A Digital Mortgage Technology Buyer's Guide

With the digitization of modern life, consumers have come to expect the same kind of real-time response and control from mortgage companies as they have experienced in other aspects of their lives. As a result of pervasive services like two-day or even same-day delivery from Amazon Prime, TV On Demand and made-to-order Nikes, consumers expect underwriters to process loans and communicate with them in a similarly personalized, real-time way. The digitized mortgage experience becomes even more challenging when you consider that 57 percent of customers combine online mortgage applications with in-person interactions.

In response, traditional mortgage originators are transitioning legacy processes to compete with the game-changing speed of born-digital disruptors like Rocket Mortgage and Better.com. Navigating this transition with a sense of urgency is doubly important since mortgage processing margins are declining and competition is intensifying. This Buyer’s Guide outlines eight criteria to help technology buyers select a smart capture technology solution that successfully bridges the digital divide – at scale – for forward-looking enterprises.

By definition, digital smart document capture systems should eliminate the manual batch capture process. They should eliminate keying from image, barcoded separator sheets and patch-to-cover sheets. But the most sophisticated smart capture solutions should also employ supervised machine learning, a type of trainable AI, to automatically identify, classify, separate and organize loans faster and more accurately than any human. In fact, customers report processing times that are more than 20 times faster than the speed of manual human classification—and with an 80 percent or higher accuracy rate resulting in faster loan approvals and reduced time-to-close.

Manual data entry is tedious, mind-numbing work. Look for a system that uses multiple extraction techniques, instead of settling for outdated location-specific zonal OCR coordinates. Rather than using a pre-determined template for every document, which can take months to define, there is now technology that scans the entire page using keyword search – a relational database select statement. Intelligent document capture uses rules, scripts and techniques such as fixed form extraction, table extraction, database lookups and FuzzyDB extraction to enhance OCR. Using multiple ways to read and extract the data can then learn to find indexes of interest wherever they are located on a document.

Selecting an enterprise-level smart document capture technology requires a system that can scale in both capability and capacity – up and down – to meet changing economic trends, SLA and performance requirements. Unlimited processing capability speaks to the hundreds of different documents a sophisticated smart document capture system can learn to recognize automatically. Capacity speaks to the ability to add or subtract servers as needed or utilize the cloud.

Whereas industry-specific document capture solutions are limited to just one functional use case such as processing loans, enterprise- wide solutions adapt to the unique needs of different document-intensive departments, including accounts payable, claims, billing, human resources, mailroom, GDPR compliance, customer onboarding, customer support, and even financial services fraud prevention like Know Your Customer (KYC) or trade finance. Choosing a document capture solution that has a broad application across the enterprise makes it possible to amortize your investment across multiple departments and to multiply your company-wide customer satisfaction scores as a result.

Since it’s hard to be certain where the future is going to take your business, you should build and evolve a best-of-breed technology stack that allows you to adapt to changing directions with your enterprise IT function. For maximum flexibility and options, companies should consider systems that support different operating systems that give you the capability to pivot one way or another without having to change enormous infrastructure and incur large development costs. Using open source architecture allows for maximum flexibility and scalability. Even the larger financial services companies are transitioning to both hybrid and cloud platforms to optimize both technology and costs.

Being able to purchase a smart document capture system on an annual subscription basis allows your finance department to recognize it as an operating expense instead of a perpetual license that is classified as a capital expense. This ultimately allows you to outperform the cost of capital on a monthly basis, generating retained earnings that you can use to fund new initiatives.

Cloud-based mortgage companies can expect to tap into more than 600 pre-trained document types, which will dramatically accelerate deployment and processing speeds. Using a system that has already learned how to read specific mortgage-related documents can expedite deployment by 80 percent, thereby allowing companies to see ROI and customer satisfaction rates quickly.

The right system should allow you to start driving efficiency immediately, which can help organizations recognize ROI in a few months. You ought to see ROI in weeks to months, not years like many legacy systems. The best solution should also allow any type of business user – not just developers or IT staff – to set up document classification and extraction rules quickly, without needing to know how to write code. The system shouldn’t require users to have special skill sets or development capabilities to implement or maintain the system. It should allow developers to be cross-trained and deliver capture tools and content solutions without having to learn a proprietary system through specialized training or hiring additional staff and incurring increased overhead.

Using the criteria listed in this guide will help your enterprise identify and select a smart document capture solution that adapts to your changing business requirements and technology environment.