Mequon, Wis. (October 22, 2012) —With 800,000 online mortgage loan applications already submitted through September, Mortgagebot (www.Mortgagebot.com) clients have easily surpassed total annual volume of any previous year—including 2010, with their then record-breaking 725,000 applications—a sure sign of the online channel’s strategic value in the mortgage lending industry. Aided by the ongoing refinance boom—refinance application volume reached its highest level in more than three years in September—the provider of the Mortgagebot Enterprise™ end-to-end lending platform anticipates hitting the 1 million mark by year-end. Through Mortgagebot’s EnterprisePOS™, its front-end point-of-sale automation, lenders have captured applications they otherwise would not have received. Consumer traffic to Mortgagebot client websites is also steadily rising, with nearly 42 million visits year-to-date, a 6 million increase to the 36 million for 2011. Moreover, 40 percent of Mortgagebot clients, which comprise large mortgage lenders, community banks and various-sized credit unions, take more than one quarter of their mortgage applications online.
Matt Cotter, senior vice president of sales and marketing, says the momentum to offer online-application capability will only accelerate as customers continue to demand more online functionality in the application experience. “With the world becoming increasingly mobile, lenders must keep pace with borrower preferences. Borrowers view the online channel as the de facto way to conduct business,” he says. “The online channel’s strategic value to lenders means we must continually innovate to make the online-application experience as attractive and portable as possible—and Mortgagebot leads the way with superior, flexible functionality at affordable pricing to lenders. No doubt, users of “smart” online-application solutions have most successfully handled this year’s influx of applications, spurred on by historically low rates.”
Increase in Lenders with “Smart” Online-Application Capability
Mortgage lenders are quickly realizing the need to keep pace with borrower preference for conducting transactions through the online channel, and the numbers show it. Mortgagebot estimates client numbers since 2010 have increased 33 percent, from 962 to nearly 1,300. Together, the lenders handled nearly 870,000 applications year-to-date, a nearly 50 percent increase over the 600,000 applications of 2011.
The move toward adoption by both large and community lenders is no surprise considering the technology’s benefits. Using the Mortgagebot Enterprise™ platform, lenders effortlessly keep astride of federal and state compliance requirements. Software-as-a-Service technology ensures all necessary disclosures are up to date and automation immediately delivers disclosures upon a borrower’s application submission, giving them the ability to wield flexibility and the scalability to handle volume fluctuations in the mortgage industry and maintain quality control in their loan handling. Mortgagebot’s per-transaction pricing and flexibility, which allows clients to work with their preferred vendors without penalty or additional fees, add to the technology’s affordability, particularly for small lenders. Lenders failing to adopt the online solution typically incur more operational costs and risk human error and non-standardization, inevitably finding the complex regulatory requirements painstakingly difficult to handle, and ultimately bypass the efficiencies and cost-savings needed to keep pace with the new face of mortgage lending.
Consumers Drawn to Online Advantages
Accustomed to the ease of online transactions, borrowers value the high quality of service in their online-application experience. In particular, younger demographics, which grew up with the Internet, expect all the advantages of the online channel in their application experience as they take on financial responsibility and expand into the mortgage industry. In fact, consumers have largely fed lender movement toward adoption because the online channel boasts benefits unmatched by any other channel:
- Round-the-Clock Mobile Access. Consumers shop and research mortgages anywhere, anytime. With the mobile Internet overtaking consumers’ transactional activity through smartphones and tablets, the increase in interest rate searches from mobile devices has jumped more than sevenfold in two years, from about 83,231 searches in 2010 to 623,410 in 2012 year-to-date.
- Ease-of-Application. “Smart” technology ensures consumers are matched to eligible loan products and applications fully complete before submission, eliminating inefficient follow-up phone calls by loan officers. Mortgagebot generated $160 billion in applications year-to-date, about 50 percent more than the $110 billion generated in 2011.
- Portable Application. Multi-channel capability allows a borrower to apply across multiple channels—perhaps beginning the application process online and finishing it at a branch officer, through a loan officer or over the phone.
- Immediate Approval. Intuitive interface only asks applicants relevant questions so that they can fill out and submit applications through Mortgagebot EnterprisePOS™ in less than 20 minutes anytime and anywhere, and receive immediate approval.
Consumers Push for Innovation—More Online Functionality
As consumers demand more online functionality, providers of lending platforms work at the forefront of innovative technology for the online channel. Integration with third party services, for instance, has produced a superior application experience for consumers, who demand smarter features and deeper self-service enablement. Integration of Mortgagebot’s point-of-sale solution and Avista Solutions’ Agile™ loan origination system earlier this year resulted in Mortgagebot Enterprise™, the end-to-end lending platform providing a complete, uninterrupted loan-application and processing experience from origination to loan sale on the secondary market. The integrated system gives lenders online loan-application capability and automated loan processing across multiple channels in a seamless environment, as well as a 100 percent web-based all-in-one mortgage LOS with a built-in product and pricing engine and fully integrated vendor service options. Game-changing innovations such as this expand the tide of consumers who value time-savings, ease-of-use and convenience of the online channel, which in turn exerts more pressure on providers such as Mortgagebot to develop additional online functionality.
About Mortgagebot
Mortgagebot (www.Mortgagebot.com), a D+H company, provides mortgage and consumer lending technology to nearly 1,300 clients nationwide. Mortgagebot delivers the award-winning, end-to-end platform—Mortgagebot Enterprise™—as a scalable, web-based solution for lenders to maximize their lending potential and streamline all origination processes. With Mortgagebot EnterprisePOS™, lenders can automate every point-of-sale channel where business is captured: consumer-direct, branch, and loan officer, and integrate directly into the all-in-one Mortgagebot EnterpriseLOS™—for processing, closing, imaging, and secondary marketing—or to third-party loan origination systems.
Mortgagebot also offers Mortgage Marvel (www.MortgageMarvel.com), the award-winning mortgage-shopping service that delivers accurate, anonymous, real-time rate quotes in seconds from a selection of hundreds of lenders. Mortgage Marvel uniquely enables borrowers to link directly to their preferred lender—where they can complete a mortgage application and get pre-approved with fully compliant disclosures, all in about 20 minutes.
Mortgagebot and Mortgage Marvel are registered trademarks and Mortgagebot Enterprise, Mortgagebot EnterprisePOS and Mortgagebot EnterpriseLOS are trademarks of Mortgagebot LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Davis + Henderson Corporation. Other products and/or services are the property of their respective owners.