How American Mortgage Firms Can Effectively Leverage Offshore Outsourcing

Mortgage origination and underwriting are complex, methodical, multi-faceted processes vital to homeowners and businesses but often draining to the firms that provide them. Origination involves a number of phases, requirements, compliance checks, and mountains of paperwork coupled with electronic forms and submissions. Tracking all of these elements, in a timely fashion, across various clients can easily put a strain on mortgage brokerages.

Attempting to scale business to meet market demand, and to do so cost effectively, is even more daunting. Firms are further constrained by limited resources, payroll expenses, short work weeks, bank holidays, and employee churn that increase the need for HR and training investment.

While many American mortgage firms are hesitant to look outside their in-house employees or traditional staffing options for support, leveraging offshore outsourcing offers a number of business advantages. With the right partner, outsourced mortgage origination support services can give your firm a reliable and cost-effective way to adjust to the ebb and flow in demand, reduce processing times, and free up internal resources to focus on growth.

Working with an outsourcing partner does not mean eliminating US-based operations. What it does mean is that you can balance workflow, diversify staffing, and offset expenses while prioritizing other business areas for success. Here are some ways American firms can effectively outsource origination and underwriting tasks to offshore teams.

1. Reduce Processing Times

Loan origination and mortgage processing are naturally time-consuming processes. They include numerous components, often coordinated across buyers, sellers, lenders, and other interested parties. Outsourcing repetitive or process-driven tasks can reduce your overall processing times. Offshore teams can enter application content into Loan Origination Systems (LOS) and confirm all requirements are met based on standardized checklists. They can also review submitted documents to confirm whether a loan is ready for underwriting. Outsourcing these workflow components expedites processing and frees up internal staff to work on more strategic tasks.

2. Reevaluate Internal Resources

Making sure you have the right people focused on the right tasks can help you maximize the investment you make in your in-house employees. Mortgage specialists and account managers are best utilized on relationship management and handling nuances or troubleshooting with buyers or lenders. Evaluate which team members are losing time to tedious or repetitive actions. Then, consider outsourcing these tasks to offshore teams. High volume tasks like data entry and form review can often be replicated with checklists and training, allowing you to get more from your current employees or downsize your payroll.

3. Achieve Greater Consistency

When you have multiple people with different backgrounds, training, attention to detail, and level of interest working on loan origination, you may find inconsistencies from account to account or broker to broker. Instilling the need for consistency can be an uphill battle with internal teams focused on pushing through paperwork processes to get to the next account or to meet quota. Outsourcing document preparation, calculations, verifications, and material review can create consistency that yields higher accuracy and success rates. The right outsourcing partner will ensure that their project manager understands the details essential to your business and that all team resources follow the same requirements to compile and process the same way. Consistent collection and coordination across all of your accounts will make it easier and faster for you to move loans forward.

4. Close and Sell Loans Faster

Business growth can be restricted by the speed at which internal resources can manage required tasks. Leaving individuals to prioritize their own work, manage multiple accounts, and manage a book of business while moving current accounts forward can restrict time to close. When you partner with an offshore outsourcing agency, you can expand and expedite time to close for loan origination. Teams can be allocated to work around the clock in organized shifts so that your business moves forward even when your in-office teams head home for the day. Updated accounts, filed paperwork, completed reviews, and next steps for underwriting will be waiting for you when you return to the office the next day.

5. Scale to meet market demand

Demand for loans changes with the market, and this can be admittedly unpredictable. Right sizing your in-house teams to support the changing needs of your business is difficult and costly. Onboarding new staff to support origination and office tasks uses resources, time, and funds that take owners and managers away from vital business functions, only to leave them with too many people and not enough work to do when demand lessens. Partnering with an outsourcing provider gives brokerages greater flexibility to scale up or scale down based on staffing needs and market demand. Only contract for the support you actually need, and you will also save on training and benefits that would otherwise go to in-house teams.

5. Cut Down Training Overhead

Origination and underwriting require detailed workflows and compliance that, in turn, require proper training and oversight. Every time you onboard a new employee, you have to ensure that the team member has the right training. This means dedicating time and resources to explaining processes and monitoring performance. Most outsourcing companies will dedicate a project manager to each account. You spend your time with a single training and become confident that your project manager is clear on your needs and processes. Subsequent training for all new offshore team members, including turn over management, is handled by the outsourcing partner, not you.

6. Decrease Employment Overhead Costs

Training isn’t the only thing that can impact your business expenses. When it comes to labor costs, benefits, overtime, and even overhead on software licensing and office supplies, upkeep for in-house employees adds up fast. Keeping dedicated internal mortgage brokers on staff is key to managing relationships and handling high-skill tasks that reflect the wage rates you pay. But many support functions can be outsourced at a fraction of the cost. Leveraging offshore teams provides the same benefits as bringing on more staff at a fraction of the price with almost no additional overhead. This cuts down on the number of internal employees you need to compensate and also makes sure that the employees you do keep on payroll are spending their time (and your money) on tasks that matter.

7. Improve Customer Experience

Your clients are your priority. So you might worry that outsourcing aspects of your origination and underwriting processes could impact the customer experience or how they view your business. When you partner with the right outsourcing partner, your business workflows become more efficient and more transparent. Clients continue to work the in-house mortgage contacts they expect to communicate with. The behind-the scenes, high-volume tasks are what benefit most from outsourcing. Everything is done in confidential systems and methods with compliance at the forefront. Nothing leaves your systems or affects the client experience negatively. In fact, customers will not see interruption in the process; they will experience more seamless and quicker loan processing.

8. Optimize Origination

Outsourcing helps you diversify your labor resources and increases efficiency for origination and underwriting. You will be able to reply to customers faster, move processes forward, identify fraudulent or invalid applications, and even implement pre-underwriting for more thorough verification. With offshore support, you can achieve more with less cost, less friction, and less overhead. You free up internal resources to focus on growth and relationships and close loans quicker. Outsourcing repetitive tasks or processes easily replicated with workflows or checklists allows you to optimize your origination, instill confidence with lenders, and pursue more business than you could take on before.

Every business is unique, and adding outsourcing to your business strategy requires careful consideration. If you are interested in exploring how outsourcing mortgage origination support services can help your company grow, reach out to us here at Assivo. We provide customized consultations for every client and can walk you through how offshore teams can turbocharge your business with an eye to scalability and cost savings.