Streamlining Loan Closing

A digitally advanced mortgage market has thrown up challenges for lenders especially in the loan closing space. From meeting timeframes to making sure that consumers have an accurate and consistent experience, lenders often come across roadblocks in providing a seamless consumer experience while closing a loan.

According to  Andy Crisenbery, SVP and Managing Director of Lending Solutions at Black Knight, these challenges could include the closing not being well coordinated. Consumers, said Crisenbery, will get "multiple copies with the same information that they need to review and sign, versus just being able to login to a portal and provide their information one time and end up with a timely response on where they are."

From the lender's perspective, he noted, the process was all about making sure that the consumer remained engaged in an automated consistent manner while providing them a status of where they are with the loan application and transaction.

The fact that various lenders use different eClosing methods can also complicate the process.

However, technology is helping lenders to not only expedite the process of closing a loan but also streamlining it in a "way that provides the least disruption for the lending and closing community."

"There are good opportunities to change the interactions with end users for both communities in a way that doesn’t require anyone to change operational processes or technology platforms that may be in place today," Crisenbery said. "Our approach to introducing technology to improve the closing is to enable the most electronic way to close a loan based on the jurisdiction’s requirements, the product, and the participants involved without disrupting technology and operational considerations for each."

Black Knight launched an enhanced version of its Expedite Close solution on Wednesday that uses advanced intelligence to determine the best way to close a loan based on lender preferences and jurisdictional requirements, whether they are wet ink, digital, or hybrid in nature. The new solution supports eClose, eNotary, and eSign as well as traditional wet-ink mortgage closings while instantly analyzing packages of static loan documents. It creates live, searchable data from their contents and determines which documents can be signed digitally.

From the consumer's point of view, this kind of technology helps in significantly enhancing the borrower experience, whereas from the lender's perspective, its post-closing capabilities aggregate and fully audit all documents to deliver a unified, searchable closing package.

Crisenbery also stressed on the time and cost savings associated with the way lenders implement eClose or eMortgage. These could range from a few hours to several days, along with the financial savings of the technology involved, which ranges from $40-50 all the way up to $260-270.

"Savings can range all the way from a cost savings of around $35 or $40 just to implement eDelivery or eSignature capabilities to help with parts of the loan package, all the way up to $260 through a totally electronic close," Crisenbery said. "A true eMortgage includes operational savings with either eliminating or minimizing manual tasks associated with the loan, all the way to time and financial savings with getting the loan completed more quickly and the cost of money during that timeframe.