White Paper: Helping Manage Mortgage Lending Chaos With Better Order Processing

April 19, 2022

According to Freddie Mac, a lender’s average closing time is one of the most important factors influencing a consumer’s decision to do business with them. In the rapidly accelerating world of digital mortgage, title companies should be thinking of ways to remove friction in transactions.

Title companies and mortgage lenders must communicate better if they hope to win business in a purchase-dominated market, according to a white paper from Visionet Systems’ AtClose division.

"To remain competitive in this environment requires lenders to offer higher levels of customer satisfaction, lower costs or both. But to do that, the lender must become much more efficient," said Adeel Ahmad, AtClose senior vice president "The answer is a cost-effective platform that increases efficiencies to lower costs and provides an opportunity for flexible vendor pricing that does not require additional human intervention. The right platform takes over work that previously was assigned to human staff and makes data more accessible to managers."

The paper offers a candid exploration of the market’s current challenges and explains why friction in the order management process is still costing lenders too much time, money and business. An industry that originated more than $4 trillion in 2020 will only see $2.6 trillion this year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Over the past few years, more financial institutions have staffed up their vendor management departments in response to the CFPB’s vendor risk management guidelines. After going to this expense, it is reasonable to see these companies trying to manage this problem with their internal staff by managing the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) they have in place with their vendors. Unfortunately, there are three significant challenges that stand in their way.

According to the paper, the three issues are:

  • The time crunch
  • Shrinking margins
  • Industry brain drain

AtClose said any solution must include intelligent order management, smart vendor management, open integration and data analytics, be compliant and secure and have scalability. In addition, any order processing technology must be capable of providing a solution that starts when the order is placed and serves until the order is received, quality control checked and consumed. If the consumer is involved in any part of the process, it must include a component that will make their part of the process as seamless and efficient as everything else.

“From a technology perspective, it should be completely agnostic, allowing any vendor’s tool to integrate easily with the core system. It should not be limited to only those providers the technology company has pre-approved or previously integrated,” AtClose wrote in its white paper.


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