Experts on how eClosing is transforming mortgage lending

Today’s HousingWire Daily features a roundtable discussion on how the eClose explosion is reshaping the mortgage experience for lenders, hosted by HousingWire’s webinar manager Allision LaForgia.

The conversation features Craig Focardi, the senior analyst of banking at Celent, Shane Westra the chief product officer at SimpleNexus, and Matt Hansen, the chief information officer at Celebrity Home Loans.

Here’s a short preview of the discussion, lightly edited for concision and clarity:

Allision LaForgia: I know everybody is looking towards 2022, so it’ll be really interesting to see what we have in store today. We’re going to be looking at reshaping the mortgage experience, tech convenience, and customer satisfaction and how those go together…Craig, the floor is yours!

Craig Focardi: It’s always customary, and I think, important to talk about some of the challenges and the pain points on why we need to transform. While it’s oftentimes easy for people outside of the industry to criticize us as backward, I’ve seen a lot of significant progress, although it’s been a complex process. Currently, granular processes are still document-driven and custom docs still contain a ton of data, and customization is at the county and state level. That being said, I think we’ve come a long way, but these are sort of the key challenges that we still face. For example, as recently as the third quarter, processing timelines are still very cyclical as it’s taken the industry an average of 45 days to close a loan, according to Ellie Mae. We were at 47 days coming out of the refi boom, so there hasn’t been a lot of progress as it’s still document driven. eClosing can help shorten aspects of the pre closing and closing processes. It will also help with costs.

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