The Challenge! Rule and Constraint based framework for choice management, guided selection of products and services, and choice assessment for non-manufacturing enterprises.
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Powered by CS-Enterprise, RightLoan Delivers Fast, Easy Residential
Loan Programs for Mortgage Brokers and Their Customers
Professional residential mortgage brokers operate in one of today's most fiercely competitive
business environments. With roughly 500 lenders of consequence in the United States cumulatively
offering 15,000 lending programs, the nation's 240,000 brokers find themselves in what has become
a commodity marketplace where finding and keeping a competitive advantage can be a major
challenge.
RightLoan Corporation has come forward with an innovative solution that is revolutionizing
the way in which many brokers sell, source and originate residential loans. Launched in early
2004, RightLoan is an online directory service of nationwide residential lender programs, powered
by CS-Enterprise, a unique search and configuration software suite from Configuration Solutions.
According to Bill Zemlak, RightLoan founder and president, although in its infancy, his company is
already rewarding its 400+ mortgage broker subscribers with higher sales, productivity and profits,
because they can now provide their customers with consistently excellent solutions in record time.
"We intentionally began with a relatively small number of brokers and broker organizations in order to
get their feedback and fine-tune our application to ensure that we meet all our customer needs and
requirements," says Zemlak. This input, being used to fine tune RightLoan’s functionality and
usability, will allow the start of national selling in late 2004. RightLoan expects to ramp up
the subscriber base tenfold to the 10,000 mark by the year 2006.
The Challenges of Loan Application/Origination
Brokering residential mortgage loans has traditionally been a demanding and time-intensive business.
Up to 25 percent of all mortgage loan opportunities are lost within the first 72 hours because the
broker does not have access to a comprehensive, searchable database of lender programs to precisely
match appropriate products with borrowers' qualifications and requirements.
In fact, most brokers typically deal with only five to ten lending institutions and conduct searches
using only a few different methodologies, none of which are very effective. As a result, searches
often take four to eight hours, sometimes longer. Multiply this long lead time by today's large
number of loan applications and it becomes obvious that delivering a rapid response using
traditional methods is next to impossible.
Some larger brokers and mortgage loan organizations have implemented high-priced software tools
built on basic search and configuration technology. While these perform better than manual
searches, accuracy and consistency are not assured because their search-and-configure engines
can accommodate only 30 or 40 features or attributes in matching borrowers to lending programs.
In addition, these tools are typically linear in nature, with very basic rule-writing
capabilities. The resulting incomplete or improper matching routinely causes bottlenecks
and delays in processing applications, and can lead to lost sales for both the mortgage
broker and if a purchase, their realtor clients.
RightLoan has a "secret weapon" that enables mortgage brokers to overcome the challenges of
time and inaccuracy to deliver fast, valid solutions, every time, all the time—CS-Enterprise.
The CS-Enterprise Value Proposition
Productive time is the most valuable asset a mortgage sales agent or broker can have.
RightLoan helps brokers become more efficient and productive, providing quick and accurate
solutions so they, in turn, can deliver a rapid response to borrowers and realtors.
For example, a typical home loan in the U.S. is about $150,000 and the broker will generally net
about one percent, or $1,500. The faster matches can be made, loans originated and transactions
completed, the more profitable the broker or the brokerage company will be. And, since RightLoan
subscriber fees are a relatively low monthly expense, the bulk of these profits go right to the
bottom line.
In addition, CS-Enterprise is affordable, quick to implement and easy to use. Most important,
the software solution works seamlessly with existing software systems and in every computing
environment. "Plus, it requires very little maintenance," asserts Zemlak. "Once the technology
architecture is up and running you don't need a lot of IT people to maintain it. CS-Enterprise
is a truly practical tool designed for sales and operations professionals to use, write their
own rules and create their own applications."
How CS-Enterprise Empowers RightLoan
So how does CS-Enterprise outperform other search and configuration tools? It's all about the
underlying architecture and technology.
The RightLoan business model for its lender program searches uses over 200 features to define a
lender program which, when compared with the 40 or so features used by other software applications,
can lead to a certain amount of complexity—both on the user side and on the rules side. Through
its unique architecture and dynamic software tools, however, CS-Enterprise streamlines the
complexity.
Simplifying the User Experience
Presenting a mortgage broker with over 200 linear questions, one by one over fifteen or more web
pages is just not realistic. No broker would spend the time involved. So it was necessary to find
another way of presenting questions and still accommodate the feature model.
The solution is the intelligent and flexible CS-Sales, the configuration engine within CS-Enterprise.
Firstly, the engine takes the questions, and with each question a user answers, reconfigures all the
remaining questions so that the user is only presented with future questions that are relevant
based on previous responses. Questions no longer applicable are eliminated.
Secondly, since all of the answers are validated relative to each other at the time they are given, the
user is, in effect, being driven in real time towards a valid solution in the fewest number of
questions—typically about 40% of the total available questions. And, since these questions
can be grouped and presented very efficiently and logically, the process is fast and intuitive.
That's how this next-generation configurator simplifies complexity on the user side.
Simplifying Rules Through Nesting
On the rules side, a similar intelligence takes hold of the process. Linear search tools do generate rules,
but do not permit complex "nesting up" features as a group to take into account the interdependence of
features as expressed in the lender’s documentation. The CS-Enterprise configurator has an extremely
powerful rules-writer capable of nesting all features in an efficient, non-linear manner. RightLoan
can readily translate the lenders' documentation into an electronic rule that the configurator uses.
That's how CS-Enterprise simplifies complexity on the rules and origination side.
Adding a Multiplicity of Views and Users
In finalizing the latest version of its online solution, RightLoan added CS-Expert, a powerful new
component of CS-Enterprise that enables mortgage brokers to simultaneously model a variety of
product offerings for analysis and decision-making.
Deployed online remotely or on network services—using CS-Connect, a remote connectivity component—CS-Expert
enables users to collaboratively design complex loan program offerings automatically from the top down.
Multiple user interfaces can be created to fit the navigation and origination requirements of different
users and/or different structures— new first position loans, for example, as opposed to combo or standalone
second structures.
If a user decides the structure they are currently in is not applicable, they can switch over to an
alternate structure —and any answers given previously will be seamlessly switched over to the new
structure without duplicate keystrokes.
Deploying Fast and Cost Effectively
The entire CS-Enterprise suite runs on and interfaces
with all the leading databases and can be deployed on standard servers. The JAVA-based architecture is
ideally suited for RightLoan where their customers have a multitude of variations of desktop hardware,
software and Internet access, and in general very limited access to technical support. CS-Enterprise
applications can easily be deployed over the web with standalone access, or like RightLoan, they can
be included and launched from within a "wrapping" web site that can handle registration, setup,
training and other issues to reduce customer support cost.
"CS-Enterprise is a massively powerful tool and our clients love it," states Zemlak. "Not only has
it enabled a whole new capability in the mortgage industry, but it also gives us new opportunities
for expanding our business model into other applications, such as financial portfolio specification,
health care insurance selection, and even physiotherapy program design, for example. We are
discovering that with CS-Enterprise, the possibilities are infinite," he concludes.
