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Mortgage, Open Banking

4 Common Barriers to Successful Digital Mortgage Adoption

2020 accelerated the adoption of many remote and digital solutions across nearly every industry. And while mortgage lending has some catch-up to play relative to some other industries in adopting digital solutions, change is happening, and it’s happening fast. Even if you’re not adopting digital mortgage solutions, many of your competitors are. 

But digital adoption can certainly come with its own challenges. These barriers, however, are not impenetrable, and a targeted approach to overcoming barriers to digital adoption can set you on your way to enjoying all the benefits of a digital mortgage experience. 

Why Adopt Digital Mortgage Solutions?

Digital adoption in mortgage lending involves integrating a digital mortgage solution, such as a digital verification of assets, or transforming a traditional workflow to a digital-first model. Digital solutions enable lenders to verify income, assets, and employment without the high-friction interactions with borrowers that were complicated by pandemic restrictions. 

As digital mortgage solutions have proven during the pandemic, digital adoption enables mortgage lenders to be more nimble and adapt to unexpected disruption in the market. Digital adoption also streamlines the origination process. Fannie Mae found that digital verifications can reduce cycle time by up to 12 days. And that real-time data is more accurate and helps mitigate fraud and credit risk. Digital adoption has also picked up traction as it better satisfies the expectations of today’s digital consumers.

So what’s keeping more mortgage lenders from adopting digital solutions? 

Barriers to Digital Adoption

Changing a mortgage lending workflow is no light task. Even if you see the benefits to digital mortgage adoption, it’s another issue entirely to actually implement digital solutions and strategies. Understanding the barriers standing between you and a successful digital adoption is the first step toward targeting and overcoming these challenges and enjoying the many returns of a digital mortgage process. Let’s take a look at some of the most common barriers to digital adoption.

1. Apprehensive Teammates and Borrowers

Frequently, the barrier to digital adoption isn’t so much technical as it is about the apprehension of the teammates who will be using the solutions and the prospective borrowers who will give their trust to the solutions. Although many consumers already share their financial data digitally, allowing access to bank account data can be intimidating for borrowers. The fact is, loan officers, processors, underwriters, and other team members may just be more comfortable with their well-worn traditional workflow. 

Overcoming this barrier will require showing teammates that the returns of digital adoption far outweigh the growing pains, and assuring borrowers that the secure consumer-permissioning process actually empowers them with greater control over their financial data. It also helps to integrate a simple-to-use verification technology like Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) that simplifies the entire verification process into a one-touch experience.

2. Integrating Technology with Traditional Systems and Workflows

At the core of digital adoption is leveraging innovative technology and solutions that enhance the mortgage experience. Adapting to new technology, however, can become a barrier when you’ve been relying on the same traditional solutions for decades. Technology must also be able to integrate with a lender’s loan origination software. 

Fortunately, while any adoption involves some learning curve MVS is built to be intuitive and quick to integrate. And as a one-touch solution for mortgage verifications, MVS makes adaptation easy. No more using multiple processes to get the necessary information. Everything you need is in one streamlined process.

3. Changing Trusted Processes

Trust is an integral element of mortgage lending. Borrowers trust lenders with personal information and with the hope and stress of one of the most significant decisions of their lives. And you trust your tried-and-true process to deliver a low-risk, accurate origination. Traditional processes may be out-of-date, slower, and potentially higher-risk than newer processes, but it can nonetheless be difficult to leave that familiar process behind. 

Fortunately, digital adoption doesn’t necessarily involve abandoning everything about familiar processes. Instead, adoption enhances those processes. For example, Prosperity Home Mortgage has implemented a hybrid lending model. They leverage Finicity’s digital verification solutions for a streamlined, competitive experience, but they also still prioritize in-person guidance for borrowers to personalize their lending experience. Prosperity maintained trusted, familiar priorities while augmenting their overall process with digital solutions.

Solutions like MVS also ease the enhancement of trusted processes by enabling a single process to verify assets, income, and employment. That process is also built to satisfy and exceed the expectations of today’s digital borrowers, which means this new verification solution will feel more comfortable and seamless than traditional paper-based processes.

4. Disjointed Strategy and Poor Change Management

Some lenders may have already overcome the other adoption barriers and may be on their way to integrate digital mortgage solutions. However, a disjointed adoption strategy or poor change management can become another barrier to successful adoption. Weak buy-in to the digital adoption at different levels in the organization can slow down the adoption process and prevent proper training and effective synergy between teams. 

A cohesive digital adoption strategy and effective change management involves demonstrating the benefits of digital adoption from the top of your organization on down. Successful adoption requires commitment and coordination from all. MVS can smooth out that commitment and coordination by reducing the amount of change being instituted with a single simple process, making the overall adoption easier to manage.

Target these digital adoption barriers and you’ll be on your way to a successful digital adoption and all the benefits that come from digital mortgage. Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service can help you do just that.