Ellie Mae announced Monday its new offering for lenders that will allow them to give borrowers a personalized digital mortgage experience.
Homebuyers today are three times more likely to find their lender online than they were five years ago, and more than 60% of homebuyers expect to apply for and complete their mortgage application completely online, according to Ellie Mae.
This data only confirms what experts have been saying – the mortgage industry must get on the digital mortgage train or get left behind.
“For lenders to effectively compete in today’s purchase-driven market, they need to be equipped to successfully reach the homebuyer at the point of thought,” said Joe Tyrrell, Ellie Mae executive vice president of corporate strategy. “Encompass Consumer Connect offers an engaging online consumer experience for lenders to turn a consumer’s interest into a quality application that can be closed faster with complete transparency and compliance.”
“Built-in analytics ensures every application is met with a customized and personal experience, and when Encompass Consumer Connect is coupled with our Encompass CRM marketing automation and Velocify sales automation solutions, lenders have the assurance that their consumers are engaged throughout every step of the loan origination process and that no borrower is left behind,” Tyrrell said.
Now, Ellie Mae is announcing its Encompass Consumer Connect, which is part of its Consumer Engagement Suite and allows borrowers to not only complete their mortgage application online, but also to engage in a full digital mortgage experience.
The solutions can be accessed from any device, and is fully customizable and branded to the lender’s needs.
“With Encompass Consumer Connect, Ellie Mae has created a transparent and efficient workflow, where the amount of change we have to introduce to our operations staff is minimal, but we save time and get a huge lift in our customer experience,” said Andria Lightfoot, George Mason Mortgage senior vice president of information systems. “The real icing on the cake is that Ellie Mae understands that we want to uniquely brand and design this experience for our customers – we don’t just want to buy something off the shelf and look like everything else. We can customize almost every aspect of the platform.”
On the lender side, they will be given complete control and customization over the product’s brand and workflow. They will receive automated services such as credit, product and pricing and asset verification. The product will also enable interaction with borrowers for requested documentation and update via the secure borrower portal.
And for borrowers, they will be able to research rates and loan options, fill out a simple, conversational style mortgage application, securely upload documents from any device and receive real-time status updates.
“We wanted to give our customers the ability to interact with us the way they wanted to interact with us,” said Brandon Durham, Homeowners Financial Group product support manager. “With Encompass Consumer Connect, if they want to sit in a coffee shop and apply online, or upload documents from their phone, we wanted to give them that option.”
“If they want to sit across the desk and have someone personally guide them through every step, they could do that too,” Durham said. “Encompass Consumer Connect lets us utilize an interview-style application with icons and pictures. It’s very user friendly, written in everyday language.”
This is just the latest offering in a series of technological upgrades Ellie Mae is making. In fact, the company is currently working with artificial intelligence to perform tasks such as determine how borrowers want to be communicated with and even allow lenders to access their files through Amazon’s Alexa.
