The mortgage industry has always dragged its feet when it comes to adopting new technological innovations. No matter how advantageous it may be to adopt new technologies, the mortgage industry has been hesitant to do so. The mortgage industry in many parts of the world is still inefficient, incredibly slow, and quite complicated. The process for applying for a mortgage has required manual underwriting and stacks of paperwork for years. Not to mention the amount of personal information that customers need to be into mortgage application forms seems repetitive at best and downright creepy at worst. That isn’t even touching the mortgage industry culture throwing a wrench in the works. The mortgage industry is still coming out of a lengthy historic decline for the mortgage industry as a whole. Professionals in the mortgage industry have done it the same way for the past 20-30 years and it works from their perspective, so why would they change it? [1]
The primary motivator for these changes is customer expectations. As the number of Millennials in the workforce increase and they start moving into houses of their own, they are demanding a change to the mortgage status quo. No longer do customers want to deal with what they perceive as insanely large prices for getting a mortgage. By automating a lot of the mortgage application processes that are typically done by hand on behalf of the lender, this can drastically cut the cost of mortgage origination. [2] They think that spending thousands of euros on originating a mortgage is absolutely absurd. Additionally, new customers are annoyed with how long the entire mortgage application process takes. Customers these days don’t want to have to develop a months-long plan to get a mortgage and then enact that plan. Time is money to them, and they don’t want to waste that proverbial time focused entirely on getting a mortgage. [1] Finally, new customers are dissatisfied with the lack of control over when they start the process. New customers don’t want to wait for business hours on the weekdays to start applying for a mortgage; they want to start the process whenever they want. These new customers want access to the mortgage application process 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, with as few data inputs as possible. [1]
These new demands from new mortgage customers are incentivizing the mortgage industry to change. Whoever hops on the technological innovation track fastest with the best solutions will get the lion’s share of new mortgage customers.
This article was written by Ian, an intern at Irish Mortgage Brokers and Yes.ie.
References:
[1] https://www.housingwire.com/articles/43201-the-mortgage-industrys-digital-future/
[2] https://dsnews.com/news/02-13-2018/solutions-in-search-of-problems