Within mortgage lending today, the Encompass® mortgage management platform from ICE Mortgage Technology offers one of the industry’s most recognized and widely adopted loan origination systems (LOS). In fact, the company processes over one-third of all residential mortgage applications in the United States with 230,000 users across thousands of lending providers. The Encompass platform also handles millions of transactions each month—a number that has seen historic levels during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Magnitude of the Mortgage Market
In 2020, origination volume reached approximately $3.9 trillion, including a 14 percent increase in new home purchasing year over year and nearly $2.4 trillion from refinancing. For 2021, the Mortgage Brokers Association has forecasted a slight decrease in total origination volume to around $2.56 trillion, but this is still the second highest figure during the last 15 years.
With low interest rates driving the demand to purchase new homes or to refinance, mortgage lending institutions have seen record origination volume—putting an even greater strain on loan originators to keep key metrics, like time to close, at a minimum. Despite the best efforts of loan officers, according to the March 2021 Origination Insight Report, the time to close across all loans has remained high at 52 days, but is down slightly from the 58 days required at the beginning of 2021.
The Pressure on Mortgage Lenders and Loan Officers Today
The mortgage origination process is a tedious, multi-step, highly-regulated process that can have several bumps along the way. Each individual loan within Encompass requires considerable documentation—from W2s and bank statements to credit reports, consent forms, and other lengthy information. Multiply the time and effort required to manually review each of these documents individually, and it’s no wonder lending institutions and loan officers are having difficulty keeping up. Manual mortgage processing is a major strain on staff and it’s becoming harder and harder to find quality loan originators and underwriters. In fact, many institutions resort to hiring temporary workers to accommodate spikes in the business.
How RPA Can Streamline Mortgage Processing with Encompass
Mortgage lenders using the Encompass platform can track loan applications through the entire origination process and access everything they need to both originate and close loans, including loan underwriting tasks. But because these processes are typically manual, loan officers struggle to get data and documents into the application in a seamless manner.
Mortgage processing automation that relies on robotic process automation (RPA) streamlines the mortgage application process by automating interactions between applications, data entry and extraction, and reporting. In mortgage processing, this typically includes automating loan underwriting and loan bundling. This is possible because low-level, manual, repetitive tasks are taken from human workers and given to software robots.
When RPA bots support the mortgage origination process in Encompass, they can process every application the same way, but quicker and with greater accuracy. Then if any information is missing from the application, the RPA bot can send an email notifying the right person. Using RPA alongside Encompass increases staff productivity and efficiency, and eliminates costly errors, ensuring the loan is moved quickly and more accurately throughout the process.
Key Areas RPA is Used in Mortgage Processing with Encompass
The ability to streamline loan processing, while ensuring data privacy, accuracy, and regulatory compliance is a game changer for Encompass users. Here are just a few examples of how RPA can be used to streamline mortgage-related tasks and work alongside your Encompass LOS:
- Review File Logs and Feed Data Back into Encompass: Once an applicant enters his or her loan application information, a software bot can seamlessly gather and download mortgage application data and extra documentation, and then feed the data back into Encompass.
- Automate Credit Prequalification Process: The loan application can be triaged based on the applicant’s FICO score to automate the credit prequalification process. The best scores are routed to the loan officer for fast tracking, while fair scores are sent to the credit department for analysis and poor scores are sent an automatic rejection letter.
- Create Files and Send Files Securely (sFTP): RPA bots can also support in preflight loan processing and take the burden off your loan officers. These software bots can pull key data from Encompass and order necessary services, including credit checks, background checks, and flood certifications. They can seamlessly create files, review files, and securely send files through sFTP.
- Send Conditional Approval or Rejection Letters: Once a loan officer approves a loan, software robots can generate conditional approval letters to customers, pulling the conditions and requirements from Encompass. They can even update a retail POS with the new data and status as well.
Get to Know the Encompass Solution Bot from Automate
Fortra offers mortgage specific software bots that assist in automating the mortgage origination process. Our solution bot for Encompass exchanges information with the Encompass LOS through a powerful API connection. Automate is capable of generating the connection and executing instructions needed to retrieve and send information to the Encompass application.
Mortgage lenders that rely on Encompass can leverage our solution bot to automatically create loans, update loan information, generate pipeline reports, send reports by email, and retrieve loan attachments. This means you are taking repetitive, manual processing tasks away from loan officers and enabling them to focus on high-value tasks. How well does it work? One company went from processing 1.5 mortgage applications per day to eight applications each day. That’s a productivity increase of more than 500 percent.
Automating the mortgage origination process with RPA supports and enhances the value of Encompass, and enables lending institutions to do away with manual processing and manual data entry. Best of all, it empowers loan officers and mortgage professionals to spend less time on repetitive, time-intensive tasks and more time ensuring customers receive the best service possible.
Explore More Areas Where RPA Can Benefit Your Institution
Take a closer look at how RPA can transform processes and streamline high-volume tasks in your organization. Learn more about RPA for financial institutions today.
