Genesee Regional Bank: saving 80% on income and employment verifications using Truv in Encompass!

Right. Going. Give this a few seconds and let people jump in. What makes me really happy is I see some TMC members in the audience. So thank you guys for, for joining. Let me just make sure that the chat is enabled for everybody. Everyone. I'll just say everybody. Just let us know where you're dialing in from. I'm in D.C. right now. Interesting time to be in this area. And while we're waiting for people to cool New York. So I guess it's working for everybody. If it's. If it's not, you can send me a direct message, people. I have been known to not enable that function, Joe. But while we wait for folks to kind of sign up, why don't you give us your predictions who's going to win the super bowl, man, and who's going to be in the finals.

So I got. I just, I don't even have to say it. I'll just demonstrate it here. Right. I'm not going to wear this for the whole webinar because I don't think people take me seriously, but. Huge Bills fan. This is the year. I've been saying it since training camp. Right. We got to. We got to get past the Chiefs and, and get to the Super Bowl. This is the year.

This is the year, man. That's so cool. Let's see. Panelists can chat, attendees can chat with everyone. Yeah, everybody can post. And I've got IT enabled. Look, I think. I think the Bill's got a good shot. I was, I'm in D.C. i was surprised that the Commanders beat the Lions. So it's going to be an interesting Super Bowl. You got the Chiefs too. There's a lot of in Ravens, a lot of good contenders. Let's jump into this.

Sure.

We got some TMC members, so I want to give some TMC love. Thank you very much. TMC for lenders, for. For jumping on. On board here. This is as much TMC story as it is Genesee and Tru story. Really. I mean, this is happening right now because of a lot of the mortgage collaboratives, conference conferences that we go to and the collaboration that happens in that collaborative. So shout out to. To TMC for putting on such great. Creating such a great community. But why don't we start off with some introductions if you're here to, to really learn about how you know a TMC lender member. Genesee Regional bank has. Has brought on the income and verification income and, excuse me, Income and employment verification vendor and saved about 80 against the work number. And they're going to demo. Demo. He's gonna. Joe, who's here, is going to demo it to you, live in his encompass, then you've come to the right place. So welcome. Joe. Thanks so much for joining Joe's group vice president at Genesee Regional Bank. Joe, why don't you give yourself an introduction and tell us a little about yourself and Genesee.

Yeah. So thanks for having me. We are a community bank headquartered in Rochester, New York. We do most of our lending primarily in New York State. We do a little bit of lending down in Florida. And, you know, we've been. We're about a half a week. Last year, we did 350 million in mortgages. Our goal this year is to hit 400 million all purchase money originations. We don't really. I mean, we do refis when they come, but who's had a refis lately? You know, it's. So we are. Have grown our business that way. We pride ourselves in efficiencies and making the customer experience as seamlessly as we can. And so, you know, we've been members of the TMC now for, I think, 13 years. And, you know, we go to the conferences twice annually. You know, find a lot of value there, and that's kind of how we stumbled across truth.

Well, let's jump into it. Do you remember who. Who it was or. Or do you remember the situation when you're at tmc?

Yeah, I want to say this was. It wasn't Nashville. It was the one prior to Nashville, which I think was Chicago. Yeah, they're all a blur at this point. I mean, usually they're a blur after you leave. But, you know, we were in a. And this was when. When truth had kind of just came out. So there was still no day one certainty. There was still some things missing, but the. The noise was there, right? The. The, hey, there's this great new company that's making some inroads. And it was in one of the sessions. I don't remember. I think that one of the sessions was profitability and how to drive costs down. And remember hearing the name. Did a little bit of research when I got back, but nothing really came of it. And then in the following tmc, it came up again in our collab labs, and I said, you know what? I really got to talk to these guys and check it out. And so I think that's when you and I met at that conference, and I believe that was in Nashville. And then when we came back, we kind of set it up and started talking about what can we do and, and you know, one of the biggest drivers with all verifications cost, you know, with the rising cost of originations and you know, with one show in town for a long time, right, we were all kind of handcuffed to the work number. And you know, as those additional options came out, especially with True, we saw a huge value add that where we could save a lot of money.

That's fantastic. You know I remember that that conference and I was in the room and there was like 15 TMC lenders that were in the room. And I remember one of the questions polls that was done just amongst the lenders was hey, how many of you are using, currently using a consumer permission solution for verification of income and employment? And like half the room raised their hand and then how many of you are going to use one by the end of the year? And like the whole room raised the hand which was really interesting. I think that you know, the rising cost of credit, rising costs of verifications for income and employment are just hitting lenders so hard that everybody's desperate to find a solution. And I think TRU and other providers like True have really come along at the right time to help them ease that pain. So what were you doing before, before we jump into the demo, I just want to ask a couple questions. What were you doing before like for verification of income and employment, were you doing for Troop? Was it primarily the work number?

Primarily was the work number. You know, obviously we did, we never, we never went down the waterfall of hey, let us go get your written verification of employment. Our processor still did the manuals that needed to be done. You know, but one of the most eye opening things that I found when I started looking into, okay, we're spending upwards of $30,000 monthly on work number. And when I started looking into the numbers, you know, we were pulling, every time you pull a work number, those that know, and I've actually shared this with the work number with Equifax as well was I can't control what I'm pulling. So if I pull a work number, I may get what I need back, I may get a job that the borrower had two years ago that, that does me no good. And so when I looked at the numbers, more than 50% of the work numbers that we were pulling were actually inactive employers. And so, you know, and, and at, you know, at that time I think it was $55 an order. You know, that's a lot of money that you're just kind of throwing out the window because you can't control what you're getting back.

Yeah, that's. Thank you for summarizing that so clearly. So we'll say the deciding factors really were cost. You had to solve that. There was just the cost is so expensive and you're not getting the conversion that you need because the data you're getting back isn't the data you actually need. Right. Like 50 of the time, like you were saying. Awesome. So why don't we do this? I think everybody's here to see it, so why don't you just open it up and let's run one and let's do it. So what we're going to show everybody right now, actually, Joe, why don't you talk everybody through it since you're.

Yeah. So what I'm going to share with you as I pull this up here, hold on, is encompass and this is a fake file. So our good old friend Hulk and Terry Hogan here, you know, it's very simple to go in and pull these. Right. So I'm just going to come in here to the services tab. I know some people like to go up top. I. I'm old school. I go to the side here, order verifications. I got my different providers there. Trove is one of them. And I'm going to choose true here. And when I do this, it will spin for a second. As we all know, have loved to learn to love from Encompass. It's taking a little bit longer probably because we're on a zoom, of course.

I'm always interested to know what Hulk Hogan's income is, by the way.

So if I come in here and this is obviously a test environment, I move this out of the way, I can come in here and I'm just going to create this one because it does have Richard's email address in here, so it goes to him and not some random person. And I hit create order and when I do that, an email would be sent to Richard that basically introduces Truv and it has GRB's information on there, but it introduces us. And you can see here the verification was sent. Please reach out to ensure completion before it expires in six days. It should take the borrower only one to three minutes to complete. It's secure and paperless and you know, most likely that the employer will be covered. The one nice thing we found is that when, when there is employers that aren't covered initially we reach out to you guys and you guys have been able to get us some additional employers in there to make sure we're getting the responses back. That we need.

Love it. Well, why don't I complete the journey? Why don't you stop showing your screen and I'll show everybody what it actually looks like from the borrower's perspective. So here we go. If you see this is usually most people verify through a mobile phone. And so there's the, the, we call it the emulator. It's dummy data but it's going to show you what the actual process looks like. Click the link. As the borrower, it takes you to this, this takes it to our dashboard, excuse me, where we call it the true bridge because it's a bridge between the borrower and their employer and their payroll. And so you can, the borrower can search for employer, it can search for payroll provider if they know it directly. We've mapped it all to make it very easy. It's actually fundamental for getting high conversion. And if you look here, you can also see you've got gig workers, people are getting benefits like you know, retirement or something like that. You can get, you can verify all of those here. Let's just do one. Let's say I work at Home Depot. Click on Home Depot. There's my login. We've mapped it already to the payroll provider. The borrower knows their login. Hit connect and it's done. For the borrower, that's, that's all they do and then their piece is done. This is afterwards, this is the report you get and it's the same report that you're used to getting. You get identity information, you know, first name, last name, etc, Social Security number, address. You get employment dates of employment, you get the employer, you get their income, you get an annual income summary. You get your, the bank accounts where they're actually, if, if the payroll provider gives it, we'll get the bank account where they actually deposit their paychecks. You'll get payroll statements and W2s. So that's everything you need and you're off to the races. We do the same thing for verification of assets as well through the bank account, usually through tracking transactions and deposits and showing, you know, showing you all the deposits that are over 3 or 500. But I'm not going to show you that full demo now. We deliver it in a JSON file so we can integrate with any of your POS or los. But as you can see just now how it's, it's integrated. Joe just showed it how it runs through encompassing, very straightforward, everybody. You can save about 80% on your income and employment right now out of the box. If you use Encompass. So what do you think, Joe? I mean, was how long. How was the onboarding time? Like, how long did it take from the time you kind of decided to get this project going by the time you were up and running?

Yeah. I mean, just to add the one thing that I love about the true. I mean, in addition to getting that voe form back, you know, getting that last pay stub of the prior two years, if you have bonus income, overtime income, I know it shows on the, on the summary page, but having that broken out is huge because you're not having to go back to the customer or go back to the employer because you can't make out, hey, this says bonus income or it says other income. You're able to see those pay types right on the pay stub. And that's been very helpful.

Yeah, I guess in 2021 and 2022, you know, I mean, people could qualify with just their base pay, but now they need like every scrap of income, you know, with the price of homes and, and such that's going on and where rates are right now. We've heard that from other lenders too. It's very useful to find out exactly what they're making in terms of bonus. Bonus pay and variable comp.

Yeah, but I mean, onboarding was, was fairly simple. You know, the biggest thing that we found with onboarding in order for us to really feel the impact. So in the past, we had all of our loan officers, our processors, our underwriters, our closers, all had access to the work number. And so in order to really see the savings and kind of almost not force the adoption, but drive the adoption, we pulled work number away from everybody except for managers. Eventually, we allowed it back in the hands of underwriting and closing. But, you know, pulling it out from the work, the, from the processors and the loan officers was critical in our success because it was too easy to just go click the button and get it back instantaneously versus ordering it and picking up the phone and calling the customer to explain what they need to do. Which is crucial in the, in what we found in the success of, of getting that verification back is you really have to pick up the phone and call the customer and say, hey, you know, this is, this is what this is. Because again, every email that you get right now, you're wondering, is this a spam email? You know, this seems weird, right? So making sure the customer knows, hey, expect this to come. And when you get it, this is what you need to do. This is, it's Very secure and explain it to them. And once that conversation happens, the success rate goes way up.

Yep. And I think there's some very clear benefits you can tell the borrower too. I mean you know, most, a lot of the time you the, the connection to the payroll provider is persistent, meaning 10 days before close, let's say they do it at application 10 days before close 10 they don't have to go and do it again themselves. Right. They you can press a button on the behind the scenes and just re verify. You can do it as many times as you want with the same borrower. So that's. And there's no cost for that too. So like you know, you for the alternative usually it's like 65 bucks every time you do a verification, including the re verification for us, it's 80% less than that and you do it again for free when you re verify. So let's talk about when you rolled it out to the, to the team. Did you just overnight do the switch or was there more of like a, like a pilot group or something like that?

Yep, we, we started with a pilot group, had them test it, had them work out some kinks, you know, try and drive, you know, again testing that theory of okay, do we need to call the customer? Do we, you know, are we getting the coverage that we need? Those kinds of things. And we uncovered some clients that we weren't getting the coverage on. Reached out to you guys, you guys were able to kind of fix that for us. You know, tried to work through some of the customer troubleshooting. Hey, I can't log in here. What login do I use? MFAs become a little tricky just because a lot of times you're having to refresh that, that link because they're, they're multi factor times out during the process. So just having to get that back. But I mean it, you know, once we kind of worked through that and kind of gave that customer that roadmap of here's what to expect, you're going to do this. Now you may be asked to do it again because of the multi factor authorization and you know they've been able to adapt to it and move through it.

So let's land the plane here. You know you can, the, the success metrics you can expect are 80% cost savings. It's number one thing that most folks care about. But you're also getting more accurate data. Like the data is directly from the source and you can have confidence in it. I think the third one would be if it's important to you. We have reps and warrants from both fitting Frannie approval. So that's. That's very important to a lot of our lenders, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Did I miss anything, Joe? I think that's a wrap, man. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I think. I think we caught everything.

Shout out to tmc. We're both. Are you going to be in Dallas by any chance?

I will be in Dallas, yes. Yeah, everybody, Bird registration earlier.

I love it, too. Yeah, I love. That's the one. That's one of my favorite conferences. There's no way I missed those. So, yeah, everybody in the audience that you're there, I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in Dallas and give me a shout if you attended this like you are. So, Joe, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you doing this for us.

Yeah, you're welcome, Richard, everybody.

Thank you. Have a great day. All right.

Go Bells.