When Noel Watts, the vice president of mortgage banking at Marshall & Ilsley Bank, set out to upgrade the lender's origination platform two years ago, he expected interest rates to rise and mortgage volume to plummet.
The opposite happened.
Rates dropped and volume jumped as Watts embarked on six different simultaneous technology projects. It was a juggling act, but one that the $49 billion-asset bank, a unit of Marshall & Ilsley Corp. of Milwaukee, says has begun to pay off.
"We were doing everything we could to free up the loan officers' time so they could focus on sales," Watts said. "We knew at some point rates would rise, which would increase our need to prospect and secure purchase business."
With interest rates dipping again, this time around the bank's loan officers can promise customers that a loan will close in as little as 28 days on average, compared with 45 days to 60 days on average before the upgrades.
"We went from being the Flintstones to the Jetsons," said Julie Joseforsky, senior vice president of retail lending and collections at M&I. "All of it was done in the thick of the refinance boom."
To streamline the application process, the bank invested in a point of sale system from Wipro Gallagher Solutions Inc. and added a consumer Web portal from MortgageBot. Watts estimated that these two system changes alone eliminated 3,256 hours of nonsales activity, or 22 hours per mortgage banker a year.
More problematic were the disclosures (and redisclosures) that the bank had to mail to customers to comply with the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act rules that took effect in January 2010.
The RESPA regulatory requirements created a huge back-office workload that required eight full-time employees to send disclosures and redisclosures to customers because of changes to the good-faith estimate. M&I's lending unit outsourced the process to Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, which allowed the bank to reassign most of the staff who had previously mailed out disclosures to other duties, he said.
Finally, the bank invested in OnBase, a paperless imaging system from Hyland Software, that allows bankers to view documents at the same underwriters view them.
Watts said the technology changes have given loan officers at the bank's roughly 300 branches more time to focus on sales.
"When your job is to prospect all day and there are activities that take away from that, you're going to hear about it," Joseforsky said.
