My company has been on a quest to transform the mortgage process so that consumers can do the whole thing from a smartphone. That’s a tall order, but it’s what is required to stay ahead these days. As we looked out into our market to see how our competitors were doing, we also took a look adjacent to it and discovered some surprisingly good thinking.
Here are three places where we found ideas:
1. Online lending marketplaces. Crowdsourced lending has become a movement recently, and companies like Lending Club are making the most of it. What could we learn from them? The primary thing we’ve found is that the user, the consumer, is in control and driving the process, and there is no immediate need to get someone on the phone.
2. Payday lenders. Payday lenders are using some interesting technologies, especially in mobile. Taking a mobile-first mindset is something that the mortgage industry is still grappling with – and I’m not talking about building another mobile app. I applied using my phone on one lender’s mobile site, and they pre-populated a lot of data, ran credit, and approved me for a loan in just a few minutes.
3. Consumer financial applications. Applications like Mint.com allow you to log in and have a lot of sensitive data pulled in securely. You offer up large amounts of the same kind of data in a mortgage application process, so why not allow that to happen purely online? Why not give consumers a plug-in they can use to log into their bank account and let us pull in their current balances and recent statements rather than asking for pieces of that in a multi-step process? Currently, people have to go to a copy shop or scan in their statements, but how do you know that the images of those bank statements are getting wiped from the hard drive when you leave?
So many financial transactions are unrecognizable today compared to five years ago. I believe the same is true of the mortgage application process. If looking out across other financial industry segments helps new thinking to flourish, why not get ahead of the game?
