Meanwhile I'm going through a mortgage refi and the mix of old and new technology is comical. I was hoping things had advanced since I last went through this a decade ago but not so much. This is through eRates Mortgage and you might think the "e" stands for electronic, but I'm not so sure.
So far I've had to:
- Fill out an online credit application form, which among other things ask me what year I started my last job and converted that to "years and months" but was off by one since it appeared to be doing math as if the current year is 2016. That was at one particular web site.
- On another web site, I was then able to e-sign about a dozen documents. However, about half a dozen documents I had to print out, sign, scan, then upload to a third web site.
- One of the forms had an error, so I received an email from a mortgage officer that read "You've received an encrypted message from XXX@financeofamerica.com. To view your message Save and open the attachment (message.html), and follow the instructions. Sign in using the following email address: me@example.org". This comically required me to register with live.com so that I could read the actual email and reply with a corrected version of the form via an outlook web interface.
- Yet another mortgage officer contacted me for additional forms, these were sent as PDF attachments that I had to print, sign, scan, and email back (over regular email this time) as further attachments.
- There is no online site I can use to track the progress of things. I just have to call or email periodically.
- The forms as you might imagine are a mix of ancient government mandated forms and sundry other requests that are from the loan company's underwriting department.
On a semi-related note, I also just rolled over a 401(k) which was also unable to be done electronically. The old 401(k) institution overnighted me a check which I had to combine with a form I printed out from the new 401(k) institution, then I had to overnight those to the new institution. 3+ days of lost market gains.
The mortgage documentation problem is on my list of things to work on starting Q3 2017. I'd love to hear more about what's pissing you off -- may I email you?
Had a company that was solving sort of this problem a while back (early 2000s). Read in forms (1003 for example), did automated underwriting (hooked in with Fannie Mae), pulled in rate sheets from different Banks to do automatic rate calculations for loan officers. Rate sheets were loaded in daily. There was a rules engine to cover the many complex rules required to determine if a loan was viable for a given 1003 form, etc.
The issue has never been the backend systems at banks -- I've worked with that stuff starting from origination through securitization and on to secondary market trading.
The problem is the customer abuse ("needs list") that is a hallmark of underwriting. There has to be a better way to get all that information from the customer in the vanilla case.
> The issue has never been the backend systems at banks
I find this hard to believe considering the pains we were solving: now quite some time ago. Maybe they have changed.
Excessive burden on mortgage consumers is driven by many aspects.
At it's core is (was if what you say is true) the inability for backend systems to effectively aggregate and verify the necessary context to easily meet regulatory needs.
We were starting to aggregate such data allowing us to automatically verify and then fill out all forms necessary for the mortgage consumer.
So far I've had to:
- Fill out an online credit application form, which among other things ask me what year I started my last job and converted that to "years and months" but was off by one since it appeared to be doing math as if the current year is 2016. That was at one particular web site.
- On another web site, I was then able to e-sign about a dozen documents. However, about half a dozen documents I had to print out, sign, scan, then upload to a third web site.
- One of the forms had an error, so I received an email from a mortgage officer that read "You've received an encrypted message from XXX@financeofamerica.com. To view your message Save and open the attachment (message.html), and follow the instructions. Sign in using the following email address: me@example.org". This comically required me to register with live.com so that I could read the actual email and reply with a corrected version of the form via an outlook web interface.
- Yet another mortgage officer contacted me for additional forms, these were sent as PDF attachments that I had to print, sign, scan, and email back (over regular email this time) as further attachments.
- There is no online site I can use to track the progress of things. I just have to call or email periodically.
- The forms as you might imagine are a mix of ancient government mandated forms and sundry other requests that are from the loan company's underwriting department.
On a semi-related note, I also just rolled over a 401(k) which was also unable to be done electronically. The old 401(k) institution overnighted me a check which I had to combine with a form I printed out from the new 401(k) institution, then I had to overnight those to the new institution. 3+ days of lost market gains.