I learned to fly a number of years ago, and spend as much time in the air as possible. My favorite days aloft are those that pilots refer to as ‘severe clear,’ where visibility seems practically limitless. In the Midwestern flatlands, there’s not much sticking up off the ground. A little hill here, a smokestack there, or the nuclear power plant that’s fifty-plus miles south of where I live. The days the power plant is visible are the clearest of all.
I am a self-confessed mortgage lending technology geek, so I got to thinking about the “severe clear” concept in our business. What is severe clear to me is comprehensive, rules-based, workflow-driven technology – not technologies – that guides a loan from application through closing and funding, including documents. This is an absolute necessity because severe clarity is what every participant in the mortgage process demands these days. We older mortgage bankers grew up in the opaque era. It wasn’t that we did not want to share details of the mortgage process with our borrowers, investors and regulators; the fact was, we could not. The technologies of the time made it impossible.
The distinction between technology, singular, and technologies, plural, is a distinction with a difference. During the opaque era we employed all kinds of technologies to get a loan from application to closing, including Wite-Out. Remember that stuff? Back then, no mortgage operation could possibly survive without it. Nor could we get a borrower to the closing table without a messy conglomeration of low-tech tools which, by the way, we were happy to have at our disposal.
Technology as a singular noun, though, means just that: one comprehensive technology where the borrower makes their own application online, if they desire. This is the same technology the lender uses to process, underwrite, close, fund and deliver the loan. The benefit is clarity. The data upon which the loan is built is never in question. It is also visible to the entire lending team, as well as the borrower, throughout the process.
Clarity, or visibility, for the borrower is very important today, as well. Twenty or thirty years ago borrowers cared far less about the making of a mortgage than the getting of a mortgage. As was true with so many things 20 and 30 years ago, borrowers were not supposed to know how things happened, only that they did happen. Today’s homebuyers and refinancers are of a different mind: they demand to know how things work and to see how things happen. Comprehensive technology today supports both this level of transparency and the terrific borrower experience that successful lenders simply must provide.
Providing a great borrower experience is one excellent reason to move to a single mortgage lending technology. Compliance is another. The multiple data sets connected to the use of multiple technologies provide for only marginal clarity. The parallel to flying on a severe clear day versus a marginal one is the difference between seeing forever versus seeing about five miles.
When you’re covering a mile of ground every thirty seconds, five miles’ visibility isn’t much. Limited visibility is what you get when attempting to work with a loan that’s built on multiple data sets, especially when the goal is getting the borrower to the closing table quickly. Limited visibility also makes figuring out how to comply with today’s rules much more difficult.
The last day of autumn this year was a severe clear day. The last day of the season in this part of the country almost always is. We flew that afternoon, and, as we leveled off heading south the power plant was right where it was supposed to be, fifty miles in the distance. In flying and in business, severe clear is a wonderful thing.