Things I learned in Vegas ... at the Ellie Mae User Conference
Things I learned in Vegas ...
at the Ellie Mae User Conference
A few weeks ago, I made what is becoming an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Ellie Mae user conference, or Experience 17 as it is known. Now, for those of you who know me, you know I am not a city kind of guy, and even less a "Las Vegas Strip" kind of guy, but one must do what one must do. Again, as in past years, it was well worth dragging me out of the woods to see what the folks at Ellie Mae are up to.
Encompass is the biggest player in the LOS space, and it is always interesting to see their vision, and more importantly, how they can help lenders. There are over 200,000 Encompass users, and there are big changes happening for all of these users.
The Encompass Lending Platform
For Encompass users, March 31, 2014, was a very bad day. End of month, end of quarter, and Encompass was down. Completely down. Everyone thought it was a malicious attack, but it ended up being a capacity issue. Ellie learned from this issue, and over the last 3 years, they have re-engineered Encompass, starting with the infrastructure. While the look and feel of Encompass as it sits on the desktop has not had significant changes since then, everything you don't see has been transforming.
This infrastructure is called the Encompass Lending Platform, and this has been a major evolution. They have built robust scalable architecture that is both faster and more fault tolerant, and designed to grow as needed. They have also created a set of tools to work in this new environment, and are making those tools available to users and developers. This lets lenders use the same technology they are using to develop custom applications that will integrate with Encompass. One of the examples they displayed was an application written (in 3 weeks) that had Loan Officer Connect integrate with an Amazon Echo, and letting a Loan Officer interact with the application using only their voice. Pretty wild. This platform and toolset is going to make integrations much easier going forward.
The toolset - RESTful APIs
No, this is not sleeping technology. The tools that Ellie Mae has developed are based on what is called RESTful APIs (Application Program Interfaces). This is a standard way of securely communicating with the Ellie Mae platform, and not leaving data on whatever device the lender is using. This will allow lenders and developers the ability to create secure mobile applications based on the Encompass Lending Platform.
Ellie Mae has used this toolset to create all of their new product offerings which all end in Connect (Loan Officer Connect, TPO Connect, and soon to be released Consumer Connect). Because REST API architecture does not leave data on the user side, these applications have been built to be what is known as device agnostic.
Device Agnostic
I am not getting into a religious discussion here - trust me. If an application is device agnostic, it will run on any machine - desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, and scale to that device. And because these applications run in a browser, there is no software or apps to install. That always makes the IT folks happy!
Encompass NG
The last application that will be configured to exploit all of this new technology is Encompass itself. This is expected to roll out at the beginning of 2018, and will be called Encompass NG. All of the feature functionality will remain, but the application will be browser-based and device agnostic. Although I do not see myself using Encompass on a smartphone, I think a larger iPad would be pretty slick for casual use. This is going to be a methodical transition between the existing application and NG. Probably the biggest takeaway from the migration process is that lenders who have done a lot of customization will have more work to do, especially if you have a lot of custom input forms.
Reporting
One of my biggest peeves with Encompass is the way reporting works today. If you have read any of my articles on reporting (let me get on my soapbox), you know my feelings on having a robust reporting library for users from the Board on down to the line employee, and the current tool does not cut it for me. One of the highlights of the conference for me was the announcement that a robust reporting tool will be released in the second half of this year, based on the new platform and technologies. You should be able to create reports that dazzle without expensive add-ons. I will be eagerly anticipating this one.
Construction Lending
It looks like they finally got construction lending right. There was an extremely good presentation on construction lending, and a lot of the pain has been taken care of. While there is more work to do, the new feature functionality lets you process a construction loan without having a crisis management team on standby for the closers. We will take a deeper dive into this in an upcoming article.
It will be an interesting year for Encompass lenders. I am already making my plans for next March in Las Vegas to see what's next.
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Full Disclosure: I did gamble at the Wynn. Spent $6.00 playing slots. Hiking in Spring Mountain Ranch - now THAT was fun!
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