Going Mobile – With Mortgagebot
I am a huge fan of classic rock, so whenever I am the victim of an earworm (that song that randomly gets stuck in your head for hours and hours) there’s a good chance it’s from that genre. This week I was in my hotel room after testing a new LOS implementation for a client, and The Who’s Going Mobile had just replayed in my head for the 847th time that night. Naturally, that got me to thinking about Mortgagebot Mobile (earworms are funny things that way).
I have always been a fan of the Mortgagebot POS platform. In my life before consulting, I implemented one of the first instances of Mortgagebot POS. It was back in 2001. I had been following the emerging Internet Lending trend for about 3 years, and Mortgagebot stood out. It was a solid product, it provided a great customer experience, and it integrated fairly easily with the LOS I was using at the time. Scott Happ, Sue Baker, and the founding team had hit a home run.
LOS platforms have come and gone over that time, but the Mortgagebot POS platform has gracefully evolved. They have added flavors of the Mortgagebot suite geared towards originators and platform staff, and steadily increased the feature functionality to keep up with regulatory, industry, and customer demands. Almost 17 years later Mortgagebot is still on the very short list of POS solution you have to look at if you want a best-in-class POS solutions. Not a bad track record.
Back to the earworm. Several months ago, I sat in on several demos of the newest product to come out of Mortgagebot (now part of D+H) - Mortgagebot Mobile. Again, another solid product that leveraged the feature functionality of the classic consumer facing POS platform, but scaled to the phone and tablet. It filled a need of Mortgagebot customers to target the shift in consumers’ preference for receiving content and transacting business on their handheld devices. With the competition coming from Rocket Mortgage and such, this was the tool that community lenders should have been deploying, but I really hadn’t heard of too many lenders doing just that. What was I missing? I knew if I wanted to solve this riddle, and hopefully remove this nagging earworm, I needed to talk to Darton.
Darton Rose (darton.rose@dh.com) and I have known each other for years. I called him, and explained my curiosity over not hearing much about deploying Mortgagebot Mobile from lenders (I left out the earworm part). He explained that D+H and the Mortgagebot team spent a lot time on the development and testing of the platform before it was made available to the customer base. They wanted to make sure it met the standards set by other members of the POS platform (solid product and a great customer experience). It was officially rolled out at last year’s MBA convention.
As we talked, I came to my own conclusion as to why so many Mortgagebot customers (I know there are a LOT of you out there) have been slow to adopt Mobile. I refer to it as change fatigue. For the past several years we have had to make so many changes to our systems and workflows to keep up with the regulatory environment. HMDA, UCD, and the new URLA are vastly approaching. With all of this, many community lenders have subconsciously fallen into a defensive attitude when it comes to system changes. I get it. But this is a system change that is proactive, and may help you attract more customers. I have looked at the process to add this to your existing Mortgagebot, and this is a pretty straight forward project. Definitely on the lower end of the 1-10 scale.
Community lenders need to have a mobile strategy to be successful. If you are a Mortgagebot customer, you have the tools available now to deploy. I would recommend you check out this new platform, and see how easy it will be to have a solid mobile presence. If you need assistance, we are always available to help.
Now it's Get Out Of Denver by Bob Seger. It's going to be another long night.
Please reach out if I can help at pbates@scapartnering.com.
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