Ellie Mae’s latest earning results further confirmed the growing dominance of large and mid-sized nonbank lenders in the mortgage industry as big banks pull away from originations.
Jonathan Corr, president and CEO of Ellie Mae, said in its fourth-quarter earnings call, “Our Q4 and full year outperformance was driven by strong momentum across our entire business as we expanded our user base and drove increased adoption of our product offerings. New customer seats booked during the quarter were a record 8,700.”
Corr explained the growth saying, “As a greater percentage of mortgage origination volume has shifted from mega lenders to large and mid-sized lenders, we have seen our customers continue to grow their businesses, adding more seats and conducting more transactions across our network. The strength of our customer base is also highlighted by the number of seats they added during the quarter, which totaled 3,000.”
Jon Marino recently wrote in a CNBC article that fourth-quarter earnings from big banks showed a retreat away from mortgages as more nonbanks step up to fill the gap.
The article highlight’s the success of nonbank Quicken Loans in the mortgage business.
From the article:
Quicken is part of a group of lenders, many of them online only, that substantially grew their footprint in the mortgage lending business as banks have retreated in the wake of the global financial crisis. In early 2014, nonbank lenders became the primary source of new mortgages, and in the time since have increased their lead over credit unions, large banks and smaller traditional loan providers, according to industry data.
This doesn’t mean that Ellie Mae is losing business from big banks.
Corr noted during the call that from an overall standpoint, what is continuing to drive its success in the marketplace is previous success.
“As we become more successful in all the segments, whether it'd be the enterprise segment, the large segment or the mid-market – that continued success is just driving more and more activity, more business coming our way,” Corr said. “The fact that we keep adding to our product footprint, and we keep adding to our capabilities of automation very much are bringing customers across the table. And that also falls into all categories of lenders, not one category. So we're seeing mortgage banks, community banks, regional banks – success across the board.”
Ellie Mae’s total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2015 increased by 39% to $64.9 million, up from $46.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2014.
This beat analyst revenue expectations by $3.55 million, and EPS expectations by $0.23.
