Jane Mason, CEO, Clarifire
Mortgage servicing looks little like it did 20 years ago, thanks to technology and market events that have had profound and often devastating impacts on lenders, servicers, and borrowers, if not our entire economy. But if there is one particular characteristic that separates today’s servicers from yesterday’s, it’s dynamic workflow automation.
The need for workflow automation was apparent to me from the moment I entered the industry. Today, many mortgage servicers rely on automated workflow technology, to some degree. But it took a series of natural disasters, and an ultimately global pandemic and economic crisis, for workflow automation to really take off.
The Beginnings of Automated Workflows
Before the 2007-2008 market crash, servicers primarily worked in the background and had minimal resources; in fact, they were typically looked at as the cost burden of mortgage banking. I was working for a legal firm that handled defaults when the market tanked, and all of our customers began experiencing huge volumes of requests for assistance. Suddenly, mortgage servicers found themselves in a brand-new world filled with intense regulatory scrutiny, punishing fines, operational challenges, and scathing criticism of their antiquated systems and processes.
It was complete chaos. But amid the wreckage and unrelenting demand for homeowner relief, there was a huge opportunity to help servicers and their struggling back offices by deploying automated workflow technology. By automating complex manual processes and applying versatile, easy to change, dynamically-driven workflow throughout the entire servicing and loss mitigation process, servicers could eliminate their dependence on spreadsheets and hard coded tracking systems and save enormous amounts of time. In doing so, they could give their customers the attention they deserved.
It took years for organizations to right-size themselves and implement new technologies and controls for governance and reserves. As I anticipated, organizations that embraced workflow automation fared much better than those organizations that simply chose one of the big-box servicing platforms that only sustained unhealthy paper habits.
