Transforming technology for improved home loan underwriting and loan approvals

Challenge

Our client wanted to address challenges in four areas to improve its business processes. Implementing the four projects with a single technology partner was a clear indicator of the client’s confidence in Marlabs to engineer critical technological transformation. The four challenges included:

1. Understanding and controlling the journey of existing mortgage holders while measuring channel and campaign effectiveness. To meet these goals, an antiquated marketing solution used by the client had to be modernized, along with providing the ability to see subscriber activity beyond email impressions.
2. Monolithic and homegrown origination platform with challenges in scalability and maintenance. To re-architect the platform, the client needed to standardize its integration with banks and other partners, optimize redundant processes, and tighten operations.
3. Improving web and mobile app development for lending and CRM. The client’s goal was to accelerate development and QA for mission-critical applications and extract business insights from application data.
4. Automation of underwriting using two systems. The client wanted to run two underwriting systems simultaneously. It needed the processes that could achieve this.

Solution

The Marlabs team of 45 fintech specialists used Salesforce, Angular, H2O.ai, ServiceNow, and Okta as the key technologies to deliver the transformation over four years.

1. Understanding and controlling the journey of existing mortgage holders while measuring channel and campaign effectiveness—Salesforce product Audience Studio was implemented to decrease advertising spend, Marketing Cloud was implemented to improve the speed of campaign creation, and Service Cloud was used to provide a single view of the customer. Other technologies implemented included: Contact Builder for data modeling, Automation Studio for segmenting subscribers, Email Studio for creating compelling and personalized content at scale, and Einstein Send time optimizations, Einstein Engagement Frequency, and Scoring to understand subscriber behavior. These solutions were implemented in four phases:

• Phase 1: A minimum viable solution was created for one client BU. IP warming established trust in the client’s identity, increasing the chances of getting email delivered to the target prospect/subscriber’s mailbox. Four customer journeys were implemented that required the integration of Salesforce CRM to Marketing Cloud and the client’s lending platform.
• Phase 2: Marketing Cloud was maintained and expanded with over 15 customer journeys and 20 email campaigns supported by 100+ email templates updated monthly.
• Phase 3: Journeys Mobile Studio and Salesforce Audience Studio were implemented to track subscriber journeys beyond emails. Key 1st-party data collection from SSO advertising, SMS opt-ins, and 1st-party web pages (Mortgage Applications, Calculators, Customer Maintenance) was enabled.
• Phase 4: Six additional customer journeys were implemented for four BUs. 2nd and 3rd-party Acxiom data related to subscriber activity outside the client was added to the journeys data.

2. Monolithic and homegrown origination platform with challenges in scalability and maintenance—Re-architecting the origination platform from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model. Marlabs brought a modular approach toward modernizing the client’s mission-critical loan and mortgage management application. We also implemented process optimization initiatives to streamline and increase productivity by setting up Azure DevOps/CICD for release management and automation of end-to-end business scenarios in retail, wholesale, and DTC (direct-to-customer).

3. Improving web and mobile app development for lending and CRM—Marlabs conducted a thorough system-appreciation engagement and designed a roadmap to re-engineer the client’s customer-facing functions. The UI/UX was enhanced, a web-based microservices-driven architecture integrated through secure APIs was implemented, code reusability was introduced, code reliability was increased, the existing mobile application was enhanced, and tools such as Crystal Reports, Tableau, and spreadsheets were used to prepare BI reports from large volumes of data.

4. Automation of underwriting using two systems—Marlabs automated the client’s loan origination process, implemented workflow automation of underwriter activities, and enabled end-to-end process optimization and API automation. The technologies used to drive these changes and develop a system to run DU and LP systems simultaneously included ASP.Net, C#.Net, MS SQL Server 2012, Angular 7, JavaScript, and Bootstrap.

Results

With the transformed systems, the client is better positioned to meet its goal of providing a successful path of homeownership to everyone while meeting its cost-containment goals.

Impact

• Accelerated loan underwriting and approval processes
• Reduced operational costs through automation
• Improved accuracy and consistency in decision-making
• Enhanced data visibility across the lending lifecycle
• Increased customer satisfaction with faster turnaround times