Executive Summary
We’ve discussed how an agile operating model and defined digital strategy can help lenders stay competitive through unfavorable market conditions. We’ve also discussed how business intelligence technology can save lenders time and money. Here, we explore further how BI tools leverage new technologies to enable lenders to effectively and efficiently make business decisions, streamline and improve their processes, develop and enrich their human resources, and more.
Why Business Intelligence?
In these times of uncertainty and doubt, understanding how you fit in to the market around you is key to success in home mortgage lending. No matter the size of your enterprise, you require real-time data and comprehensive analytics to gain the insights you need to remain competitive. Implementing a customized BI solution offers a unified point of access to achieve this, ensuring both operational managers and key executives have a full understanding of trends in your market, your firm’s competitive position, the risks your firm is facing, the opportunities laid before your firm, and most importantly, how they fit into the firm’s strategies. More than saving time and money identifying, gathering and processing data, a BI solution can fundamentally change how knowledge and information are able to drive innovation and growth within your operations.
Getting Visibility
Optimizing the flow of information throughout your business can effect immediate changes in your workflows, allowing you to process applications faster, understand your borrower segments more clearly, detect fraud and manage risks more easily, comply with regulations on a more consistent basis and better control the quality of your customer service. A BI solution can achieve much of this through providing you with clear and accurate KPIs, simple, high-impact metrics, that can give individuals a large amount of information in a very small amount of time. These KPIs, when accurately calculated and intelligently presented, can reduce the need for (and risks of) heavy reliance on intuition and instinct in your company. A BI solution can offer live visibility into your operations, leveraging APIs to extract data from your LOS, and other points across your operations, and constantly using this data to populate dashboards and visualizations that you can customize and define to suit your own particular needs.
With a cutting-edge BI implementation, you don’t need specialized personnel to turn insights into iteration and evolution of your operations. Take, for instance, a simple KPI like your cost-to-close. Once your BI system is configured to calculate all production costs, direct and indirect (to include advertising and sales, processing and administration, etc.), you’ll always have a clear figure for how much you’re spending to close on loans. Realtime comparison between this and other fundamental KPIs, for instance, pull-through, can offer immediate insights into how your lending practices can be refined. Every opportunity to detect and resolve an issue before it becomes a problem increases your likelihood of survival, and the more KPIs you’re able to monitor, the more of these opportunities you will have.
A BI solution allows you to enjoy the benefits of micromanagement without all the wasted time and energy that typically comes along with it. It’s your bridge, your command center, allowing you not just a panoramic view of your business, but the ability to direct and effect change on any scale, from broad strategies down to individual employees. You can use operational KPIs like your average cycle times and approval rates not just to monitor productivity and cost ratios, but to get live feedback as you implement improvements and new ideas into your operations. Intelligent analysis of simple KPIs can tell you where things need tightening up, who needs more or different training, when you’re ready to expand and grow, and what niches in your market you can leverage to achieve that growth. Easy access to all your data in the form of easy-to-grasp figures makes performing quality control easier than ever. That’s what you’re missing out on without a business intelligence solution of your own.
How We Can Help
Here at Indica Digital, we’ve worked tirelessly to design a business intelligence tool made specifically to suit the needs of mortgage lenders. Nalo is the perfect tool for decision makers, with a dashboard designed around loan production, made to ensure executives, operations managers, etc. have instantaneous, unrestricted access to all the information they need to make balanced, intelligent, informed decisions. Nalo is built from the ground up to make you a more effective and efficient lender, and to make managing your portfolio in this inhospitable digital landscape easier than ever. Connect with us today to get started.
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