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Automation & technology

Building a culture of automation in an evolving marketplace

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From the series:
Culture of automation

Moving your organization toward automation is no longer a nice to have, it's necessary for survival in the mortgage industry. To provide some perspective on this seismic shift, we've engaged six top experts as guest speakers across a six-episode “Culture of Automation” mini-series.

To kick things off, we spoke with Keri Rogers, SVP, Strategic Planning at Lennar Mortgage. She covered a variety of topics with us, including:

  • Steps an organization should consider when adopting a culture of automation
  • The impact automation can have on mortgage processes, and consequently, the borrower experience
  • Recommendations for mortgage companies looking to leverage automation to help drive greater ROI, efficiencies, and compliance

Listen to each episode to find out what your path toward automation might look like.

0:03
Welcome to our open house. Instead of examining hardwood floors, closet space, and kitchen layouts, we're taking you on a tour of what's happening across today's mortgage industry. During each episode, we'll hear from industry leaders and subject matter experts to give us an inside look into a hot topic, cutting edge technology, or new trend that can help accelerate your digital journey. Thank you for joining us. Come on in.

0:27
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ice Mortgage Technology Open House Podcast. My name is Aaron Dormio, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Ice Mortgage Technology, and I'm excited to introduce you to our Culture of Automation mini podcast series. Over the next six episodes, we'll be talking to various guest speakers from Encompass customers to industry experts about their journey to automation, including what led them to automating their mortgage processes, the cultural impact internally, as well as the impact automation has.

0:56
Add on their business and borrow or experience overall. Today I'm joined by Kerry Rogers, Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Lenar Mortgage. Lenar is a fascinating case study in the mortgage automation. Their organization has layered in automation end to end from workflow automation to underwriting. I'm incredibly excited to get Kerry's perspective on building a culture of automation. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into it.

1:21
Hey, Carrie. Thanks for joining me today. Really appreciate your time. Hi, Erin. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Lenar is really such a fascinating case study about automation, just the way you guys have layered in automation and various different points within your mortgage processes. So to start off, I'd really like to talk about your process and adopting a culture of automation. If you can kind of go into really your journey and what led you into choosing automation for your business and your and your borrowers and then we'll kind of go into a little bit more detail.

1:51
I'd love to hear your story about how you began that. I think, I think it's a, it's a big question because automation, it really depends on on what we're trying to automate and and what's the reason behind why we're trying to automate and I think it's simple.

2:05
For us in general in the industry, as far as what the why, it's just really complicated. On the how, we have a simple goal. We want to automate tasks to reduce time and improve efficiencies and assist our associates to focus on the right tasks that need their skill and attention at the right time. Seems so simple, but it's actually very hard to do in our industry because a lot of the tasks that have to be executed throughout the lifecycle of a loan are complicated. They require a lot of knowledge, a lot of material and it's.

2:35
Very difficult to empower everyone with the same amount of knowledge and decision making skills to take the right action at the right time. The the why I think is simple. We all want to be more efficient. We want to get more done with less. It's easy to have this vision of of what that could could look like.

2:52
I think one of the important things about adoption in particular is is making sure that everybody in the organization understands why these types of automation processes or initiatives are important to our industry and our business. Some tasks can create a huge relief charge to our associates. Automating those tasks require balance right and transparency and they have to trust the process and and in order to get people to understand that you have to educate them and sometimes it's really, really.

3:22
Easy if it's like an obvious win for them. But a lot of other tasks that we're working on automating, it's much harder to convince adoption in certain areas, because if you automate tasks, it could threaten that you know that particular associates or that particular users.

3:40
Control. Sometimes they have to give up control, and that's hard for everyone to do regardless of your industry. And some of the tasks might make them feel a bit micromanaged. So it's not because we want to micromanage anyone, or that we're actually going to micromanage, but by doing tasks in a certain aspect or a certain way, right or through automation, it gives us really, really good data and.

4:01
And that data is what we need to drive more efficiency. So all of it is done with really, really good intentions. You know, the more data, the better. And that's really what automation is about, is saying what should we automate, What's going to give us good data to determine what do we need to do next? Seems kind of simple but complicated at the same time, right, Right. You made a really good point there. Not only is it important to identify internally what is the right thing to automate within your business to speak kind of parenthetically to that.

4:31
Requires a person like yourself and others within senior levels in your organization to take a step back, look at the business and determine OK, where does it make sense for us to automate, where does it make sense for us to see that return back on our business and ultimately to benefit the customers. But to your point, it also a huge onus on the, it's is on the organization to identify areas in which there won't be incredible pushback like you said for those people internally.

4:55
That feel like #1 are their jobs being taken away, is this being automated right just to to lower headcount is is you know there's there's various different different areas culturally that people feel like this is impacting their job. I was wondering if you can go into a little bit more detail on that because from a cultural perspective the adoption of automation.

5:14
That's where it really starts, right? Absolutely. So I can give a few examples that I think kind of tell this story because it really truly is about the people and an adoption is about the people, you know anybody in the on the tech side in the tech world where of course we want to automate, we can think of 1,000,000 great use cases, right things, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be successful.

5:33
So you definitely have to focus on the small and easy wins first with little impact, so people don't get scared and run away. But let me give you a couple examples where we've automated some processes that people just love and they're not scared of at all. And it'll give you some other examples where we got a little bit more into the weeds on what we were trying to automate and we had to really explain the why and the with them, the what's in it for me down to the role level. So for example.

5:59
Compass generating closing documents with our volume is sometimes unmanageable. We don't always have control over when our loans are going to close because we are driven by our builders business, Lennar, our parent company. So we try to spread it out throughout the month, but sometimes it's impossible and the volume on the last couple days of the month or a quarter or a year is just completely overwhelming. So what we did is we worked with RPA and we created a bot.

6:26
They're named after the Jetsons, so ours is named Elroy and and I love that. He's super cool. He's awesome. He's still a little, he's still, you know, he's still learning a little bit. He's pretty new. We've had him a couple of months, but he's been great.

6:38
And and basically what we do is we've programmed him to be an assistant to our closers. Instead of having to go through the steps of generating documents and selecting the settlement agent, you know and waiting for the documents to generate and send, we've programmed to Elroy to basically take that piece off of our closers. So all they have to do is check a box and say what type of closing is it going to be? Is it going to be a wet sign or is it going to be a hybrid or is it going to be a run and once they check the box to say what type of package.

7:08
I want so we did this by design. We actually only gave them the option to do a full closing package that included a CD, a full closing package without a CD or just a CD, only just a checkbox in a compass. Which is great. It's super flexible. We can create the custom screens, We make it really, really easy for the closers to select what they want. Elwory jumps into the loan and takes it from there. He goes in and he makes sure that he generates the documents exactly as indicated, does all of his checks and balances and delivers it to the right destination.

7:38
On the closing type, so like, super cool automation. Nobody pushed back. Everybody loved that. They were like, I just click a box and get out and it and it does it for me, Love it.

7:48
Right. They're all over it. Super easy to adopt. We made sure that we built in the data behind the scenes to make sure that people were actually using it because it's really key to be able to validate the automation that you've implemented is working after the first week. And they trusted it and they saw that it was delivering all the documents they would themselves. It just became part of their DNA. And he's just, you know, Elroy just works his magic, especially at the end of the month. So it's pretty amazing and that's one of the fascinating things that I've identified in learning more about Lenar's.

8:18
Process toward automation is you've you've managed to implement these solutions that have not disrupted anything that you guys are doing in terms of how your business internally operates. In fact, you've done things, you've implemented things like you said.

8:32
To complement your existing processes, I'm curious to kind of learn more about you know now that you've you've kind of seen these processes, you've seen these solutions become implemented. What's been that impact on overall your your overall start to finish, end to end mortgage processes and really consequently what's been the the impact on the borrower experience since and since the adoption of this automation?

8:55
The automation that we've selected to focus on, we just we always make sure that it ties back to two core goals, which is our customer exerience and quality. And for us, our customers are not only our customers who are buying the home.

9:08
But Lennar as a home builder and our associates who work for Lennar Mortgage, those are all of our customers. My job in particular is to make sure that their digital mortgage experience is the best that it can be. And quality is the key to automation. Quality helps us control. Automation helps us control the quality. So we take some a lot of human error out of the equation, you know and our industry overall is challenged to do more with a lot less really challenging to bring new talent into the industry and when you're trying to bring in new talent to the industry.

9:38
We have to make sure that we have a lot of training and time and focus on that customer experience through automation, something we've been working on over the last year and into 2022 is really.

9:51
Leveraging the automation that ICE has given to us in the workflow, automation in the web and and building some some custom stuff on top of it so we can help our newer associates really get into the business and be successful and grow their careers in a really smart way. That also complements the customer experience because it's really hard for them to remember all the guidelines and master the internal processes and be positive through communication and have excellent customer service and be excellent problem solvers. It's a lot, it's overwhelming.

10:21
We're trying to disrupt that and we're evolving. We want to cultivate the talent that we have by leveraging an exception based, task based workflow, right. It's going to pave the way for everybody to reach their goals. We get to our customers faster because we're telling.

10:37
Our associates, when they need to make customer contact, we've integrated that through through Velocify. We're actually leveraging Velocify in our operation workflow and we drive the tasks and the data to Velocify from Encompass and we tell our processors when they need to make contact, when they need to follow up, when there's key milestones that happen in the building process.

10:56
And in the mortgage process, we've given them the ability to use text messaging through Velocify, which is amazing. We also leverage Velocify to text our customers a mobile ID scan journey so we can get automated pictures of their their driver's license or passport. And we collect that data and we validate it through this automation, brings it right back into Encompass. And we've just saved an enormous amount of time for multiple different roles to validate the consumer's identity and to get their name correct on those documents. It's it's a huge win.

11:26
So little things like that that that affect our journey end to end really, really, really help us be more efficient and and like I said do more with less. It's really going to oversimplify it, right like we're using the Encompass web workflow automation along with a custom task management tool and data to drive dashboards and logic and queues or our associates know exactly what they need to do.

11:51
When they need to do it, when they need to escalate it, how do they escalate it? And we're drilling it down into the skill sets that are appropriate for each task. And I think I know the answer to this question, but how would you perhaps quantify the results of this new process as compared to how it was previously. So you know measuring return on investment and measuring the success and productivity is, is very hard because we're changing the way that we work. You know, we can do it through a few different ways I think number one I think.

12:20
Obviously customer satisfaction scores and customer communication sort of ability to drive documents and faster and have less questions throughout the process. Those are things that that we can measure, we can measure how many times we have to touch the customer, how many times that we have to follow up so.

12:37
The amount of touches will be really relevant to the amount to the quality of the communication and obviously those scores at the end of the day that we get from our customers will help customers. We expect to increase to make sure that you know we are what we're doing is working from the customer experience standpoint, you know and then overall we we expect a much higher productivity per day.

12:59
If you have to, if you take out the confusion of the day, what do I need to work on? Who do I need to call 1st? And and and we take that out of the hands of the associates and we just tell them what to do and who to call.

13:12
Rate organically that customer experience is going to be better. Those scores will be higher and their loans will close faster. They'll be cleared earlier, way earlier than when they need to close. So it's all in the metrics, the overall metrics compared to how many tasks are being managed. From a role perspective, it's very difficult to manage that. Today we can just say, OK, you processed 25 loans, you closed 25 loans, that's great. But we don't really know how many tasks it took to get that loan completed. So we're going to have another whole level of data that will.

13:42
Really help us realize the the overall efficiency. I also think that quality, the number of conditions, the number of post closing conditions, those tell the story probably better than anything else. So we definitely expect better quality by doing this as well. Absolutely, absolutely. You made a really good point a bit ago and I mean fact you made a meet a lot of really good points. You took disruption and evolving and you kind of combined them together. I thought that was really interesting. I'd love for you to kind of expand on that for us what?

14:12
When we talk about disruptors and we talk about evolving, it's not just our industry. For those of us who've been in the industry for a long time, like nothing has really changed in the way in which we approach a mortgage. The roles are exactly the same as they always have been, right? The level of education that you have to have and the understanding that you have to have has not changed.

14:34
And that's where we need to change because it's so difficult to get new talent into the industry, whether they're going to be appraisers, right, or working for title or working for mortgage, it's difficult to bring people in, especially in the world where we're so remote now. So when we talk about evolving, we have to think differently about how do we bring in talent, how do we educate them, how do we communicate with them and not take for granted that they, you know, a lot of these younger.

14:59
Professionals coming into the industry may have never had the privilege of working in an office environment where you get to interact with other people and you get to learn how to deal with situations. We we have to take some of these things that we just expected them to know out of the equation and just lay the data out in front of them and say here's what you need to know and make it really simple and and just and and really help our industry evolve from thinking differently about how we attack this mortgage process that you know that.

15:30
That sometimes can take a really long time and can be really, really frustrating for people. So I think with technology that's out there you know that everybody is embracing in general around you know and anything around automated underwriting right and and using data extraction to calculate income. We're definitely helping. We're making movement and and and getting our associates to trust the systems and trust the output of these different types of decision engines that we have available like I.

15:59
I absolutely love the new income analyzer and credit analyzer from from AIQ like that's exactly what we need to be doing. But we need to be able to take those results and turn them into actionable tasks. So the people who are trained on those tasks and can just take it and resolve those problems and have that clear information which that right there is a really good example of thinking differently about how we approach this business. You don't have to wait until the entire loan is perfect to hand it over to an underwriter right who took 1015 years to get to the.

16:29
Point where they are in their career, we can break it down into chunks and process what we have when we get it. Don't wait to tell the borrower 10 days before closing that you need additional documentation because we've been holding on to it for 30 days. We want to just use what we have and act immediately. Yeah, I think that that's Carrie. I think that that right there is a fantastic example as of as we were talking about technology and automation that complements right the existing process while also being disruptive.

16:57
In an effort to evolve with the industry, I think that that was a fantastic example of that. I I also love your example of cultivating talent, whether it be people that have been in the industry for a while that become very tech savvy or new people that have come into the workforce that to your point they're really used to technology doing a lot of these. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they're they're they're used to having technology do a lot of things for them to help them to.

17:24
Figure stuff out. They figure stuff exactly right. Yeah, there's so many apps. There's an app for everything. You can Google everything. Like, why can't you just find these answers?

17:34
When you're working on a mortgage, when you're trying to, you know, decipher guidelines, it shouldn't, it doesn't have to be necessarily so Gray, right? We can definitely make it a little bit more black and white with data and with automation. That's exactly right. And that leads me to our last point of today's conversation. I was really, I was, I was, I was hoping you could provide and I think you kind of did just now.

17:57
Provide some recommendations for you know perhaps you know other mortgage companies that are looking to in some ways emulate what you've done, what Lennar has done from adopting automation, adopting that those more cutting edge technologies right to help complement what your business is trying to achieve in delivering those results and those experience to borrowers. What are some areas that you can perhaps provide some recommendations in terms of right improving revenue, improving efficiencies, improving compliance?

18:26
I would first say don't over engineer anything out of the gate. It's just looking at the process end to end. What's easy to automate it automate the happy path. If you try to automate the happy path and the unhappy path it becomes very challenging and could be frustrating and you could be in a situation where you're over engineering so.

18:44
Automate the happy path and make sure you still have the right internal structure to support the unhappy path. You can always get there later with the unhappy path right? Even if you get a 6070% lift on the happy path, that's huge. Have have your talented associates focus on what's going wrong, not on what's going right. So identifying the low hanging fruit right the big tasks that have to get done on every loan. There's a lot of tools out there.

19:09
That will help automate things that everybody's starting to automate and and and and the correct and the right vendors and the right thought process it it does exist. So I definitely recommend educating yourself talking to others who have automated get some recommendations about specific things in general that worked well. You know we've learned some hard lessons. We've gone through some attempts of automation that just we couldn't get the ROI or we couldn't find the value. But if you don't try you you you never really know. So failure is OK in some ways but but take baby.

19:39
Steps at first. That's really my recommendation. And focus on the things that are easy to control. You know exactly when they're going to happen and you know exactly how they have to happen. I like that. I like that a lot. Find your happy path and find what might not be the happy path. Forget about the unhappy path. I use this this line quite often. Sometimes there's unintended consequences of automation, and sometimes by by adding a new automation, you all of a sudden realize that you might have created another problem. So you have to be very careful about what you are.

20:10
And what those consequences could be and make sure you have the team available to support it. That's why I say take it slow, right, and make sure that you're being as thorough as possible, but not over engineering it. You can always iterate. You could always add more. And to your point, don't over engineer it, don't make it too complicated for the borrower, right, Because what might happen is you might actually make it more complicated. Less is more specifically for the borrower, less is more. That's right. And some solution providers don't always have the right path for you. That's right.

20:40
You know, it really just might not fit your model or your flow. You have to make sure that it's the right fit for you. Fantastic. Well, hey, thank you, Carrie. I think I think that's all the time we have for this episode. Thanks so much for making the time. And we look forward to continue working with you. And we look forward to continue working with Lennar and helping provide you with those happy paths. Thank you. I appreciate it so much. I was happy to join. Thanks again for joining another episode of the Ice Mortgage Technology Open House Podcast. Be sure to be on the lookout for.

21:09
Future episodes as well as the next episode of our Culture of Automation miniseries. We look forward to having you Thanks again and be safe out there.

Disclaimer

Information contained in this audio was obtained in part from publicly sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE Mortgage Technology nor its affiliates, make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.

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