Technology allows a wholesaler to rate its loan officers using metrics that show who provides it with the most valuable loans.
Paramount Residential Mortgage Group was looking for a way to make its operations more performance-based and needed a system to do the measuring. So the Corona, Calif.-based wholesaler created PRMG IQ, which allows it to rank how its brokers perform based on metrics that measure the most valuable loans. It also gets real-time information allowing it to deliver a higher level of service to its brokers.
PRMG IQ is actually a customized version of Movation, a business management platform developed by Motivity Solutions. Gabe Minton, chief strategy officer for the Greenwood Village, Colo., firm, said business intelligence platforms like Movation allows firms to connect any and all of its data sources, aggregate and display the data in a visually appealing way and in an accessible way.
"The idea is to move away from 30- and 60-page reports that you get biweekly. [Instead, there is] a dashboard on your Web browser that [is] instantaneous and it shows information across your different systems of record instead of being confined to only one," he explained.
PRMG IQ allows Paramount to scorecard its mortgage brokers' performance. "We wanted to change our culture to be more performance based and simplify our business by being confident that we knew where our business stood, as opposed to just thinking that we knew," said Paul Rozo, chief executive and president of the mortgage banker.
He added that in the past two years, the measure of a top-performing broker has changed from one which provided the wholesaler with a lot of volume. Now loan quality counts as much as loan quantity and PRMG IQ allows Paramount to measure loan quality.
Minton explained this includes scorecarding the mortgage broker's performance, comparing each to his or her peers. The dashboard allows the user to see instantly how each broker is performing against the set goals.
Incentive plans can be set up using this system. Users can also use it to quantify reasons to terminate relationships "based on abysmal performance," because the broker does not meet the goals, he noted.
Besides Paramount, Sierra Pacific Mortgage, Folsom, Calif., is another wholesaler that is using Movation to create a broker performance scorecard.
Motivity's executive vice president, sales, Lisa Springer, said the company was able to configure Movation in one week for Sierra Pacific. Motivity concentrates on the entire business rather than just on the manufacture of a mortgage loan.
When asked if in today's environment wholesalers need to be proactive in managing their broker relationships for performance, Minton said "proactive" is a key word. Wholesalers need to be proactive in managing quality they are getting out of their sources, managing production they are getting out of their sources and ultimately doing more with less and optimizing what they already have, he said.
Lenders do not have to spend a lot of money to deploy a new system. This information is available in their existing systems. Movation allows lenders to pull that information out of their existing systems, Minton said.
A retail mortgage banking customer put Movation on top of its existing systems. When they started to examine the data, Minton said they found they had problems inside of their operations group.
The average number of days the operations group was taking to work on a loan file was higher than the corporate goal which had been established.
Using Movation, they were able to drill into the data even further and saw how individual departments and personnel in the group were performing. The company was also able to see how Federal Housing Administration-insured loan applications were performing compared with conforming loan applications.
This information enabled the company to pinpoint who was taking longer than others. The company, Minton said, was able to sit down and find out what the issues were. FHA loans were taking longer to originate because not all the personnel were trained in the product and all of the story loans were going to one person. So the mortgage company was able to make adjustments to the process inside of its organization.
In the debriefing process with Motivity, the company revealed its prior reports had just given departmental data on a biweekly basis.
Business intelligence software and dashboarding, he said, enabled the company to see the issue it was missing in its previous reporting and adjust its business and process flow accordingly.
It was not that the old reports didn't have this information, Minton explained, but it was that those reports were multipage grids that made it hard to get at the data. "Our software tries to pull that data out and deliver it to you on screen," he said.
Another client noted that Motivity allowed 30 reports to be collapsed down to a single dashboard, enabling the customer to find the proverbial "needle in the haystack."
It does not only give the user a different view of the data but the system also makes calculations as well. So it takes the raw data and does analysis.
The name of the product, Movation, is a shorting of the term "mortgage innovation," Minton said. Most of Motivity's customers are mortgage companies, but not all of them are. One firm is a health care technology provider. It is interested in tracking search topics on its website.
There is one mortgage banking customer using Movation to develop metrics on its servicing portfolio performance.
Movation works with any loan origination system. And, he said, because it plugs into SQL (a database language) there is no interface needed for dashboarding and reporting.
However, to use the workflow or other modules, the system will have to be integrated into the LOS.
There are 10 to 12 customers for Movation right now and interest is growing.
Minton added the company's owners and management team believe in culture-changing technology and allowing customers to look at data in new ways. The system allows for "actionable business intelligence" in real time, rather than looking at a report that describes something which happened in the previous month.
