Mortgage – Mortgage Business Leaders Focus on Leveraging Tech, Instruments, and Folks
The most recent addition to the MReport Webinar Sequence, “Leveraging Tech, Tools & People: Finding Balance in Capacity Management,” went dwell in the present day and featured insights from three mortgage business leaders.
The webinar, which was sponsored by Altisource, included Brian Simon, President of Trelix, CastleLine, and Lenders One as moderator, together with audio system Matt Clarke, CFO and COO of Churchill Mortgage, and Michael Fontaine, COO and CFO of Plaza Home Mortgage. Simon opened the dialogue by mentioning how the business’s focus has shifted because of COVID-19.
“Most executives and mortgage companies are focused far more on how they handle the workload in the volume today than they are necessarily on the efficiency, which is contradictory to most people who run mortgage companies and are extremely focused on efficiency,” Simon defined. “But, of course, we’ve lived through an environment this year where the margins are at a level almost never seen before. And rightfully so, mortgage lenders are trying to figure out how to pick up all the opportunities that are in front of them.”
Brian Simon went on to debate how lenders can enhance efficiencies, deal with elevated workloads, normalize prices, and stabilize hiring processes.
“There’s definitely going to be a reckoning with all of the costs, and we’ll see some sort of a cliff-like event, who knows when, sometime towards the end of the next year,” Simon remarked on normalizing prices. “Executives and mortgage companies and operations managers are going to have to look around and reconcile their costs with their margins at that point.”
Simon then led the dialogue of how Matt Clarke and Michael Fontaine have every approached capability administration challenges inside their firms this yr. Clarke acknowledged that offshore outsourcing and outsourcing, generally, has been a serious element of capability administration at Churchill Mortgage.
“I think one of the things that we recognize with outsourcing was it’s not a short term fix,” Clarke stated. “The strategy that we took, really ending last year going into this year, was a long term view for outsourcing as an embedded part of our business and our operations to both leverage technology available to us, and just operational resources available to us from a global perspective.”
One other main problem that the mortgage business has needed to confront this yr is expertise acquisition and coaching. This was made troublesome when mortgage industries needed to all of the sudden transition to work-from-home environments within the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The business consultants mentioned how retaining expertise in a aggressive area has been a problem.
“How do you attract talent? You attract talent with culture,” Clarke defined his method to discovering and preserving certified and succesful staff. “Attract new talent with money and you’re going to get a short term lift and a long term expense.”
One other approach during which mortgage firms have been making an effort to increase their workforces is by recruiting latest school graduates and people who are new to the mortgage business. Whereas studying the ropes of a brand new enterprise is all the time troublesome, particularly when coaching remotely, Michael Fontaine emphasised how expertise could make the coaching go easily.
“I think it boils down to recognizing that as smart as we all think we are, it’s not rocket science we do,” Fontaine stated. “There are very simple ways to document our processes, our steps, and keystrokes if you just stay focused on the ability to train people. We’ve brought in brand new folks from sales, to processing, to underwriting, to pipeline management in closing, as well as post-closing and secondary. The key, there has been that you have to commit to the training.”
Fontaine additionally echoed Clarke’s assertion on how tradition performs an essential function in retention and capability administration.
“Treating people right is how you retain them,” Fontaine stated. “It’s not all about money, it’s about the work environment, the corporate culture of the company, how they feel about the company, the management, the direction, etc. When training them, as I mentioned earlier, you’re taking people right out of school and training them into a new role, a new career. There’s a lot of opportunities for advancement.”
Because the mortgage business continues to develop, leveraging new applied sciences, constructing robust enterprise partnerships, and making an effort to create a welcoming company tradition will assist guarantee profitable growth, even in occasions of uncertainty.
