When we set out to build our Production Optimization Platform, we knew that the mortgage industry had to be reimagined. This reimagining spanned from the borrower’s experience to origination, operations and to the underlying architecture.
We are excited to share Part Three of this five-part journey into why we built a POP, with the third segment focused on the immense power of an activity driven workflow.
The Industry Problem:
Most LOS platforms operate in phases or milestones. Loans will move from origination to processing to underwriting, etc. and the work is tied to both that phase and an individual. Each of these phases is an ambiguous blob of work that could require the touching of numerous screens. What may seem like an assembly line from the outside quickly becomes inefficient when you try to complete the work.
You now have one person with multiple loans assigned to them, and they need to complete 10 to 100+ tasks navigating multiple screens in a system. While you hope they are completing every piece of work correctly, the other loans assigned to them are waiting.
That misalignment creates bottlenecks, confusion, and backlogs.
What Makes Our POP Different?
In Charlie, every piece of work requiring a human touch is represented as a specific activity, and every activity aligns with the skillset required to complete it.
Activity-Based Workflow
Rather than tracking loan progress by milestone, Charlie tracks completion of individual activities. This means we can see exactly what’s left to do, and who’s capable of doing it.
Skill-Based Assignment Logic
Each user has a defined skillset or multiple skillsets, and the platform automatically routes activities accordingly. This ensures that specialized activities like VOE’s, underwriting, or compliance check reviews are only sent to users with the right training.
Real-Time Visibility and Routing
Supervisors and managers can see activity status across the board and intervene when priorities shift or workloads spike. Imagine how much easier it is to resolve a bottleneck if you are aware of the specific activity that has caused it, instead of a nebulous pipeline of loans that has seemed to balloon.
So What? Why Do Activities and Skillsets Matter?
Eliminating checking the checker – Everyone knows what’s on their plate, and what they’re responsible for. No more looking through an entire loan file to figure out if the right work has been done.
Speed – Work gets assigned directly to the person best equipped to handle it as soon as they are available, drastically reducing wait times in periods of high volume.
Automation – when work is broken down into smaller pieces, it becomes easier to automate all or part of the process, or leverage AI to assist.
Quality – Is it easier to get 100/100 on an exam or 1/1? The smaller the activity, the fewer moving parts, the easier it is to know exactly what to do at a given time.
Scalability – You can hire, train, and structure teams more effectively when work is broken down into logical activities. Think of a special loan program that requires a specific skillset. Today, that entire loan is assigned to a specialist. The odds are that most of the work on that loan is common to all other loans. The rest of that work can be handled by common skills, allowing the specialist to focus on specialized work.
By building activities and skillsets into the core of Charlie’s POP, we’ve created a smarter, more responsive way to get loans through the origination process faster.
