1. M&I Upgrades Mortgage Tech So Loan Officers Can Focus on Selling
American Banker | Tuesday, May 10, 2011
By Kate Berry
When Noel Watts, the vice president of mortgage banking at Marshall & Ilsley Bank, set out to upgrade the lender's origination
platform two years ago, he expected interest rates to rise and mortgage volume to plummet.
The opposite happened.
Rates dropped and volume jumped as Watts embarked on six different simultaneous technology projects. It was a juggling act, but
one that the $49 billion-asset bank, a unit of Marshall & Ilsley Corp. of Milwaukee, says has begun to pay off.
"We were doing everything we could to free up the loan officers' time so they could focus on sales," Watts said. "We knew at some
point rates would rise, which would increase our need to prospect and secure purchase business."
With interest rates dipping again, this time around the bank's loan officers can promise customers that a loan will close in as little as
28 days on average, compared with 45 days to 60 days on average before the upgrades.
Many large banks take 90 to 120 days on average to close an application, much to the consternation of customers, who often get
frustrated with the process.
"We went from being the Flintstones to the Jetsons," said Julie Joseforsky, senior vice president of retail lending and collections at
M&I. "All of it was done in the thick of the refinance boom."
It was also done ahead of Bank of Montreal's deal to buy M&I's parent company for $4 billion, announced in December. According to
Joseforsky, when executives from Harris Bank, the Canadian company's Chicago unit, reviewed M&I's mortgage operation, they said
they'd make the technology a model for Harris after the deal closes in July. Jim Kappel, a Harris Bank spokesman, would not say
whether this is true, though he said the integration of M&I "is proceeding well."
Mortgage lenders often grapple with unifying multiple systems.
Larry Walker, a consultant at Genpact Mortgage Services, a technology provider based in Irvine, Calif., said there is "cost benefit"
when lenders make a mortgage application "as electronic as possible."
"The stronger, more sophisticated mortgage players are all moving in the direction of paperless mortgages," Walker said. "If you look
at a loan file, it is common to have more than 100 documents in the file by the time the loan has closed."
One of the main obstacles is that "there are an awful lot of people that have jobs in maintaining a paper-based system," he said.
M&I Bank found that the problem went far beyond its loan origination system, which was not even integrated with a consumer Web
portal. The bank's loan officers spent thousands of hours manually inputting loan applications into 16 different computers, which
took time away from prospecting for customers.
To streamline the application process, the bank invested in a point of sale system from Wipro Gallagher Solutions Inc. and added a
consumer Web portal from MortgageBot. Now loan officers get email alerts when a customer submits an application online.
Customers will be able to go online to submit an application and check the status of their loan.
Watts estimated that these two system changes alone eliminated 3,256 hours of nonsales activity, or 22 hours per mortgage banker
a year.
"I like to say we gave our sales team an additional half of a week to serve customers," he said. (The company would not disclose the
cost of any of the upgrades.)
More problematic were the disclosures (and redisclosures) that the bank had to mail to customers to comply with the Real Estate
Settlement Procedures Act rules that took effect in January 2010.
M&I Upgrades Mortgage Tech So Loan Officers Can Focus on Selling - ... http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/176_89/m-and-i-upgrades-mort-t...
1 of 2 5/10/2011 4:28 PM