Author:
Nexval Infotech
With the rapid pace of digital transformation in mortgages, technology providers are sitting up and taking notice. Specifically, they are now easier to provide tailored offerings such as mortgage industry cloud platforms to make adoption easier for financial service businesses and unlock new revenue channels. Interestingly, despite several years of using the cloud, mortgage industry cloud platforms are a new phenomenon. Let us explore how it will disrupt the mortgage sector.
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What is a Mortgage Industry Cloud Platform Anyway?
Traditionally, we have seen cloud computing solutions for the mortgage industry that were stitched together from modular parts. Public cloud companies and managed service providers (MSP) would work together to build cloud computing solutions, which were often customized for each individual client. Large financial institutions sometimes subscribe to private or public cloud companies directly and get their offerings created in a partially bespoke manner.
The challenge with this approach is that it is time, cost, and effort-intensive with little to no reusability. The cloud solution, at its core, is not designed for a specific use case, but can adapt to any application thrown at it. The process of adapting the cloud was handled by an MSP, a systems integrator, or the cloud company’s professional service team.
To address this issue, SaaS solutions for industry cloud platforms emerged. These are ready-to-use “Software as a Service” tools that anyone can install by paying for a subscription. It is highly reusable but lacks easy customization unless you look deep underneath the hood and reconfigure it. SaaS solutions for mortgage industry cloud platforms can be adapted to your unique use cases mostly through APIs and connectors.
Mortgage industry cloud platforms – a new category – aims to strike a balance between these two. It is a platform built on an existing bedrock of cloud services so that the different services can work together to support use cases specific to an industry. Along with this, the services are customized as per mortgage industry standards and compliance requirements. Since it is all hosted on the cloud, your business would not have to migrate its existing deployments to a different data center.
A mortgage industry cloud platform is typically supported by a large cloud company with financial services expertise. For example, the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is one of the first solutions in this segment. It was launched in 2021 and brings together the company’s existing services like data analytics, collaboration, risk management, sales, and product development under one roof.
Another feature of industry cloud platforms is that it is augmented by industry partners. Microsoft, for instance, is working with consulting partners on ERP, CRM, and a few other modules so that customers get a complete solution.
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5 Ways the Mortgage Industry Can Leverage Industry Cloud Platforms
While cloud computing solutions for the mortgage industry are definitely beneficial, industry clouds are the next step. There are five ways you can harness it:
1. Achieve interoperability out of the box
One of the biggest benefits of industry clouds is that they are designed for interoperability. In the mortgage sector, this means that it would be compatible with accepted data standards, popular loan origination systems, core banking systems, and so on. Greater interoperability simplifies automation and drastically reduces your efforts.
2. Gain from a partner solution ecosystem
Mortgage industry cloud platforms would bring a pre-existing network of partners and alliances with years of expertise in mortgage. Not only are these solutions designed for specific use cases, but they are also preconfigured to interact with the cloud. By leveraging these platforms, mortgage businesses can reduce the costs and hassles around vendor management.
3. Discover more seamless mortgage process automation
As mentioned earlier, mortgage industry cloud platforms are much more automaton-ready than traditional cloud solutions. They reside in one hosting location, they are managed by a single vendor, and they are built on a consistent set of standards and frameworks. As a result, you can connect processes and workflows across the mortgage value chain.
4. Get unified analytics
Another benefit of having your data and processes reside in a single platform is data unification. This enriches your analytics capabilities and ensures that your dashboards, reports, forecasts, and data models can ingest information from a variety of sources. This is simpler as all the sources are connected to the platform by default.
5. Leverage comprehensive market intelligence
The cloud provider will typically update the platform constantly and consistently with new and market-specific data. For example, Microsoft is testing its property data model with semantics databases containing policies, claims, etc., in the US, UK, and Australia. You can be confident of leveraging up-to-date market intelligence thanks to mortgage industry cloud platforms.
Also Read: Maximizing Mortgage Servicing Efficiency: Best Practices
Leverage Industry Clouds to Reduce Digital Transformation Timelines
Given the growing preference for digital experiences among borrowers, it is only a matter of time before you need to shift your mortgage processes to an advanced and powerful cloud system. While there are plenty of traditional cloud computing solutions for the mortgage industry and seemingly simple SaaS options, industry clouds can help you achieve the right balance between speed, efficiency, customization, and configurability.
While there aren’t many options in the mortgage industry cloud segment just yet, this is expected to change over the next few years. Nexval leverages its years of mortgage industry expertise and cutting-edge digital capabilities to help you navigate (and win) the industry cloud market.
Speak with our Tech Gurus to know how.
