Featured Case Study: Mortgage Investors Group Achieves 100% Conversion Improvement

All right.

Everybody, welcome. We're going to give it a minute while people are still joining. And Junior, I am going to ask you a question so it's not dead air. While everybody's joining, I'm going to ask you to share with the audience something, a fun fact about yourself that people wouldn't know about you unless you told them.

Well, one of the things I just learned is both of us have twins. So that was, that was kind of interesting. I have twin 19 year old girls both in college and just sent one back off to school. She had to go early. She played soccer and, and she just left this week. And then the other one, I'm in Tennessee so it's tough. So she goes to Alabama. So there's, it's in sitting in Knoxville where UT is and having a daughter in Alabama. You get a lot of like, of weird looks but very proud of her. But also I cut my own hair. I have since I was 18 trying to save money throughout my life and just kind of stuck with it. So there's that couple of them.

I love it. Those are great facts. So we're veterans of the same war. As I like to say to other twin parents.

I mean, yeah, I'm just a little bit ahead of you. I'm on through World War I and 2 and you're just getting started with your twin phase.

Yeah, mine are just turning five. So totally, totally different chapters. I could learn a lot from you.

Yeah, there's a lot to learn.

Well, let's kick this off. Junior, I'm really excited to share this. You're an excellent customer. I really appreciate you coming on with us. Let's do a quick intro for everybody who's here. The topic is how winning the hearts and minds of of mortgage investor groups Mortgage investor groups organization led to 80% savings in voie verifications and 100% improvement in the conversion of voies with tru. I want to make sure everybody knows that's why you're here. You've come to the right place. Junior, your EVP of sales and production at Mortgage Investors Group and I'd like you to just give a little bit of background about yourself, maybe how you got into the industry and a little bit about Mortgage Investors Group as well.

Sure. Well, that the EVP is my title. I think more of my role is a lot of why I'm here trying to make our lives easier. For the production team and my background. I started in the business in 96 and started as a loan officer was went into management, have been into Retail sales, management. For most of my career as president of a mortgage company for a period of time, been with a couple large banks, small community bank and also imb. So I've kind of run the gamut as far as mortgage providers and has taught me a lot. I sit at the home office, so I'm involved in sales and run the production group, but also very active in the operations side and working with our operations team on a lot of these decisions. So it's a, it's a good mix.

Awesome. Well, I like it personally and professionally. Jr, I think you're really cool. Everybody, this is going to be a real dialed in conversation. We are here to see the success that MiG has had with True Mortgage Investors Group has had with truv. And JR is just the person to do that for us. So we're going to kick it off by saying let's talk about before troove, like before you implemented trove, you know, what were you doing with VOIE before and what, what made you search for the change?

Well, we, we have always been looking for advancing in technology, so we've been out in the forefront of that and we had tried different. And also the big thing that we found was to be able to change your password when logging into your payroll provider. Just like me, I don't know my password. It's saved in the computer and it changes every 30, 60 days. So it's a bear to try and remember that. So it was really easy for customers and a lot of loan officers just recommended this, hey, if you don't remember it, just change it. And then you can always change it back or whatever. But it was simple to change it through your system and that helps a lot because a lot of folks get stuck and they say, well, I don't know the password, I don't want to deal with this. And then they move on and then it becomes more of a frustration. So there was a lot of reasons that we had some early adoption beyond what the company's looking for as far as data accuracy and cost. It was the user experience and the loan officer experience as well. Does that answer your question? Long way around.

No. No. Junior, that's great. I mean, you touched on two points that I think. One, the strategy of showing success from operators in the field, like loan officers in the field, that are successful using this and using that as a case study for the rest of the organization. That to me is the blueprint for how you roll out technology. And you did do that with a small pilot group of volunteers and it's awesome that you've got that in the organization, people willing to go and do that. And then I assume after they proved out the success, you were able to put True towards the top of the waterfall. As you know, most people have a verifications waterfall. Is that correct?

Yeah. So, so again we now we have removed, we have replaced true with or replaced another provider with true. But we still leave a couple options because some are just more comfortable. Some, some do capture certain employers or there's certain needs. If you need a 4506, you may, you may use a different provider. Whatever, whatever the case is. There are some that, that are better in certain areas. But I'd say overall Trube captures the biggest portion. But we do allow that waterfall and we instruct, hey, start with true. Unless you know, you know, you can look at the list and say this employer is not on there. Then, then you go to the other services and we all know that there's, you know, bigger services are more expensive. That kind of the, the have to sometimes and, and that's still available, you know, and then there's some that, you know, we, we, we are getting ready to start the asset verification portion. But we do have others that do assets and employment already. So you know, we didn't remove those from the capabilities, but we've got enough adoption and enough usage of True that that we are about to expand into the asset piece of it.

Well, I love, I love what you also touched on when you were talking about being a partner, you know, to the organization, a true tech partner. It's not like we're getting on, you know, our CS team isn't getting on with your team and doing a dog and pony show. They're giving real world examples of this is how you should be operating with the software to get the most return. Right. And I love that. Thank you for, thank you for touching on that. So let's, let's jump into the meat. The meat and potatoes. People want to hear about the success. You know, what would you. If you had to list those top couple success metrics or results that you feel. I think you've touched on a couple of them.

Yep.

But please go ahead.

Sure. So I kind of look at it from two lenses, right. There's the, the company and there's, there's the cost and there's the data accuracy. So obviously we want all that to flow through the system and be the same as when we start. And the data accuracy is a huge one. So the, the fact that we were seeing complete information Being returned was extremely valuable. So that flows all the way through to our HMDA reporting. And we know that it's not changing. It's the same in the aus, it's the same in the HMDA data. It's the same all the way through the system and we don't have to worry about it. And then we get our day one certainty. We have all of those pieces that come together and reduces our risk. So you take the risk component and then the cost, like we talked about and like you said we touched on the cost is, is speaks for itself. I mean, it was half the cost and, and even a little bit more than that, even a little bit better than that. And when you start talking about a scenario where you've got previous employment, maybe three, three employers in two years, and you've got a re verification at the end, and you're, you're two borrowers, I mean, that's, you're getting up to the hundreds and a couple hundred dollars for one loan transaction. And it's tough to try and pass all that on to the borrower. But this would save us 100, $150 in one transaction. You multiply that over a few hundred loans a month and it adds up obviously. And I know some companies will pass that on the borrower, but that still doesn't feel good. You're in the middle of the process, you're sending them a CoC and it's another $50 or another $100 and, and you know, they want to know what that is and just creates a concern and a question that, that you, you really want to try and avoid. So we keep our costs down. We disclose a number that, that allows us some, some leeway, but we, you know, we pick up savings and then when the customer sees a lower number at the end, you know, that's a win. So we're not, we're not increasing it through the process. So that's really the mig side of it and the business side of it. And then like we talked about with the customer and you know, one of the other things we noticed, and I don't know if this is specific to true, but we noticed a benefit when we went to truv was being able to go to previous employers and collecting that information. That was another one where, you know, if the, if the customer is not employed, a lot of times they can't log into their, their payroll provider. We did find access to that to be a little bit better. And we've been utilizing it for previous employment and things like that, so that's, that's where the loan officer sees the value and then the customer. It, we, we don't even have the integration into our LOS yet. I know you're integrated in a lot of loses, and that's, that's great. But, but we, we still use it in the forefront because we'll just send the link. Gives us an opportunity to explain. Here, here's what I'm trying to do. If you have any trouble, you know, here's a couple things you can try or a couple things you can avoid. And, and it. Then the customer expects the link. They know, they know to get their password. They, they see that. We bring it back, we upload it. It's not a big deal. You know, we're not, we're not going out of our system for five or six different things. And you know, we're also not sending voes where you, you worry about a fax, an email calling somebody to fill it out, follow it up, you know, a mistake being made, filling it out manually, all that kind of stuff you're avoiding. So we're doing this within minutes versus a day, two days, a week, things like that. So all of that is the win on the customer side.

Jr, you're a pro. You know what I think most of your peers need to hear, and you're touching on all of them, right? Right now you're talking about savings, you know, customer experience, accuracy of data, the customer support, D1C and AIM approval. You're talking about everything that they need to hear. So really, I think the success, you've, you've nailed it already. What I would ask you is if there's anybody who's kind of in your shoes before you signed up with True might be sitting on the fence right now. This would be the last question I'll ask because you, you really have killed it on this. Just kind of laying it all out there. What would you say to that person right now if they're on the fence?

Right. Well, yeah, and for somebody in my role, and another part of the consideration that I haven't even touched on really is where the industry is going. It's that traditional method versus the modern solution. And whether it's appraisals, credit, employment, income, assets, all that's going to be data driven. And at some point it's going to be 100% data driven, just like most industries. And True is out in front of where that, that is headed. And so we are finding that they're, they're the first to kind of deliver the next, the next piece, the next step, the next ease of doing business. And I think that's what you want to consider is who are you partnering with going forward? Not just who solves the problem, your, your challenge today, but when we get to a point where you're hitting a button and you're transmitting your data to the aos, to Honda, to the investor and, and anybody that's involved, anybody that needs to see that, an auditor, post close, anything, and you want to make sure that that's accurate. Truvis has really been the company that makes that a lot easier for us. And that's, that's how you get off the fence and, and say, okay, this is, this is more of a long term solution than, hey, I, you know, I heard that this company is doing really well or they have the next best thing, that it's really, you know, partnering with somebody in the future that, that you can kind of trust and, and it's gonna save you money, protect your company, make the customer experience better. And it checks all those boxes. So, yeah, that's what I was kind of awesome.

That was an awesome send off right there. Thank you so much, everybody who joined. I couldn't ask for a better example. I actually would much rather have our customers talk about our, how much they like us than us selling ourselves. So thank you so much, J.R. i really appreciate you.

Well, I enjoyed it. Thanks, Richard. I appreciate the invite and happy to participate. So, yeah, good getting to know you too.

You too. Enjoy those twins.

All right, thank you.

See ya.

See everybody.