TransferSafe

Background:
Once a borrower applies for a mortgage and is pre-approved by a Loan Officer, the real work begins. Contracts have to be drafted, reviewed and signed. A barrage of documents must be requested then supplied. Homeowners insurance has to be acquired and proof provided. Appraisals need to be ordered, paid for and completed — and these are just for your run of the mill, vanilla purchase or refi.

The days between pre-approval and closing is one of Guaranteed Rate’s biggest KPIs and getting a loan up to and through Underwriting is often the most costly and time consuming part of the entire process. It consists of Mortgage Consultants and Underwriters reviewing and organizing countless documents that Borrowers supply to prove that they are truly qualified for the loan they want.

When I joined Guaranteed Rate, these tasks (and many others) were completed as if it were still 1997; with paper, faxes and email attachments. These methods weren’t only antiquated but resulted in significant security, efficiency, transparency and accountability concerns.

Objective:
To address these issues, I was tasked with designing TransferSafe, which we eventually rebranded as myAccount. It’s primary goal was to the bring the post-application phase of the loan approval process into the 21st century and tightly integrate these tasks with our in-house loan origination system and GR’s POD Model. To do so, we had to accelerate and bolster collaboration between the key personas in the loan manufacturing process; Borrowers, Mortgage Consultants and Underwriters.

We later set our sights on expanding the platform to include the automation of borrower tasks, reducing errors and speeding up the verification of income and assets by integrating with third party services like AccountChek and The Work Number and building out sticky content like mortgage payment processing, credit health monitoring, home valuation reporting and fast-tracked refinances.

The aim was not only to ensure speedy and seamless closings with as few hiccups as possible but to keep Guaranteed Rate top of mind for our borrowers once the initial transaction of closing the loan was complete. Generating new customers is a lot more costly than retaining existing ones and there was so much more we could offer our borrowers to keep them engaged with our umbrella of various services.

Guaranteed Rate’s product org was a brand new group at the outset of this project. We were handed a tight deadline, broad business requirements and had no shortage of eyes on us. Getting a successful MVP out quickly would be a massive win not only because of the impact it would have for borrowers, LOs and their support staffs, but also for earning the trust of our many key stakeholders while cementing the reputation of GR’s product org as both effective and reliable.

Process:
I had very little time to perform proper, initial discovery so I had to move fast and efficiently. I began with some contextual inquiry, shadowing a handful of high-performing LOs and their PODs. I joined them at their desks while they worked, observing and asking questions along the way. There was an astounding level of one-to-one hand holding with borrowers; lots of verbal explanation through phone calls, emails and all progress tracking was being done via Outlook folders, spreadsheets and hand-written, paper notes. These immediately jumped out to me as huge opportunities for inline borrower education, process streamlining and automation of repeated, menial tasks.

What shocked me most weren’t the massive inefficiencies inherent to this all, it was just how many documents with super sensitive PII like W2’s, paystubs and tax returns were being emailed back and forth only to be copied to someone’s Windows desktop before being organized and ‘printed to the eFolder‘ – a shared document repository for final Underwriter review. The security risks were worrisome, the process was convoluted and I knew we could solve for both while delivering a far better experience.

After completing enough research to feel like I had clear understanding of the problems, I mapped out a flowchart for what the team felt it could deliver promptly and got it in front of our stakeholders:

The flow proposal elicited positive feedback from the business, the PODs I shadowed and my team, so I began designing screens for each step.

We launched an MVP with guided, step-by-step pattern. I received a ton of initial user feedback and metrics, and upon review, there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that I’d nailed the design of Enterprise portion of the app. Our internal users loved its simplicity, how it kept the entire process on rails and that it saved so much time by drastically reducing data entry and having to track everything by hand.

The bad news was that arranging the app in a linear, wizard fashion did not accommodate true borrower behavior well. The borrower’s process was more of a back and forth, with them logging in multiple times, usually over the course of a week, to complete the tasks piecemeal rather than taking a single, straight shot toward the finish line on the first pass.

Armed with real-world user data, I went back to the drawing board to solve for this new revelation. I felt a hub and spoke navigational model would be better suited for how our borrowers were actually engaging with their tasks rather than the wizard model from the MVP.

I reworked it as a to-do list with all borrower tasks organized into either incomplete or completed sections. When presenting this new concept to my stakeholders they stressed that all tasks weren’t equal and that certain ones should still be completed before others. I solved for that by adding a third, dynamic section for high priority items.

Another finding from the MVP user testing was that some borrowers simply weren’t willing to complete their tasks individually and instead were dumping all their files into a single task. This was problematic since the goal of organizing them into individual tasks saved our PODs from having to sift through the files and arrange them in the proper review order for our Underwriters. This resulted in more work for GR employees but one of our principal core values as a company was “putting the customer first” so I designed a deemphasized, catch-all bucket at the bottom of the page that would formally allow for this behavior without promoting it too heavily.

This was also an opportunity to update the UI to more closely match our Digital Mortgage and Loan Finder products to create a more cohesive feel across the entire borrower experience. It necessitated changing our wayfinding to a design that kept users keyed in on where they currently were in the larger mortgage process while providing insight as to how far they were from actually closing. My stakeholders bought in to all these proposed changes, so I got to work on the new design.

Results:
After shipping these updates, both user testing and analytics showed that the new framework made a marked improvement in getting Borrowers to complete all their tasks in fewer days and while reaching out to our Mortgage Consultants less.

The catch-all space for bulk-dropping documents also reduced the number of users that were skirting the system by uploading all their files into a single, unrelated task since they now had a dedicated place to do so. This resulted in less confusion and greater time savings for the POD members when reviewing, organizing and preparing the files for Underwriting.

Borrower adoption was also positive as we saw a significant drop in the amount of users sending their sensitive documents to us as email attachments, one of our topmost goals from the outset. Compliance was swooning, but the biggest takeaway was that our total number of days from pre-approval to close trend precipitously downward, ultimately falling from around 44 days to just below 29, a decrease of nearly 50% and a massive win not only for my team but for the entire company.