Digitally transforming mortgage lending back office process automation

A high volume industry

With the government’s commitment to affordable housing, and stamp duty relief for first time buyers, the mortgage industry continues to be a high volume, process driven industry.  Digital investment into mortgage lending back office process automation is now as imperative to operational performance as the investment into front end contact centre operations.

Low interest rates in the wake of Brexit saw a surge in applications from borrowers. Of first time buyers alone, there were 31,800 loans received in August and in the last quarter, total mortgage applications that lead to offers reached 88% (an increase of 13%). Mortgage lending back office process automation needs to be sleek, responsive and streamlined to accommodate the demand.

Pressures on mortgage lenders

With new and emerging technologies customers have a new set of expectations as to how they want to communicate.

The pressure on lenders now is to accommodate those millions of customers, their diverse needs and the potential rises and falls in demand (all whilst keeping the regulator off their back).

Delivering a seamless, efficient customer experience means that lenders must now respond to the needs of their customers and adopt new innovations.

What do customers actually want?

According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, 4 in 10 customers would prefer to use a blend of digital channels to communicate with their lender and 4 in 10 believe that ‘robo advice’, such as chatbots, are faster and more convenient.

Failure to recognise these evolving needs will hinder lenders’ competitive advantage. This is a massive opportunity for lenders to embrace innovation to engage with their customers.

Digitally transforming mortgage lending back office process automation

In the case of most lenders, investment into digital innovation has been ploughed into front office operations. Ignoring the back office means that the potential for using digital solutions to optimise the interworking between the two is a massive missed opportunity.

OPX is an all-encompassing suite of back office optimising solutions that digitally transforms the back offices of mortgage providers. The system accepts and allocates incoming digital communications and front office hand offs, both of which are automatically allocated and processed by either RPA or team members using workforce optimisation technology. Then finally is assembles and issues digital customer communications. This is improving the mortgage lending, customer journey process in the following ways;

1. Meeting demand – by maximising the capacity and skills within an operations team, and highlighting potential training needs, managers can ensure that their operations are making the best use of its resources – every second – so that tasks are completed, SLA’s are met and bottlenecks avoided.
2. Flexibility – an innovative blend of human and robotic activity enables work to be allocated and balanced between high volumes/short duration tasks and more complex processes. Managers also have the flexibility to monitor and dynamically move suitably skilled team members between teams to meet a surges in incoming work.
3. Customer experience – OPX shows managers a single view of operational performance to check that SLA’s targets are on track to be met, and identify processes for further improvement.

Why OPX is unlike any other solution

Unlike other solutions, OPX offers all the necessary modules that the back office requires for a digital transformation – in one solution. By not having to rely on multiple venders, a cost saving exercise will run simultaneously to the continual journey of improvement and the lenders can ensure that their customer journey remains competitive.

To request a short demo of OPX and understand more about how it could improve your back office operations, please get in touch.