Transcription:
Vishal Rana: (
Hello. Good morning. I'm Vishal Rana. I lead the customer success and operations teams at Snapdocs, and we're here together with Weichert Financial to talk about their implement journey and, I'll pass it over to Sean to kick us off.
Sean O'Flynn: (
Thanks Vishal. Good morning. Sean O'Flynn and I am the senior vice president of process improvement and talent management at Weichert Financial Services. Tim?
Tim McLaughlin: (
Hey, good morning everybody. Tim McLaughlin, I am the chief investment officer at Weichert Financial Services.
Vishal Rana: (
Thanks Tim and Sean for joining. It's been really a pleasure working with your teams over the past year, getting you up and running with a digital closing platform. And one of the things that struck us at Snapdocs, as we look back at working together, is kind of the process you went through to choose, evaluate and ultimately select the partner and the great partnership we've had since. Before we jump into that story, I'd love to just give the audience a sense of who you are and what your organization's about. Tim, can you give us some background about Weichert?
Tim McLaughlin: (
Yeah, sure. So Weichert Financial, we are part of the Weichert family of companies, 19 individually-owned companies within the umbrella. Some of them being mortgage title insurance. The focus of our company really is one-stop shopping to really drive home that value proposition for our customer partners. The real estate company, which was the first in the Weichert family of companies was started in 1969. The mortgage company, which Sean and I are part of, was acquired in 1980. And again, the real focus is how do we deliver an umbrella experience to our real estate offices, our relocation partners, our franchise direct and Brandex customers.
Vishal Rana: (
Great. And so you've got this wide range of businesses. You're working both with kind of your captive sister companies to drive loan origination volume, but also other organizations that can bring you volumes well. And you've got this broad range of services. Why were digital closings something that you wanted to focus on and bring to market when you did?
Tim McLaughlin: (
Yeah, so for Weichert, you know, digital relevance is crucial as we enter and kind of progress in this next decade. What we wanted to do was compete and get ahead of the market. We really wanted to optimize the customer experience. Our main business goals when it comes to the digital space is being digitally relevant, being competitive and giving a unique and really strong customer experience to our customer base. As Weichert has built upon our digital presence, we really wanted to be a first adapter in the hybrid and the eClose space, being on par with, and even getting ahead of a lot of our investor base that's out here. In addition to that, we really feel like digital closings, that is going to be the wave of the future to maximize our customer experience.
Tim McLaughlin: (
And that's what our ultimate goal is, right? To deliver a resounding customer experience. We want to give the customers the tools that they want. It's certainly something that we're hearing demand for from the borrower side. And we're taking it in phases. We're in a good space on our hybrid closings right now. We look forward to how do we build upon eClose and RON, as that expands. And our customers are excited as they see the options that are available as we roll out each of these components.
Vishal Rana: (
That's great. I mean, it's one of those things that we run into as we talk with different companies, is a lot of organizations are really looking at digital closing as a way to be competitive in the market and to offer borrowers a great experience. And so I'm glad that that resonates for you all. And then also, I think there's what I heard in there was a bit of digital maturity, right? You wanted to be ready for the capital markets as they sort of got online with eNotes and RON, and be able to execute in the best way possible. So that's great. When you came to market and Sean, I'll, I'll ask you this one, to try and evaluate who was gonna be your partner through this process, right? Because this was a kind of, it's more than just a technology implementation, right? There's, there's more to it. Tell me a bit about where you started your process, and then eventually I'll ask you about kind of the evaluation criteria and so forth.
Sean O'Flynn: (
Sure. Thanks Vishal. We really started our research in 2019 and Eric Declercq, who is our CEO and president had just joined the company in 2018, end of it. And he was assessing the businesses and he started mapping out his priorities. And one of them was very clear. He wanted an end-to-end digital solution, so from application all the way to closing. So we did what we do every time we consider a new technology. We reached out to our industry peers. We have a very talented colleague base. So we spoke to our mortgage advisors who are the best in the business, right? And our operation staff. And we narrowed it down to four and in early, 2020, we decided on Snapdocs.
Vishal Rana: (
And so what were your evaluation criteria? What were the factors that went into making that decision and what ultimately made you pick Snapdocs?
Sean O'Flynn: (
Sure. Good question. We had our priorities, the main one was we were not experts. We understood that. So we needed a partner who had done this, who had been in the space, a relatively new space, for several years. And, you know, as we were making decisions, the decision and we were close to executing the agreement with Snapdocs, there were new names that were popping up. Some that we had never heard of, others provided different technology, but now we're getting into the eClose digital space. And we, you know, it was intriguing to us. So we spoke to a handful of them, but at the end of the day, we wanted somebody with real market experience. And we did our due diligence, like I said, and we got references from Snapdocs and from the other options and believe it or not, like, I understand most people say, well, of course, you're gonna get good references from the person that you're evaluating or the company.
Sean O'Flynn: (
But we were very specific. We wanted somebody who had our technology stack, the most important being our LOS, which is Encompass. And it needed to be a direct lender, had to be our size. So about 85 to 100 originators. Snapdocs provided that without any question. As I got on other reference calls in my team, our team, you'd be surprised we get on the call and yeah, so they're on Encompass, but they're a bank or, they're a direct lender, but they're on a different LOS. So the comfort level was definitely with Snapdocs. And our founder, Jim Weichert, I've heard it over the last 20 years, a hundred times, people and customers have options and they want to buy from a provider that has, that you trust so that you like and trust. And that's how we felt about Snapdocs.
Vishal Rana: (
Great. Yeah. I mean, just jumping in on that trust piece a little bit. I know you mentioned when we were chatting, some of the folks that you interacted with throughout the process. Were there things that stood out to you about the team?
Sean O'Flynn: (
Absolutely. So Rick Demaret, Who is our first point of contact, super responsive you know, it was a crazy time, everybody's busy, but he would return our calls. He'd be proactive. And some of these other companies, I think maybe they were looking for answers to the questions that we were trying to get to, and we go days and we go maybe weeks, and it's just not comfortable. So not only, it's a trusted advisor approach, right? And we instill that with our mortgage originators. And they're very good at it. You wanna work with somebody who you trust and who's an expert in what you're trying to purchase.
Vishal Rana: (
Right. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting when you think about that's in many ways, the business you are in right? Which is being a trusted advisor for your customer. And so when you see it in the companies you wanna partner with, you recognize it immediately, right? Because it's the thing you've been building all this time. Absolutely.
Vishal Rana: (
And you get kind of this ideological alignment, right? That you know that your companies share values. And so that's awesome to hear. When you, after you finish, I mean, you mentioned a little bit of the sort of procurement process and working with Rick and walking through that process. But once you signed up, you know, I'll open this up, you know, first to you Tim, and then we can move back-and-forth with Sean if you've got additional comments on, what was the implementation experience like? Like how did you all sort of plan for, what work did you do? What did, Snapdocs do to help? How was the technical integration?
Tim McLaughlin: (
Yeah, sure. So I will let Sean get more in the weeds because he was the primary point person on this piece of the project lift. But I will tell you that, you know, it was a heavy lift. And I think while Snapdocs did a good job of managing our expectations and what would be involved, once you got into it, you realized that there was a lot of work and a lot of resources needed internally, which is challenging sometimes when you're juggling with your data, right? Like everybody has like three or four jobs these days. So, I think Snapdocs was a great go-to to point us in the right direction, to answer questions, to help us with the lead. Managing the timeline and the expectations was the biggest a-ha for us I think. Sean, would you like to add?
Sean O'Flynn: (
Yeah, sure. So the implementation, the thing I was most concerned about initially was the integration with Encompass, the LOS and, you know, we've run into challenges in the past. And that was very simple. So I was surprised. The connection and the integration was hands down one of the best. And then selfishly for me, the kickoff call, I can usually get a gut feeling of how the project will go. Usually if the project manager has a project plan, and if they will be the ones managing it, like I have no problem doing it. But as Tim said, it's a lot of work and we can manage from our side, but who's managing the project from an overarching aspect? And Dane Johnston was tremendous. He was, probably one of the, he was actually, he was definitely one of the best implementation managers that I've had an opportunity to work with. And he had everything spelled out: timelines, who was doing what, if we ran into any issues he was always available. So from an implementation standpoint, Tim is correct. It was a lot of work learning, just the, different vocabulary and understanding the different nuances between the eVault and all of those aspects of it, is learning curve. But from an implementation project management standpoint was very good. Seamless.
Vishal Rana: (
Yeah. I want to double click for a second on, Tim, the comment you made around, this is a lot of work and it's complicated. I think one of the things that we find with customers is, they underestimate the number of, kind of other things outside of the direct integration and the work with Snapdocs that they have to do, or whoever their provider is, right? There's a lot of work you need to do with your counterparties and your investors and things like that, to make sure that you're clear on all of your compliance and things like, you know, and I think one of the experiences that, you know, and I'll selfishly plug ourselves, that we value ourselves on is being able to give you guidance, right? I'd love to hear a bit about that experience, as you had to go through kind of the heavy lift of connecting with your providers.
Tim McLaughlin: (
Yeah, sure. So in addition to, you know, making sure that all the plumbing worked internally with Encompass, et cetera, we had to partner with our external sales partners, Fannie, Freddie, the aggregators, the warehouse banks, our custodian, our sub-servicer. So there were a lot of different components that needed to be plugged into the equation. And as we went through the build, you really start to get a feel of how many tentacles and how far reaching this really is.
Vishal Rana: (
Yeah. It's one of the reasons I think when we hear from customers like you and others, that really the value of having somebody, as you mentioned, Sean, in your evaluation criteria, somebody who's been doing this for a number of years matters, right? Because there's a lot of nuance in all of this as you mentioned, Tim, that having someone who's walked the walk a few times before is really, really helpful. So Sean, I think one of the things that was really interesting is watching kind of what I would say this crawl, walk, run approach to your adoption of Snapdocs. And what we've seen as we work with our customers is one of the keys to success is to ultimately get to the point where the business is comfortable where you're doing the vast majority of your transactions on Snapdocs. I know you've gotten there, but can you tell me a little bit about that journey?
Sean O'Flynn: (
Sure. Yeah. A lot of technology projects, the goal is to get stood up, right? And oftentimes you put so much energy into just getting everything working that, take that deep breath and it kind of just gets handed off and you're on your own as a client. And fortunately, we didn't see that with Snapdocs. We were assigned our customer success managers. So, Tati and Landers, and they were very involved in phase two, which is really where you get your money's worth. So it's adoption and it's hard. It is the hardest part of any kind of implementation. You need to change the behavior of the people that are doing the work. And so there's a lot of communication, communicating the reasons why we're doing this. The reason why is we wanna get more efficient at our closing process, we wanna have one process in place.
Sean O'Flynn: (
We want the borrower experience, as Tim said earlier, they will have a better experience. So the crawl, walk, run was, "Hey, here it is, get comfortable with it as you can on your timeline," right? But eventually we will be walking and we will be measuring. And Snapdocs was very good at providing that data, those metrics. So which closers aren't quite there yet? Is it product? Is it training? They offered additional training. And then it became run, and by the time we were running, it was really at the executive level. It's Eric Declercq saying, "This is our model. We will be doing digital closings, so we gotta get there." And we did. So we're at 95% adoption, which is great. And we've been doing that now for the last four months. So it's not just a trend. It is now part of our business model.
Vishal Rana: (
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think that sequence, right, there's sort of, you know, the advice you get and getting everything stood up, and then there's this sequence that happens after. And I love how you frame it, Sean, this is sort of like where you get your money's worth, right? Because you can set everything up, you can hook up all the pipes, but if you're not actually doing loans through the platform, you're not getting any value. And you've just spent a bunch of time and energy setting something up that that honestly was a distraction. And I think one of the things that's really important to us and honestly like a huge part of what our team does is to really work with customers, to move through that journey of crawl, walk, run, getting from, "Hey, let's make sure that the technology's working, let's start in a controlled area and make sure it's all working," and then eventually move to, "Hey, let's, let's roll this out more broadly, get some proof points and stories on how this is changing the workflow of being more efficient and how it's working downstream for your investors and things like that," making sure you've got all those kinks out. And then eventually, and I think your pattern is really similar to what we've seen elsewhere, is eventually there's a leadership directive that says, "Okay, we've shook out all the cobwebs. It's all working. We're now ready for prime time."
Vishal Rana: (
And that's really where we see, customers see a lot of the value, particularly on the efficiency side where, you know, now your closers know exactly what's gonna happen. It's gonna go through Snapdocs. It's gonna be this process. They're not having to make a bunch of decisions at the last minute when they're pressed for time trying to close. And I think that's really that single process, as you mentioned, Sean, is where you get a lot of the value. And that's whether the loans go through as wet or hybrid, ultimately adding on eNote and then finally getting to RON. Like, the closer doesn't need to really process that as much when they know it's going through Snapdocs, they can know that they''ll get to the right kind of mode that you've selected. So that's awesome.
Vishal Rana: (
One of the things that I'd say we've been really excited about is the relationship we've also had during this kind of post-implementation phase on new product capabilities. And Weichert's been an early adopter of some of the new features that we've been putting out. And a lot of that's been from feedback, from you Sean, right? Asking the team like, "Hey, we're seeing, you know, settlement uptake, not be as high as we wanted." And so then we launched some changes there. Other things with kind of loan officers, access and things like that. I'd love to hear some of the capabilities that you were able to take advantage of, and why they were important to you.
Sean O'Flynn: (
Sure. So again, so this is now phase three, I guess you can call it. And as you get comfortable with the technology, as you built it into your process, you get feedback from the users. And so like Nancy Crocetto, who is our senior vice president of operations, she had her team engaged and sharing that feedback with us. And a lot of times companies will have a wishlist, and you get kind of put on this wishlist and they'll tell you, "Hey, as soon as we get 20 more companies that are interested in that feature, we'll add it on," right? And I've been waiting for a couple years now for some of those to go into place. The refreshing thing with Snapdocs was we shared features that we felt were important to us. And I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that three of our top, or four of our top ones went into production within three-to-six months.
Sean O'Flynn: (
And a couple of those were very close with our settlement partners and they were having a little bit of a difficult time, not terrible, but a little bit of difficult time with the dashboard. And they wanted just a more user-friendly presentation. So we shared that with Landers. That is now in production. There were some features within the user access where it was kind of one size fits all. You can go in and you have ability to change the closing docs. You have ability to delete data. And not that anybody would do it on purpose, but as an originator, you're busy, and you're trying to explain to a customer, "Hey, these are documents that you need to sign." They could fat finger something. They could make a mistake as they're going through the different pages.
Sean O'Flynn: (
And we didn't feel comfortable with that, but at the same time, it's important that the originator, the mortgage advisor, has visibility into the documents, because they're the ones closest to the customer and that's who the customer will be calling. So we shared that with Landers and now we have a new user role where it's just view, there's no edit rights, you can't make a mistake, but you can view it and you can help that customer. So those were two important features. And then just as far as making the day more efficient for the closers, if for whatever reason they need to redraw documents, you had to cancel the, the Snapdocs package. You had to start it over again. So now there's a feature where you can redraw, you can redraw those documents, you don't need to start from scratch. You can redraw either one document or the whole package. So those were important to us. And it was great to see that Snapdocs listened, they put resources to it and all of them are in production.
Vishal Rana: (
Yeah. I think, you know, when I hear about that, right, what I often hear from customers is, "Okay, that's great. You've launched all these features, but now I gotta go in and implement them." Tell me, you know, real quick, like how much effort did you have to put forth to get those new features live for the team?
Sean O'Flynn: (
I mean it takes effort. Everything takes effort and it's training and it's adoption, but pretty seamless. Landers scheduled the training, as many trainings as we needed. He would coordinate with our settlement companies. He would have 2, 3, 4, 5 trainings with the closers and Nancy's team, as many as we needed. And yeah, so it was seamless.
Vishal Rana: (
That's great to hear. Let's change gears a little bit. Tell me a bit about, like, what are the outcomes, like the things that you've measured for your borrowers and your internal teams? How do you know that this is working?
Sean O'Flynn: (
The biggest thing that we measure as an organization our custom satisfaction numbers. Would you refer us to your friends and family? And throughout the pandemic, throughout implementing Snapdocs, it has not dropped below 95%. And as an aggregate total it's been 97%. And the response rate, which to me is just as important, close to 60% response rate. So our customers are telling us how they feel. And that to us as an organization is the most powerful reinforcement that we're doing the right thing. And that means our technology. That means our process. That means everything that we're working hard to achieve. So yeah, it's definitely our customer satisfaction results.
Vishal Rana: (
So, you know, maybe Tim, I'll pull you back in here. Tell me what are you working on right now? I know you've had some exciting launches in September, and I know that we're, what's ahead? What are we planning for Q1?
Tim McLaughlin: (
Yeah, sure. So, I think the launch of the hybrid has been exciting across the family of companies. Next on the docket was the eClose, building an eVault, having the capability to do a fully-functioning eClosing. And we did our first four, the first one in September. We got our warehouse banks and our custodian involved. We've done two each with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I think it has been a very seamless process. You know, anything, when you do the first couple, you learn what you don't know, right? Let's know what we don't know. So I think we have the template set, I think the biggest challenge as it comes to ramping up the eNote production right now is acceptance by the investor community.
Tim McLaughlin: (
Fannie Mae will accept them. Freddie Mac will accept them. A lot of, and I would say by a lot of, I mean, most of the aggregators, private investors, et cetera, aren't there yet. So, it causes a little bit of a disconnect when you have your two main GSEs who will accept these, but all your other counterparties are still working on functionality to take these commonplace on day-to-day transactions. So that's the biggest roadblock for us right now regarding eClose. And then RON's on the radar screen for 22, 23. Certainly we're seeing legislation being passed in a lot of states. We're in New Jersey, so we do a good percentage of our loans in New Jersey. Legislation was just passed there. But we need adaption. We need rules of engagement. We need a process and that's been very slow coming together. So we're keeping our eye on the RON piece on when we can integrate that in with the eClose. But right now I think the main focus is working with our non-accepting eClose partners on how can we get you on board so we have a full slate of investors who will accept these.
Vishal Rana: (
Yeah, Tim, I think I hear your sort of concerns, right? I think in acceptance and then just the regulatory environment for RONs. I think these are challenges that all of our lenders are facing across the country. You know, it's easy if you sell all of your loans to Fannie and Freddie, then eNotes is kind of a no-brainer because you know that you'll be fine. In the case of a lot of organizations which are doing kind of best execution kind of on the, on the back-end in capital markets, it starts to become a little bit more challenging, right? You don't always know who you're gonna sell the loan to when you're originating and you know, you wanna keep your options open. So totally understand that. I think some of the capabilities that Snapdocs' really been trying to help with are allowing companies to see a bit more visibility around what acceptance exists within your network, whether it's for the location, where the property is for RON. Or if it's the slate of investors that you as organization have to get acceptance of eNote.
Vishal Rana: (
And so, you know, those e-Eligibility capabilities are things that we've been really spending a bunch of energy on and building for the industry, right? Because really for this to become mainstream, we need all the participants to join in, right? Like this current state of, you're not quite sure what's going to happen once you originate the loan, makes it harder for everybody to figure out the right process to go forward. And so I think one of the things, if we had to take away from this session is, I know we've been talking about this as really getting our peers here in the industry to really put pressure throughout the organization to say, "Hey, look, we want to do this type of work, this technology's here."
Vishal Rana: (
Well, as we wrap up, I I'd love to give you a moment. It seems like you've really gone through this journey, and like many companies that go through the journey, have a lot that you've learned as you've gone through the process. If you could give some final advice to our listeners here on what they should be thinking about when evaluating a partner for digital closing and thinking about the process of actually implementing, help our friends here with their next step.
Tim McLaughlin: (
From my perspective, there's three main takeaways. I think crawl, walk, run was, very apropo. I think you need to manage your expectations. There is gonna be a timeline on the process. The review of your partner evaluation is critical. And you know, I think we are thrilled that we chose the right partner in Snapdocs. And then, I would add having a dedicated team lead in place to manage this from an organizational perspective, because this was one of the many jobs that Sean and I have in co-managing different pieces of this together. And it was daunting. There was a lot of time involved. You really need a dedicated team lead. Sean, what would you add to this?
Sean O'Flynn: (
Yeah, I'll wrap it up in 30 seconds. So I would just say, think about who you're partnering with, make sure they can provide the support to you. You got three phases: you got implementation, you got adoption super important. And then you got, when you're live and running through your process, who's going to be the partner with you to add those features that are important to your individual business model. So I would do that. And if you're on the fence, I would say, do it. Have one process for closing? This is the way the industry's going. So if you're on the fence, do it.
Vishal Rana: (
Awesome. Tim and Sean, thank you so much for your time in telling your story.
Sean O'Flynn: (
Thank you.