Electronic mortgage and paperless processing advocates encouraged lenders to start slow and go paperless in pieces, rather than taking on the entire task at once, during a pair of sessions at a technology conference ongoing in Las Vegas this week.
Start by picking the low-hanging fruit, explained Kelly Purcell, executive vice president at Wave eSignSystems, an e-signature and e-vault technology provider. For lenders, that could include digital delivery and e-signatures of initial disclosures. For servicers, there are e-doc opportunities with loan modifications.
“It’s really simple and it’s not that complicated if you break it down into segments,” Purcell said.
A crucial piece of a lender’s e-doc strategy is getting internal staff on board. “Old school” professionals used to paper processes have to be converted to e-docs. One way to help the transition is by giving loan officers and processors two computer monitors so it’s easier to review files without printing them out.
“You have to get people to buy in. If they don’t, they won’t use it,” said Ted Hicks, product management group director at Calyx Software.
One lender in the audience shared that after his operation switched to paperless e-mortgages, the company saw an annual savings of $80,000 from using less paper, not to mention the costs of other office supplies like paper clips, file folders and staplers. His loan officers now have dual computer monitors, but that expense was offset by the cost reduction the lender saw from getting rid of its lease agreements from copiers and fax machines, which had cost the company $35,000 every year.
Nancy Alley, vice president of product management for Xerox Mortgage Services, compared e-mortgage and paperless adoption to mixing a cocktail. The different ingredients needed include technology that facilitates intelligent collaboration from point of sale with the borrower to secondary investor sales, imaging technology for documents that still exist as paper, flexibility in electronic delivery and an e-vault for storing digitally signed-documents.
“If it’s a small drink or a big drink, you should be imbibing paperless today,” she said, adding that as new investors like correspondent lending buyers, implement their own paperless processes, lenders need to be able to react quickly. “It’s important to have the systems in place so when you’re ready to flip the switch, you can.”
