Mortgage
How to Get Your Team Onboard for a Data-Driven Culture
Articles by: Richey May, Jul 21, 2025
In today’s fast-moving mortgage landscape, organizations that embrace a data-driven culture gain a significant edge. Success is no longer determined by instinct alone. Instead, the most effective mortgage lenders are aligning their teams, decisions, and strategies around timely, actionable data.
Creating a data-driven culture means more than just implementing new software. It’s about changing how your people work, think, and collaborate. Everyone, from loan officers to underwriters, must use data as a daily tool to measure performance, streamline operations, and serve clients better.
Why Data Matters in Mortgage Lending
In mortgage lending, timelines are tight, margins are narrow, and customer expectations are high. Business Intelligence (BI) solutions give you the ability to see what’s happening inside your organization in real time, allowing for faster decision-making, clearer accountability, and improved outcomes.
As we’ve seen firsthand, the right BI solution can transform a mortgage company’s operations. However, the implementation strategy often determines the success of that transformation.
To build a data-driven culture effectively, we recommend focusing on three essential elements: speed, ease, and expertise, which one of our own clients has cited as their top priorities. Consider the following metrics as examples:
- Speed: Time to close, loan cycle time, pipeline duration.
- Ease: Conversion rates, app completion, borrower touchpoints.
- Expertise: LO performance vs. benchmarks, referral growth.
Identify Mission-Critical KPIs
The foundation of a data-driven culture lies in your KPIs. These performance indicators should reflect what truly drives success in your business. They also need to evolve over time as your strategies shift.
One of the best ways to ensure the success of your KPIs is to carefully select them, based on the roles they will impact most directly. For example:
- Loan Officers: Pull-through rates, locks per business day, fundings per month
- Underwriters: Turn times, error rates, touches per file
- Processors: Milestone completion rates, file quality metrics
Each of these KPIs clearly conveys what those who own them must accomplish, and, in so doing, how their work materially affects others within the organization. When everyone understands what matters and how success is measured, it becomes easier to align actions with results.
Make Data Accessible Across All Roles
Data needs to be democratized. This means making relevant, role-specific information accessible to every employee, not just to management or analysts.
Loan officers, underwriters, and processors each need their own dashboards, built with the metrics that are most relevant to their work. This type of transparency fosters collaboration and ensures that the entire organization is working from a single source of truth.
As we explained in our article The Data Don’ts: 5 Common BI Implementation Pitfalls, adoption of data is about transparency across an organization. When teams see shared goals reflected in shared data, silos start to break down. Conversely, when BI implementations go awry, they often fail due to poor planning, unclear goals, unnecessary segmentation, or lack of training. To avoid these issues:
- Define clear business objectives before choosing a platform
- Involve users early and offer consistent training
- Build routines around using the platform daily and reviewing results regularly
Use the BI System as the Source of Truth
To gain lasting value from business intelligence, your team must trust the system and use it consistently. That starts by making your BI platform the official reference point for performance.
Set expectations clearly from the beginning. Tie KPIs from your BI platform into job descriptions, training, and performance reviews. When employees know that their numbers will be pulled directly from the system, they’re more likely to engage with it.
Make dashboards a core part of your meetings, and review them consistently. Showing how performance is tracked both helps and encourages team members to invest in the tools at their disposal. When data becomes a tool for self-improvement rather than surveillance, adoption increases—and so does performance.
Build Your Culture with the Right Tools
A data-driven culture isn’t built overnight. It takes leadership commitment, cross-team buy-in, and a platform that simplifies rather than complicates the process.
That’s why we built RM Analyze. As opposed to generic alternatives, Analyze is designed specifically for mortgage lenders, offering intuitive, role-based dashboards and pre-configured KPIs that help you move from reactive decision-making to strategic execution.
RM Analyze helps teams see the story behind the numbers: not just what is happening, but why it’s happening. It helps organizations avoid implementation pitfalls and realize value faster, with better alignment and adoption across teams.
If you’re serious about building a true data-driven culture, RM Analyze is your next step.