In this engaging session, the innovative team at Langley Credit Union will share how they have used DocuSign and its integration with their LOS, Mortgage Cadence, to digitize its mortgage process to efficiency and bring expenses into alignment while boosting team productivity and improving borrower experience.
DocuSign’s product team will share strategies to turn headwinds into tailwinds that will help you differentiate your business and even improve customer retention. And, we’ll show you how solutions for eMortgages from electronic signatures, to digital closing to remote online notary can support lenders wherever they are in their digital journey, allowing them to build a modern mortgage and keep their processes moving efficiently.
Transcription:
Amad Amin: (
Welcome everyone today. Today's thought leadership with Langley Credit Union on how they digitize their mortgage process. My name is Amad Amin. I am the product director for the Rooms for Mortgage product at DocuSign. Before we begin, I wanted to go over DocuSign's safe harbor policy. As a reminder, today's conversation may contain statements that are forward looking. We believe our assumptions are reasonable, but they are subject to risks and uncertainties that may occur that may impact actual outcomes. A quick look at our agenda. We'll start off by introducing our guest speaker from Langley Credit Union, provide a quick overview of industry trends and observations. And then for a majority of our time, we'll focus on Langley's journey to digitizing the mortgage process. We will have time at the end for some Q and A. However, if at any point in time during this conversation, you would like to ask questions, please feel free to do so on the chat and we will address them at the end of the conversation.
Amad Amin: (
Before we begin with our conversation with Langley, I wanted to share here with you a few observations we have seen taking place in the industry. Some of the challenges we have seen in the mortgage industry is currently navigating multiple headwinds, decreasing volume, increasing loan production expenses, and evolving borrower expectations, especially the shift towards digital enabled solutions. However, there are also bright spots as closers return to productivity levels we haven't seen for almost a decade. In today's session, the innovative team at Langley Credit Union will share how they have used DocuSign and its integration with their LOS Mortgage Cadence to digitize its mortgage process. This has helped them with boosting team productivity and improving the borrower experience. In our discussion, we will share strategies that turn headwinds into tailwinds that will help you differentiate your business and even help improve customer retention. Joining me today will be Rob Lefkowicz, VP of mortgage lending at Langley Federal Credit Union. He currently leads Langley's mortgage operation function. Langley is a top performing $4 billion credit union with a $1.1 billion mortgage portfolio and annual originations exceeding $450 million. Rob, thank you so much for joining. We are excited to have you on. Can you hear us okay, Rob?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Yes, I can now. I just got my unmute. Hey, thanks for letting me join today and it's my pleasure to be here. And I'm happy to share my experiences with you.
Amad Amin: (
Yeah, we're looking forward to it. So let's kick things off by talking about why a digital mortgage process was important to your organization. Think about it in terms of where were you on your journey? What were some of the pain points you were encountering and why was this a priority?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
I appreciate that as our first question and I hope all of the attendees have enjoyed the speaker so far. I know I have, and something I heard yesterday is one of the speakers talked about how we've done good as a industry digitizing the point of sale application, but then talking about the processing and the closing. And we were right there with others on that. But we found as we're looking to grow from a local to semi regional organization to a, a larger regional player, we needed to evolve and change. The analogy that I would often say to people why we're doing this, when you get to the closing ceremony, you can have the book or you can have the pamphlet to sign.
Rob Lefkowicz: (
In the traditional model is, you go in sign your a hundred plus documents, move on. And, we just thought it could be better and different. As we've grown and continue to grow and move outside of our traditional geographic footprint, we've known that doing a digital closing and this type of a scenario is going to be really important for us. The two things I would call out while we're just talking about that is we send a lot of business to our wholly owned title and settlement agency. So we wanted to allow that organization to continue to grow with us, as we grow geographically. And, we wanted to be able to improve the borrower experience, really is our number one driver, and giving someone a pamphlet versus a book is a good thing to do at the closing ceremony.
Amad Amin: (
That's great, Rob, and it really, really resonates with a lot of what we hear from customers as well, especially on the importance of the borrower journey before we dig in a bit more and unpack what you said, how would you define eMortgage or just digital closing in general?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
As I've learned throughout this journey and process, it can meet a whole lot of different things. You could talk about just originating your application in a digital platform. You could talk about providing your initial disclosures. You could talk about doing a hybrid closing where you're doing partial digital signatures and wet signature on some documents, or you can even describe it as a fully digital transaction. For us in the scope that especially where we started with, we're really focusing in on the settlement transaction, and being able to a, and first and foremost, successfully complete a hybrid closing transaction, with a path forward into a fully digital, RON solution for a settlement.
Amad Amin: (
Thanks, Rob. So you outlined the digital journey and some of the initial steps you were looking in making that transition from wet to hybrid to fully digital. When you were scoping solutions and looking at what could be utilized by Langley, what factors led you to pick Rooms for Mortgage?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
The thing that really drove me the most is being a heavy DocuSign user generally across all of our business lines. I look for a partner that I knew and was comfortable with and trusted. And along with that the folks at DocuSign and Mortgage Cadence had done, worked together to, to build out the platform and showcase that the solution was available without me having be the person to do all the development and build out. For an organization our size, we have limited resources on development. So looking for our technology partners to provide some of that early lift was a big deal for us.
Amad Amin: (
And you've definitely hit on a couple of key points that I definitely want to expand on, resource intensive looking to come along with you for the solution from going from, a manual or more of a wet sign to a digital process. There's one part about buying the solution, and then there's a whole other challenge of around implementing and seeing value out of it. So when you were initially onboarding, not just with DocuSign, but just your staff in general, what was the initial plan? How did you lay out the initial adoption for the solution? How did you get over, any of the concerns the staff may have had?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Yeah, for sure. I don't know if I've met anyone in the audience, but if I have, you would know that I'm a go fast right now kind of person. I want to, in my mind, we're gonna do a digital closing next week and we're gonna do RON transactions and it was going to be awesome. One of the key things that the DocuSign for Rooms, folks brought to the table was making sure we do a crawl, walk, run type of philosophy. And we really narrowed in on the specific scope of when we would introduce the room into the transaction, what types of transactions we would do, what settlement agencies we were going to partner with in the first iteration. So we really defined and narrowed our scope for the initial iterations to get those first transactions completed, get them down, and then we'd built a project scope moving into the future.
Amad Amin: (
And that's great. And I the ambition of going digital fast. So if we can take a step back, how did we look at, from a digital roadmap perspective when you were having conversations with our staff here at DocuSign, how do we help navigate some of those milestones that you had set up from just doing the initial loan to finally setting your eyes on a fully digital mortgage?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
I've generally been pretty darn impressed with the crew of folks that the DocuSign team has and the expertise doing the work already. Cutting edge is preferred to me than bleeding edge. And it was encouraging and supportive to have the experience already there. So that was a big help. We've somewhat moved one from the implementation piece of all right, we've done this and we can do it, to really expanding out the next steps into the process.
Amad Amin: (
Thank you for that, Rob. And then if we think about just doing those initial steps and getting everyone comfortable, what were are some outcomes that you were looking for before you felt comfortable to advance in the digital journey?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
So the outcomes that we were looking for is, from a high level, borrower experience was the primary driver in outcome for an improved borrower experience. Other outcomes that we were really looking forward to and have seen, we've seen a lot more transparency across the closing process from borrowers providing documentation, closers working with settlement agencies, and then settlement agencies being able to like communicate with borrowers and all the other parties. So we've really started to check off those boxes of, what has the borrower experience been? And I called a person yesterday afternoon. I said, Hey, can you tell me a little bit more about how your experience went? And we got the positive reinforcement in the feedback that we were looking for. Anecdotally one of the first rooms we ever created, we had a borrower update all of their needed documents within 10 minutes, unprompted outside of the, Hey, here is your resource and place to aggregate your data. And we've also gotten really good feedback from our settlement partners on, on how easy it was. Like any new technology, there's often hesitation of is this going to make more work or add more time? And we've found that we've really been able to either reduce or keep the time and effort required to complete this transaction the same or better, frankly.
Amad Amin: (
That's great to hear, especially around the collaboration aspect of it, how end users are responding. That was definitely a focus of ours. When we started to look at what do we want to do? What kind of solution do we want to bring in the closing space? And we heard over and over the importance of the borrower experience and collaboration between lenders and title. So it's great to see that it's panning out like we had intended. You mentioned earlier in the conversation around some of the people that might be listening to our conversation today. So what advice would you give them if they're looking at picking out a solution provider or just based on your experience?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Yeah, so a couple things that I would recommend, is first really think about what your end target might be, and ultimately how far down the line you want to get. For us, the goal was to be to a point where we're doing fully digital closings and so, we set our expectations that way. In some scenarios, just going to a hybrid closing may be good enough and a perfect fit for some folks. And once you identify where you think you want to go in the near term, we really took a lot of time about evaluating our different technology partners to make sure everything fits throughout the journey. It seems like there were a lot of chicken before the egg conversations, from do you have a platform that allows the digital closings, and then does that partner work with your loan origination system?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Do the title agencies that you're working with, do their title insurers acknowledge the appropriate RON solution you want to use? And you can continue that on to who your e-note provider's going to be? And what investors that you may or may not be selling to, what are their requirements going to be? And it was very, interdependent on all of those. So you really got to make sure you take your time, and understand what each each piece does, so you're ready to move forward and not hit any major roadblocks.
Amad Amin: (
That's great. Thank you so much for elaborating on that. You've touched on a point around being comfortable with different aspects of the closing, and if you want to focus on hybrid, that's okay. Because there's value to be gained there as well. And that actually leads me to my next question, because in the research we've conducted, just with customers and people in general that are looking for a closing solution, the closing process seems to be the most resource intensive. And, when we think about it from your perspective, do you agree with that? And what would you say are the most intensive elements of closing?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
I would agree with that and the part that I would say is the most intensive is the preparation work that goes into being prepared for that closing ceremony, to include the work between the settlement agency and the lender, to then communicating with the borrower at the same time. So it does make it very intensive, but, maybe a story I would tell that really drove home for me, that we were making the right decision for someone in the mortgage space doing this, it makes a lot of sense. But when I took the idea and the vision of what we are wanting to do outside of the mortgage lending verticals here at the credit union, I saw lights flashing on every time I talked to somebody. And people would say, yeah, like you mean I don't have to sign all those documents and you mean that I don't have to drive somewhere just to sign a few pieces of paper. And, the experience that people who have been part of as a consumer of mortgage, relating to what this new experience is going to be and is, was really validation for us that we've hit on something that consumers really want.
Rob Lefkowicz: (
You could probably make the argument that consumers are demanding of this, and we want to be able to provide it. And also take advantage of the opportunity that we could tell people up front, this is how we conduct business and we do it because it's easy for you. We're looking to incorporate the philosophy and the ease of use all the way from the beginnings of the sales cycle and really leverage that, into more business and productivity.
Amad Amin: (
That's great. And you touched on this a little bit, especially around the preparation part and parsing through the documents, getting ready for signature. How much time would you say that took up, from your employee's perspective, and then how did DocuSign you address some of those operational efficiencies you were looking to gain?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
I would measure it probably in the hours for total time, back and forth between people communicating and getting agreement and balancing, that type of work. Also, to take into consideration the, I forgot to sign this document, or I forgot to initial this document, the quality assurance and checkpoints after the signing ceremony. So I think that easily could be measured in hours rather than minutes. One of the things that, I've been most excited about and my closing team and my settlement folks have been most excited about is when we're doing the digital signature, the mapping, into the signature date, initials, is all hard coded into our documents. So I'm sure most people are familiar with the DocuSign type experience where you plug in sign here, plug in the date. Well through the implementation process, we've hardcoded that in to all of our documents, so we know that the signatures and the dates and the initials are all going to be there and the borrower isn't going to complete the envelope without completing all of the needed signatures, dates, initials. So we found that that's really cut down on missed documents, misapplication of signature dates, that kind of stuff.
Amad Amin: (
And you spoke a lot about the importance of the the borrower's experience and helping gain efficiencies there. And in conversations you and I have had you've shared that borrowers are at the center of the innovation team at Langley, and they're really helping you drive this shift forward to being digital. So can you talk a little bit about how they influenced your future outlook, and then how they really helped you think through, thinking about the settlement process and how to innovate there?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
I mentioned earlier the folks who are part of the team have a lot of experience in this space. So we were able to lean on that experience to see what was out there. I've also been pretty impressed in our conversations and the openness of the team to evaluate new and other use cases for the solution. I see one of the questions popping up is about home equity. And that is another place where we're looking to leverage this technology, and take advantage of doing the hybrid and fully digital closings.
Amad Amin: (
Thank you, Rob. And echoing that a little bit in some of the research that we've done on the borrower side, and their impact just from a closing business perspective, three fourths of respondents shared that they actually lost business to another lender with the ability to offer more digital capabilities, to their borrower. Did you see any of that in just your experience or can you resonate with some of those findings as well?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Yeah, it absolutely resonates. I appreciate seeing the data that you guys brought forth to validate it. But I would almost equate it to, it's something that we just know. We know that is the pace of business and the way that business is moving. So we definitely take that to heart, and for us make it easy as one of our core values. And we know that doing this type, offering this type of solution makes it easier for our borrowers. We've also spent a good amount of time addressing how we might make some borrowers who are hesitant to utilize a digital transaction, more comfortable, from providing tablets for some of our settlement agents where they could view documents and still sign electronically right there in person while they're doing their wet signatures, to making sure we incorporate the hows and the whys at the beginning of the sales cycle, to make people more comfortable moving forward with it. And we think it's, as I mentioned earlier, we think it's only going to go from a nice to have to a must have into the future.
Amad Amin: (
That's great. You talked earlier about the role that integrations play, and then you specifically use Mortgage Cadence as your LOS. What role did the integration play in your decision making, and then what specific functionality were you looking for?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
It was significant. I'm glad I wasn't presented with the decision, but if I were, we likely would not have moved forward if there wasn't some type of an integration there and the things that are important for all integration, but this one in particular is we were not going to be flexible in having to rekey data from our origination system into the Rooms platform to generate documents. We weren't going to print and save PDFs from our origination system and then move them into Rooms. We needed those things to seamlessly work, and we've been pretty happy with how it's gone between the partners in the integration. And I've also been pretty pleasantly surprised with the few instances where we've ran into any challenges or speed bumps. We've been able to quickly resolve those.
Amad Amin: (
That's great. And as you think about what's in store for you now that you're getting used to conducting the hybrid loans and getting ready for fully digital, where do you see this evolving in the next couple of months?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
So, part of our crawl, walk, run was we started with specific transactions and agency I'll just call it out. I actually see it as one of the questions in here. We started with refinance transactions, cash out or rate and term, was not a variable to us. But we started with refinance transactions utilizing our wholly owned settlement agency. So that was first iteration. And as we grow, we're in process of adding our purchase transactions to that. Next iteration will be refinance purchase with external settlement agencies. And then running concurrently is when we're doing all of our back work and integration and work to be able to fulfill the digital deed of trust recording, e-note recording, vaulting and investing. So we hope to have our first fully digital transactions, mid-22. So we've set a somewhat aggressive timeline, but with the support that we've gotten from all of our partners, I'm really confident we can make it happen.
Amad Amin: (
That's great to hear. There's a quite, I know we have a couple minutes left. There's a question that's still in the chat that I think we can take on. So, the question's more broadly asking about transactions you plan to exclude when it comes to fully digital closings. You answered previously about HELOC but are there any that stand out in your mind that would not qualify for the digital closing roadmap you've laid out?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
That would not qualify? For maybe just a little perspective, we're a consumer facing organization. I wouldn't necessarily see this moving into our commercial transactions. But when we're talking primary residence, single family homes, traditional purchase, refinance, we fully anticipate doing all of those types of transactions. Transactions that will be sold to investors, transactions that we will keep on our portfolio just the same. We're building the product that we're working to include as many different things as possible.
Amad Amin: (
That's great. Rob, I want to end with a more philosophical question and then we can open it up to Q and A. We are scratching the surface with going digital and getting to a fully digital transaction process. What do you think the future looks like if you had your crystal ball, where do you see this going?
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Crystal ball? It's a little cloudy today, so we'll see how well it's going, but I think things like a digital mortgage closing are just going to be, that's just what it is. We'll look back and say, man, you remember when you had to walk in and sign all those papers? I think that is a foregone conclusion. Piggybacking on some of the things that I heard about yesterday from outsourcing of underwriting and processing and automated decisioning of the mortgage process. I think, and I hope that those things are all going to continue to round up into a much faster, less document intensive, less paper and less people intensive process, to be able to allow people to purchase and refinance homes.
Amad Amin: (
Rob, thanks so much for, for joining, thank you to everyone that has joined our session. We hope you found it informative. I think that wraps up our session. So, have a great week and enjoy the rest of the show.
Rob Lefkowicz: (
Thank you all.