What is Mortgage Business Intelligence
Ron de Frates
The mortgage lending business is increasingly competitive and complex. Marketplace dynamics such as staffing shortages, rate increases, and regulatory changes make running your business harder each day. Mortgage business intelligence helps you manage this.
Managing your lending business starts with understanding your numbers. That's where mortgage business intelligence (MBI) comes in. MBI is a platform that helps you understand sales performance, operations, pipeline, and branch profitability. This, in turn, provides a unified view of the health of your lending business. This view should provide you with a historical point-of-view (what happened) as well as a forward-looking (predictive) perspective. It should be global (company-wide) as well as specific to each part of your business (ex. sales, operations, branches, administration, etc.).
Ultimately, an effective mortage business intelligence platform must provide actionable conclusions. It is not enough to simply describe what's happening in your business. A good system will lead you to decisions that achieve your goals (ex. growth, cost-savings, etc.). When it comes to making decisions, business intelligence systems provide clarity and confidence.
So, What is Mortgage Business Intelligence?
Key performance indicators (KPIs), predictive analytics, and detailed data make-up a mortgage business intelligence platform. You will see these are presented in visual form and as reports.
Charts and graphs make up the visual representation of your data. Examples include, pie charts, bar charts, trend lines, and bubble charts. You should be able to drill-down on the details so users will be able to explore the results.
Dashboards will also include reports. These will include tabular data, and reports. For example, the average cost-per loan may be presented as a number with supporting data. Branch profitability, as an example, may be presented as both numbers and graphs. In addition, advanced systems provide results in the form of narratives. For example, this could include executive summaries and commentary that are auto-generated.
All of these should be available to your entire team. Therefore, they will be presented on dashboards. When your team has visibility to these metrics, everyone can work toward the same goal. The key here, is creating a unifying vision for your company.
Why Mortgage Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence provides visibility into what is working well and what needs improvement, so you can make adjustments accordingly.
- Make data-driven decisions
- Track performance over time
- Compare to benchmarks
- Enhance accessibility
- Improve efficiency
- Provides a competitive edge
- Align goals of employees with the organization
- Anticipate problems and market changes
What to Measure
You will need to focus on four areas of your business:
- Branch Operations
- Sales
- Loan Production
- Profitability
Examples include:
- Corp P&Ls
- Branch P&Ls
- Cost Per Loan (BPS & Dollar)
- Break-even
- Covenants Reports
- Balances Sheets
- Cash In Line
- Future Funding
- Compensation
- Expense Exceptions
- Loan Originator KPIs
- Mortgage Processor KPIs
- Underwriter KPIs
- Scorecards
- Rankings
- Predictive Analytics
See a complete list of Telemetry BI metrics.
What Do You Need for Mortgage Business Intelligence?
You need to start with data. The mortgage industry depends on loan origination data for sales and loan production. This is required for any mortgage business intelligence platform. Encompass, Lending QB, and Calyx Point all have methods that extract data from their systems.
However, sales and operations data is not enough. You need financial data. This will tell you about profitability. Are your branches making money (i.e., net income)? How much are you making as a company? What is your break-even point? For this, you'll need data from your accounting system. You'll need loan-level expenses and revenue to understand how profitable you are. Sales alone don't tell the whole story. Net income is a bottom-line number that is critical for BI. It is only available from your accounting system. You'll need this to make your business intelligence efforts meaningful. You are wasting your time without it.
How to Get Started
You can implement business intelligence using the following approaches:
Do-It-Yourself: This DIY approach involves building a platform with custom or off-the shelf technologies. The barriers to success are substantial. Building your own solution involves hiring the right people (ex. data scientists, software engineers, etc.). This may be a good approach if you have the resources for a custom solution, but the stakes are high if you fail.
Sign-up for a Turn-key Solution: Find a vendor with a best-practices approach to mortgage data analytics. Make sure that they offer both sales/operations KPIs and financial data from your accounting system. Consider Telemetry BI. No implementation fees. Web-based, nothing to install. Contact 5X Solutions to learn more.
