Get Off The Paper Trail

By Mark Brousseau

The mortgage industry is inundated with paper: original signed applications, title forms, personal identification, appraisals, and more. Managing all of these documents through the traditional steps of organizing, photocopying, faxing and filing is costly, inefficient and unnecessary. That’s according to eGistics Vice President David Whitehead (dwhitehead@egisticsinc.com).

“Lenders would be much more productive if they didn’t have to spend so much time shuffling papers, searching for loan files on someone’s desk, or carrying paper from one department to another,” Whitehead told me. Statistically speaking, industry studies show that employees spend an hour-and-a-half to two hours per day shuffling papers. Whitehead noted that, “Reducing this paper handling time by a half hour or more could have a significant impact on a lender’s bottom line. Lenders can become more productive, service their customers better, and save big money.”

Whitehead said there are four steps to getting off the paper trail:

1. Capture documents immediately at the point of entry
2. Capture any kind of documentation
3. Capture these documents without having to manually index
4. Make the documents immediately available in electronic format throughout the organization

Whitehead warns that Step 4 is critical.

“Most of the useful work on a mortgage document is done within the 48 hours of its life,” Whitehead said. “So an organization has to ensure that their mortgage document aren’t just imaged, but available to be extracted in a way that is straightforward and intuitive for users. Otherwise, the siloing of information adds to the challenges of effectively managing the overall customer relationship.”

Once they get off the paper trail and move to electronic document management, Whitehead said lenders can achieve lower operating costs, greater collaboration, reduced cycle times, improved customer service, and better support for governance, risk and compliance initiatives.

Has your lending organization implemented electronic document management? E-mail me at m_brousseau@msn.com.