From automation to artificial intelligence (AI), today’s mortgage lending technology is advancing at a rapid pace. As a result, there are more tech-savvy solutions to choose from than ever before. Many of these solutions can streamline your costs, supercharge your efficiencies, and support a better borrower experience.
While the mortgage lending tech landscape is ripe with innovation, selecting the right suite of solutions can be a challenge. Not only do you want to choose tools that provide immediate workflow improvements, but you also want to ensure they can scale with your business over time.
In this article, we’ll explain how to use mortgage lending technology to achieve various goals, from improving customer service to reducing the cost of doing business. We’ll also highlight some specific products and services we offer here at Certified Credit.
Table of Contents
How to Harness Technology to Enhance Customer Service and Borrower Retention
As a mortgage lender, your success ultimately hinges on the quality of your borrower experience. Ample data shows that it’s more cost-effective to pursue repeat deals with existing borrowers than to constantly hunt for new ones.
While many lenders try to stay in touch with their past customers during various milestones throughout the year, the key to boosting borrower retention is reaching out when borrowers are actively seeking new mortgage products. That’s where continuous credit monitoring solutions, like Cascade Alerts, come into play.
Cascade Alerts notifies you when your current borrowers are actively applying for new loan products or at risk of premature payoffs. In turn, it gives you the real-time visibility you need to reach out when these leads will be most receptive to your pitch. Learn More: Overcoming the Challenges of Low Borrower Retention in the Mortgage Industry
How Does Cascade Alerts Work?
Setting up Cascade Alerts is a simple process. All you need to do is:
- Upload your database of past and present borrowers.
- Select your preferred alert method (SMS/text, email, or LOS notification).
- Customize your lead qualification criteria.
- Allow Cascade Alerts to monitor your borrowers’ credit reports continuously.
- Receive alerts within 24 hours about new mortgage-related inquiries.
- Upon receiving alerts, contact your leads and try to secure their repeat business.
With its continuous monitoring and prompt notifications, Cascade Alerts ensures that you never leave a potential deal on the table. It also helps you identify borrowers who exhibit early payoff risks and touch base with them before they refinance.
The best part? This set-it-and-forget-it solution is compliant and cost-effective. It can pay for itself after preventing just one early payoff and complies with the Homebuyers’ Privacy Protection Act, which now restricts trigger leads.
Lastly, Cascade Alerts is easy to integrate. You can connect it with your existing loan origination system (LOS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Velocify, Surefire, and Shape are just a few of our pre-existing CRM integrations.
Read More: How Are Mortgage Trigger Leads Changing in 2024?
How to Leverage Technology to Reduce Your Cost of Doing Business
The cost of loan manufacturing has been steadily increasing over the past few years. While some tech solutions require an upfront investment, many can streamline your origination expenses considerably over time.
If you want to leverage technology to cut costs, look for tools that help you do the following:
#1 Monitor Your Applicants’ Credit Activity Throughout the Application Process
After getting approved for a mortgage, some applicants may take out an auto loan or purchase furniture on credit. Unfortunately, any significant changes to their creditworthiness or debt-to-income ratios can make them ineligible for their mortgage loans, leading to last-minute loan fallout or repurchase requests.
Standard refresh reports don’t give lenders enough time to resolve issues before they have such dire consequences. That’s why Certified Credit developed a better solution: Cascade Undisclosed Debt Monitoring.
This credit monitoring tool scans your applicants’ credit activity for potential issues that may put their eligibility at risk. You’ll be notified of these issues right away, giving you time to get your applicant back on track before their closing date.
Read More: Reducing Fraud and Repurchase Risk with Undisclosed Debt Monitoring
#2 Purchase Data at Strategic Times
From credit reports to income and employment verifications, third-party data can be expensive. And while you need this data to complete the loan origination process, you don’t need to order it for every applicant. Instead, consider employing a “just-in-time” approach to ordering data.
We have several tools at Certified Credit that can ensure certain eligibility criteria are met before you invest extra money. Two of these tools include:
- Smart Select – Credit reporting costs have increased substantially over the past few years. To streamline them, lenders should only purchase tri-merge credit reports when they’re truly necessary. Smart Select is a solution we designed to help our clients do just that. This tool automatically orders credit reports from one bureau at a time, according to your custom parameters. Before upgrading your orders, it compares applicants’ credit data to your pre-set credit thresholds, ensuring you only pay for additional reports for applicants who are most likely to qualify. By leveraging Smart Select during prequalification and formal applications, you can take non-qualifying applicants out of the running as cost-effectively as possible.
Read More: Why Smart Credit Pulls Are the New KPI for High-Performing Mortgage Teams
- Cascade VOE – Another substantial cost in the loan origination process is verifications of income and employment. Ordering these reports too early or using high-cost vendors regularly can quickly inflate your expenses. Cascade VOE minimizes verification expenses in several ways. First, you can pair it with our milestone ordering solution to automatically initiate orders at the ideal time in your lending workflow. If you need help determining the best time to automate orders, our workflow optimization team can conduct an analysis on your behalf. Cascade VOE also lets you set up a custom cascade of various vendors, ranging from instant-hit providers to affordable consumer-permission vendors. You can customize the order of these vendors to suit your goals. We’ve seen many clients minimize their VOE costs simply by placing low-cost vendors first in their cascade.
Learn More: 6 Benefits of Integrating Consumer Permission VOE into Your Cascade VOE Flow
How to Measure ROI When Implementing New Technology Solutions
After implementing a new technology, it’s a good idea to monitor your pull-through rate. This metric offers a high-level view of your workflow efficiency, customer service, and competitive edge. You can calculate this rate by dividing your number of funded loans by the number of submitted applications over the same period.
According to an ICE Mortgage Technology report, the average pull-through rate for the mortgage industry is around 75%. You can raise your pull-through rate with the right technology.
If you want to close more loans, don’t dismiss your non-qualifying applicants. Instead, help them find a clear path toward improved creditworthiness. At Certified Credit, we have two tools that can facilitate this process, including:
- Cascade Prequal – Cascade Prequal can evaluate your applicants’ creditworthiness without dinging their starting credit scores.
- Credit score improvement tools – Our credit score improvement tools identify the most efficient way to raise applicants’ scores by generating personalized action plans and simulating various credit decisions.
After sharing a personalized action plan with your on-the-cusp applicants, make sure to stay in touch with them and check in on their progress. By doing so, you’ll increase the chances that they’ll return to you when they’re ready to buy a home. In addition to these innovative tools, employing automation wherever possible can optimize how you and your team allocate your time
Which Tech Solutions Can Help Lenders Increase Revenue and Market Share?
At Certified Credit, we design all of our solutions to support stronger revenues. Our Cascade line, in particular, can help your business run more efficiently, making it more profitable and appealing to new applicants. Here’s how:
- Cascade Alerts – Cascade Alerts can bolster your revenues right away by highlighting opportunities for repeat business. On average, our clients see 2% of their past and present client portfolios come back into the fold after implementing Cascade Alerts. The resulting revenue gains can be quite significant.
- Cascade VOE – As we mentioned earlier, Cascade VOE can lower your verification costs by enabling you to leverage low-cost vendors more often. Cascade VOE users typically see an immediate savings of 15% to 25%. This tool also helps them pass their reduced VOE costs onto their borrowers by generating itemized, TRID-compliant invoices.
- Cascade UDM – Today’s consumers carry a lot of debt. Total household debt hit $18.20 trillion in Q1 2025, with credit card balances contributing $1.18 trillion. Meanwhile, student loan delinquencies are ramping up rapidly. These trends highlight the importance of taking a proactive approach to undisclosed debt. It’s one of the best ways to boost your rate of successful loan closures.
Learn More: 8 Ways to Take Control of Your Bottom Line
Curate the Ideal Mortgage Lending Tech Stack With Certified Credit
As you can see, mortgage technology can optimize many areas of your business. By implementing the solutions listed above, you can tailor your tech infrastructure to support your goals and remain competitive amidst ever-evolving market conditions.
Not sure which solutions to start with? Schedule a credit consultation with the Certified Credit team. During your consultation, we can showcase demonstrations of our tech solutions and pinpoint which ones will provide the greatest ROI for your unique goals. Along with the products and services highlighted above, we also offer:
- Affordable credit reports
- Fraud and risk support
- Flood zone determinations
- Property and valuation tools
- Underwriting compliance
- Settlement services
Ready to build a smarter, more streamlined mortgage process? Reach out to Certified Credit today!
Sources:
Forbes. Customer Retention Versus Customer Acquisition.
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/12/12/customer-retention-versus-customer-acquisition/
ICE Mortgage Technology. ICE Mortgage Technology’s Latest Origination Insight Report Shows Purchases Eclipse Refinances for First Time in 18 Months.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Household Debt Hits $18.20 Trillion; Student Loan Delinquencies Jump.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
