5 Reasons to Integrate Consumer, Mortgage Lending

In today’s economy, banks should aim to deliver personalized offers for products and services that consumers need at the exact moment when they need them.

Unfortunately, many financial institutions house data about their various products, including consumer and mortgage loans, in departmental silos, resulting in lost opportunities to cross-sell products and services. Lost cross-sell opportunities may cause banks to lose money and account holders. When loan officers within each business unit are only interested in increasing the sales of their individual products, rather than enabling the sale of multiple lending products across their institution, they leave money on the table. Moreover, account holders may have different experiences, or be asked for the same information multiple times when applying for each loan type.

Although banks can offer affordable and competitive loan products and services to consumers, they need an effective strategy to break down silos and reach borrowers wherever they may be on their financial journey.

Millennial and Generation Z consumers, for example, are often first-time borrowers. As more members of these generations look to purchase homes, lenders will want to provide top-notch digital and personalized experiences and educate them about other financial products and opportunities.

Compounding that, rising costs due to inflation and the ever-changing economy are also taking their toll on consumers’ pocketbooks as they deal with debt, including credit card debt and student and auto loans. Forty-five percent of millennial and Gen Z adults are concerned that they will be denied mortgage loans because they have more debt than income, according to the Maxwell 2022 Millennial & Gen Z Borrower Sentiment Report.

While it’s no secret that consumers expect more from their digital interactions, financial institutions face challenges keeping up with technology change. Consumers are left feeling that their bank doesn’t offer the seamless experiences, value for the money or the innovation they want from their digital relationships.

To create the best possible experiences, banks should consider the benefits of integrating consumer and mortgage lending. Here are the main reasons why they should:

1. Eliminate Silos
Disparate consumer and mortgage lending teams create silos within a financial institution. A unified lending experience removes these silos and can lead to better communication, enhanced cross-sell opportunities and an improved overall consumer experience.

2. Create Better Application Visibility
Banks can streamline the lending process with the ability to access all open applications. This means that if a mortgage applicant has an existing application in progress within an integrated platform, lenders and bankers have visibility across systems.

3. Modernize Application Pre-Fill
Borrowers can save time and reduce errors when filling out new applications with a pre-fill feature. Pre-fill enables mortgage loan officers to access a consumer’s profile from the banking core data and use it to pre-fill a new mortgage loan application. This feature delivers a better, faster and more satisfying consumer experience.

4. Maximize Cross-Sell Opportunities
The consumer experience shouldn’t stop with simply fulfilling a borrower’s initial request. The bank’s system and processes should work to cross-sell and cross-qualify consumers to improve their financial well-being and deepen the relationship.

5. Optimize Consumer Debt
One innovative way that bans can go beyond the initial closing is enhancing customer relationships using a debt optimization approach. This approach reviews the borrower’s outstanding loans to find and recommend refinance options for auto and personal loans to help reduce the borrower’s debt-to-income ratio. This can increase the chances that a borrower will be approved for a better home loan, saving them money.

Integrated consumer and mortgage loan origination systems simplify the digital lending process. Forward-thinking lenders use data to tailor their products to borrowers’ needs, offering consumers the right products and services at the right time to create positive experiences along with additional banking products.