’re going to bring to the street a tandem HELOC that a lot of other lenders have to partner with somebody else to do that, which makes the process a little bit more complicated,” Frank added. “Since we control both the HELOC piece and the first piece, we can do that a little bit more seamlessly.”
Another focal point: “One of our biggest core missions this year is to deepen relationships inside the bank with our borrowers,” Frank said. “To be able to go to them with a student lending offer or maybe a wealth relationship discount. A lot of banks will offer, in their retail channel, a wealth discount where they’ll go to a borrower who has some money, they park it with that bank and give the borrower a discount on the rate. We can do it inside of our wholesale channel. That’s a big advantage.”
Read more: Citizens Bank launches suite of digital mortgage tools
Those distinguishing characteristics are even more acute given the dearth of bank-owned lenders overall, Frank suggested. “So there’s a lot of things we’re doing inside the bank to leverage being a bank,” he said with emphasis. “There’s really only two large banks today in wholesale lending, us and Flagstar [Bank].
“Where we are truly unique, is we are always looking for ways to offer brokers bank products, so they don’t lose that borrower that wants a complete array of banking products. It’s a work in progress, but we’re always working toward that goal.”
Dickey pointed to a technological push tailored for brokers that will manifest itself in earnest by the last quarter of this year. “It’s back to the fundamentals,” she said. “Brokers really look for three things when they’re looking at aligning themselves with a lender. They look for, of course, competitive pricing; they look for process – ease of use with something they can trust; and they also look for products. From a process and technology standpoint, we are transitioning to a new platform later this year to improve the overall technology experience for our brokers, so definitely it’s something we’re looking forward to late fourth quarter.”
Frank expounded on that front: “The new LOS [loan origination system] and broker portal is mission critical for us this year. We have a proprietary system that we’ve had for 15 years, and it’s time to sunset that and move to a new horizon, and we’re excited about that.”
Read next: Hall of AIME touted a success
The multipronged focus in distinguishing itself across the marketplace comes amid a pre-pandemic transition after the Citizens Financial Group (the Rhode Island-based parent company of Citizens Bank) acquisition of Tennessee-based Franklin American Mortgage Co. in 2018 for a reported $511 million. Before its acquisition, venerable Franklin American also distinguished itself apart from competitors as a leading private, non-bank mortgage firm – with a considerable assist by Franks.
“We’re just finally now – three and a half years into our acquisition – fully transitioning over to Citizens,” he said. “So it’s taken a while. There was great value with the name Franklin American. I’m really proud of the Franklin brand; I was there on day one to start the wholesale division. But obviously this is the new future for us, and Citizens is a $188 billion bank with so many advantages.”
Franklin American is hardly a ghostly figure or past remnant, however. The corporate culture that differentiated the company for the better part of a quarter-century has transferred over to Citizens amid complementary values, Frank suggested.
Picking up on Dickey’s ticking off the three Ps – pricing, process and products – Frank alluded to a fourth: “Even though we’re looking to a new future, we still have a lot of the same great people, and that’s a big differentiator for us as well. We’ve created a culture over a quarter of a century, and a lot of those people are still there with us who have been here 15, 20-plus years. Having that tenure and new technology is really going to give us an opportunity to advance in the future.”
It’s been said the past is prologue. At Citizens, capital invested in the future is being informed by a winning past that’s already paying off dividends.
