Between 2018 and 2020, the total annual volume of loans originated by the Mid-Island Mortgage Corporation increased from just under $250,000,000 to nearly $600,000,000.¹ This massive increase in customers presented major challenges for loan officers at Mid-Island. Like many lenders, Mid-Island relies on multiple software solutions to conduct business; the MeridianLink Mortgage LOS to originate loans, and SlimCD’s all-in-one payment gateway. A lack of integration between these two solutions began to generate issues for Mid-Island’s loan officers as they struggled to handle the huge influx of applicants brought about by the highly unusual market conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This lack of integration required loan officers to manually carry out time consuming tasks in the origination pipeline: issuing charges for loan origination fees, sending these charges to borrowers, updating multiple departments about the status of payments’ and updating loan files as fees were paid. This manual management of hundreds of appraisal costs, re-inspection fees, subordination fees, project questionnaire fees, CEMA fees, etc. placed unbearable demands on loan officers. Beyond reducing the loan officers’ work satisfaction, the workload negatively impacted their ability to dedicate time to their clients. Senior personnel at Mid-Island approached the digital sherpas at Indica Digital with the problem, and we stepped in.
Immediately, we began to analyze the situation to understand the all of the factors in play: the overwhelmed loan officers, the long queue of payments in need of processing, and the disjointed software solutions being used. After consulting with the teams at Mid-Island, we formulated a holistic solution that addressed each part of the problem.
We built an API to integrate SlimCD with the MeridianLink LOS. We designed this integration around the loan officers, giving them the ability to enter payment data directly into MeridianLink Mortgage. Our API takes this data and automatically generates a SlimCD payment transaction, then sends a link of the payment to the officer and the borrower. As soon as the borrower has paid, our application uploads receipts to eDOCs and updates the loan file with receipt date in MeridianLink Mortgage. All the different stakeholders working on the loan also get receipts, meaning loan officers no longer had to manually communicate across teams as different fees were paid.
Loan volumes remain very high at Mid-Island, but the amount of time being spent processing them is smaller than ever before. Loan officers are once again satisfied, no longer struggling through mountain upon mountain of payments to process day after day, week after week. Most importantly, the customer experience is no longer compromised: loan officers are more available, responsive and happy to help. Because of our custom solution, Mid-Island is positioned well to thrive well after market conditions return to normal.
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