We recently connected with Jodi Hall, President of Nationwide Mortgage Bankers (NMB). She’s the Chief Visionary Officer, the Chief Cheerleader and the Chief Doer for the organization. NMB is a distributed retail lender that is a national provider of mortgages in the residential space. Their headquarters is located in Melville, New York, and their mission is “to be our clients’ and referral partners’ trusted advisors, guiding them through the home financing process with the highest-level of service, professionalism, and transparency.”
We wanted to learn more about how NMB is benefitting from our partnership, and how Capacity is enabling NMB employees to do their best work.
Q: What is the importance of innovation, including AI and automation in the mortgage industry?
A: In my opinion, AI and innovation in the mortgage industry is paramount. We exist in a decades old workflow where it’s very paper intensive and labor intensive, and it’s kind of a convoluted process for those of us who haven’t been in the industry for many years. So what AI and innovation can do is to help streamline that process and make it a lot easier. There are a million reasons why NMB wants to adopt innovation. We want technology to take redundancy out of the process and be able to give our employees the ability to have more purposeful interactions with each other, and also more purposeful interactions with their clients.
Q: What makes NMB’s use case unique?
A: What makes NMB’s use case unique is the way in which we deal with our vendors and the way in which we have adopted Capacity and their team into the NMB family. They really work as though they’re an extension of us, we have the same objectives in mind, and being able to participate with people that you enjoy participating with who share your same vision makes it much easier to get the job done, and it also helps in the implementation process.
Q: What are some of the challenges you were looking to solve by partnering with Capacity?
A: We initially partnered with Capacity to be able to work as our virtual underwriting scenario desk so that our loan officers, processors and underwriters, would be able to get immediate answers to their questions. Prior to working with Capacity, our underwriters, if they had a question, would submit a ticket to the underwriting scenario desk, and so would the loan officers and processors. Then, they’d wait for a returned answer. Capacity gives us the ability to return answers to individuals in a few seconds, as opposed to waiting on that time. What we realized in the process is there were a lot of other opportunities to be able to gain efficiency and really create that virtual help desk across many of our departments. Whether it be IT, HR or Accounting, we’re able to answer redundant questions instantly so that individuals are not taking time to answer those, so they can concentrate on more purposeful interactions.
Q: Why did NMB choose to partner with Capacity?
A: NMB chose to partner with Capacity initially because we didn’t see anything else like it in the industry. We both are partners of The Mortgage Collaborative, and we were introduced to Capacity through The Mortgage Collaborative. We were just open ears to hear what they had to offer. When we first spoke to them, we were just looking for a virtual help desk, specifically for underwriting scenarios. And as we began to speak to them and explore what their capabilities were, we knew of nothing else in the industry that would be able to give us a return on investment and take the burden of answering repetitive questions away from our employees. We also started to develop a relationship even before we committed to doing business together, and we quickly realized that it was a team that shared many of our same visions and that they were really going to hold our hand through the process and help NMB be successful in adopting their technology.
Q: What results have NMB seen since partnering with Capacity?
A: Our results have been fantastic. We call Capacity “Ask Rosie” on our side, and in the first few weeks after we launched, Ask Rosie had answered more than 3000 questions with a 94% match rate. Ask Rosie is answering each question in a matter of seconds for our employees, and the questions are not going into an email or a ticketing system that sits. Our employees are getting immediate answers. We have seen a tremendous lift, and we know that the success will continue to grow over time.
Q: What are some of the tasks that you’ve been able to automate with the help of Capacity, and how does it impact your day-to-day operations?
A: Capacity is acting as our virtual help desk, and is answering redundant questions. Here are just some examples of what Capacity can automate:
- Where do I go to get my FHA credentials?
- How many PTO days do I have?
- How do I enter time in my time clock?
- How do I do an expense report?
- How do I order a VA appraisal?
We’ve been able to take everything that we have standard operating procedures on and have been able to document, and also tie Capacity to the GSE seller servicer guides that tell us what the guidelines are, so that we are able to answer those questions in seconds.
Q: Was partnering with Capacity the right decision for NMB?
A: Partnering with Capacity was absolutely the right decision for NMB. It has been an amazing experience, it was a lot of hard work to get it up and going, but we would do it 10 times over to have the uptick in business that we have and being able to work on more appropriate items for our team.
While we recognize that every organization has different needs, we wanted to share first-hand feedback from one of our customers. Hearing from customers that are utilizing our platform and reaping the benefits is always inspirational.