Business Insights

Scale Up, Scale Down

How to Manage Market Cycles With Intelligent Automation

If you’ve been reading this series, you already know intelligent automation is transforming mortgage banking. You know it can decrease your costs to originate and increase profitability and productivity.

You’ve also learned it can provide the scalability you need to weather the market’s cycles.

In this blog post, we’ll look at three common scenarios that show how intelligent automation helps you scale up or down without adding head count or laying off staff.

Scenario 1: You need to speed up cycle times, so you don’t miss out on opportunities.

You can have the best team of loan originators and underwriters on the planet, but even rock stars can only work so fast. When you’re dealing with spikes in volume, you need to do whatever you can to speed up cycle times because the longer it takes, the more chance you have of losing out to another company that’s moving faster. And adding staff is not the answer.

Automating underwriting and document classification can dramatically improve cycle times and your competitive advantage. The key is having a holistic automation solution versus spot solutions that require multiple vendors. A single platform lets you run automations throughout the loan manufacturing process, versus a variety of disparate solutions that may or may not communicate well.

The Mortgage Automation Suite brought to you by Richey May Automate and Zoral Group is a standalone solution that’s natively integrated. Once we’re in your tech stack, you have all of the infrastructure you need to accelerate the speed at which you can scale.

Scenario 2: You need to cut staff because the market has cooled off.

Cycles come and go in the mortgage industry. So having to scale up or down is nothing new for you. But what if there was a different way to manage the market’s cyclicality?

What if you could prepare to take on less volume or more volume at any time while keeping your staff steady?

Intelligent automation not only helps you weather downturns without layoffs. It also helps you retain talent because there’s less risk that jobs will be eliminated.

Terra Johnson, SVP Controller at Allen, TX-based Highlands Residential Mortgage saw the value of RM Automate in keeping her staff steady. She used it for purchase advice automation and realized 50% productivity gains in her department (the equivalent of 1.4 FTEs) in the first year.

Asked about advice for anyone considering intelligent automation, Johnson said, “It’s the day and age of technology. You [have to] utilize it when you can. And there is no reason anybody should be hesitant about using this.”

Scenario 3: You need to scale up quickly when the market heats back up.

The Mortgage Automation Suite by Richey May and Zoral is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has tremendous elasticity. It’s actually structured to scale your virtual workforce automatically. You can still hire more people so you don’t stretch your underwriters too thin, but you may not need as many as you would without automation. Better yet, you can be a little pickier with the talent you’re going after since your built-in backup workforce alleviates some of the pressure to add staff right away.

When you do bring on new staff, the Mortgage Automation Suite products have an intuitive user interface that makes onboarding a breeze. Its easy adoption actually makes it a great recruiting tool. Imagine telling a prospective underwriter that your technology stack can triple the number of loans they would normally process, with no frustrations or friction points.

Richey May and Zoral’s Mortgage Automation Suite provides the end-to-end solution mortgage banks need to scale up or down on demand and manage market cycles seamlessly. Contact us for a demo today.