What Can Retail & Wholesale Lenders Do to Win Back the Mortgage Borrower

What can retail & wholesale lenders do to win back the mortgage borrower

Over the last several quarters interest rates have slowed down the volume of fresh originations as well as re-finances. Lenders have also had to battle higher costs on account of increasing compliances. But having said that, successful lending companies are continuing to capture a good market share among the originations that take place. How are they able to do that, while some others are complaining and are not able to sustain?

Age of the Millenials

If you closely watch some of the originations over the past couple of years, you will quickly notice that in several of these, the persons buying home are not traditional middle-aged guys, but millennials who in most instances are buying their first homes. Work brings them to different locations and once they are comfortable about the location, they feel like owning a house there.

Now, if a good number of originations are happening through millennials, then lenders need to think about the millennials, while they restructure or align their origination process. Clearly this change in demographic warrants lenders to adopt more modern ways of interaction, loan initiation to providing services. In the case of millennials, this means that most of these services need to be provided on their mobile devices.

We had discussed a few months back about –Why the Borrowers Love the Mobile Experience. However, what is it that grabs the borrower’s attention? The interface and the initial offers may be perks enough to get a buy in first, however how can lenders ensure that the borrowers stay and even come back when similar needs arise later on?

Engaging the millenials

This is where the engagement aspect comes into picture. The app design and feature do play a crucial role in doing so. Think in terms of what does the app offer apart from acting as a quick communication channel? Or what can it offer? Mobile originators often offer features like Mortgage calculators that provides the borrowers a complete view of what their monthly payments would beand also allow them to check the actual affordability.Personalization to give them a sense of familiarity, with avatars and various other profile customizations.  In addition to these, you can also have borrower alerts, push notifications, document scanners, analytics and reporting which makes the app multi-dimensional and more compliant with the modern standards.

The ease of uploading and reviewing and editing documents makes the whole mortgage process simpler for the millennial borrowers,  who have less time to spare or are constantly on-the-move. A mobile solution sends back an immediate feedback when errors are made, and hence corrections can be done promptly.This also eases the process at the lender’s side, as the reviews become easier, and hence the whole processing time is reduced too.

Most importantly for millennials, and other mobile users it is usually the experience that counts. From the user interface to the flexibility offered, the mobile app can provide various factors of engagement.

Visionet offers to you, LoanVelocity which consists of modular, white-labelled digital assets and mortgage origination services that help you leverage the mobile platform effectively to engage with borrowers and initiate loan applications. The solution can be white labelled, for your specific requirements and is currently available on Android and iOS.


Sameer Wadhwa

Sameer is a market facing client relationship leader with 18+ years of experience of working with clients. He has been focused on implementing Digital Transformation solutions for client’s businesses and he has specific focus on Mortgage and CPG domains.

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