00:05Welcome to HousingWire Demo Day On Demand. I'm Alison LaForgia and HousingWire Demo Day
00:11spotlights some of the most innovative technology companies in mortgage, giving the HousingWire
00:16audience a front row seat to real product demos from teams building the tools that move our
00:21industry forward. In this session, we're featuring First Close, a leading fintech provider of data
00:27and workflow solutions for mortgage and home equity lenders nationwide. Express Equity Lender
00:33Portal gives lending teams the complete home equity platform from borrowers' first click to
00:40funded loan. Borrowers get instant valuations, equity, and pre-approval in minutes. Loan officers
00:47get full pipeline visibility, disclosure tracking, and automated follow-up to keep every deal moving.
00:54In this First Close demo, Tracy will be taking us through First Close Express Equity. Tracy,
01:00the floor is yours. All right. Well, thank you so much. I am Tracy Farber, and I'm going to show
01:06you
01:06the First Close platform and specifically Express Equity and the Lender Portal. Express Equity is our
01:13home equity point of sale system, and Lender Portal is the loan officer workspace that gives your team
01:19total visibility from a borrower's first click all the way through to a funded loan. So first off,
01:26let's start out with Express Equity. That's that borrower-facing front door, and that's what you're
01:31looking at here. Lenders who use this point of sale have told us that they're closing loans in as little
01:36as four business days, which is just incredible. And that's all with minimal data entry. A borrower can
01:42indicate property address, property type, property usage, provide their credit consents, and their
01:49e-consent. They can go ahead and behind the scenes, when I click the next button, we're going to go
01:55ahead and order a locked credit report and an AVM. So you're getting validated information. And we're
02:02now telling that borrower how much money they have in equity in their home. And actually the next screen
02:09is actually going to present offers to that borrower. So we've got validated information with an AVM
02:16and a soft credit report, and now we're presenting offers to that borrower, both in the line of credit
02:21and a home equity offer. Now the borrower can come through and use the system to understand the line
02:28amount, the draw amount, what it's going to cost them, and they can go ahead and make their selection.
02:33All of that in just five to seven minutes with no hoops to jump through or tough questions
02:39to answer. There's no hard credit pull needed upfront, and they don't need to hand over that
02:45social security number just to see what they qualify for. That matters today because your
02:50borrower is comparing you to Rocket and Better and every other field that needs to, and every field
02:56or every weight is a chance to lose them. Once a borrower moves through credit and equity eligibility
03:04and has selected a loan program, they're going to complete just a couple of more screens. That's going
03:10to include things like their income and their demographics. They've got their declarations,
03:14and all of that is just going to take them just a couple of minutes, and then they'll submit that
03:20full
03:20application. And here's the important part for executives in the room. Every one of these digital
03:27applications flows automatically into the system. I want to spend the rest of our time looking at today,
03:33and that's the lender portal. So Express Equity gets the borrowers in the door fast, but speed at the top
03:40of the funnel doesn't matter if loans are stalled in the middle, and that's the problem that the lender
03:45portal solves. Our research and our lenders are telling us that First Close is helping them reduce
03:51manual processing time by up to 85%. So let's take a look at that. All right, this is the loan
03:58officer
03:58workspace where your loan officers manage every lead and every loan, whether it started online, in branch,
04:05or over the phone. The pipeline shows the borrower's last completed milestone, their lead status, their
04:12last engagement, so loan officers immediately know who needs follow-up and who's ready to move forward.
04:19Leads can either be assigned automatically, or they can be claimed manually by a loan officer,
04:25so nothing is going to fall through the cracks. If a borrower fully submits an application in Express
04:31Equity, not only is it going to that loan origination system, but it will also be seen here in the
04:38lender
04:38portal under the loans menu. On the other hand, if a borrower starts an application and then drops off,
04:47it's going to be seen under the leads pipeline. That's where the loan officer can see exactly where
04:53they left off. Their last completed milestone, no re-entering data, no starting over, and that single
05:00feature is a big part of why completion rates go up. In fact, when lenders use the First Close
05:06platform, they can see up to a 50% increase in application completion. The loan officer also has an
05:14opportunity to start a new lead by clicking the start new lead button, or they can pick up the loan
05:20exactly where the borrower left off. So when I open up an existing lead, they can come in and adjust
05:28borrower information at their leisure. They can run through the property information, even review the
05:35AVM. They can run through the financials where they can see and re-pull a soft credit report. So you'll
05:42notice over here on the right-hand side, we can see that this loan is eligible with a credit score.
05:47We can even add and remove co-borrower if we needed to do that. They can also review the financials,
05:54they can review their expenses, and they can update income and debts. Eligibility runs on credit,
06:03equity, and optionally on DTI, and the system displays eligible programs in real time as the
06:09loan officer refines the file. So if I click on the loan program tab, we'll see that this borrower has
06:16three offers that have been presented to them, and then that loan officer can explain the programs
06:23and make the choice with the borrower. This is where a good loan officer turns a marginal lead
06:28into a closable loan. In the case that the system doesn't have enough information, or the system
06:35can't figure out what offers to present to the borrower, that loan officer will see a screen like
06:42this. That loan officer is going to very clearly understand that the property type on this loan
06:47is ineligible. They'll have the ability to come back into the property screen, adjust the property
06:54type, save the file, go back to the loan program, and they'll see those loan programs.
07:02There we go. The lender portal tracks your in-process loans in real time from the loans pipeline.
07:12And from here, all right, stop for a second. Hold the phone. The lender portal tracks in-process
07:21loans in real time from the loans pipeline. From here, the loan officer will have the ability
07:27to track disclosures, including when they were generated, delivered, viewed, and signed.
07:33They'll see every open borrower task and document, and the system will also flag inactive loans and
07:40unsigned disclosures automatically. Loan officers can spend their remainder. Sorry, stop one more time.
07:49Loan officers can send a reminder and even upload a document on behalf of the borrower from the lender
07:55portal instead of finding out on day 45 that the loan quietly died. These cards across the top allow
08:02the loan officers to filter and prioritize loans by execution risk and urgency so that the team's
08:08energy goes into the loans that need attention today and not the ones that are already on track.
08:15So let's step back for a second. Express Equity compresses the front end process by getting a decision
08:21in minutes instead of days. Lender portal compresses everything thereafter, full visibility into every
08:29stage, automated recovery of stalled applications, and loan officers spending their time on the deals
08:35that need them instead of on hunting for statuses. Together, that's the difference between a pipeline
08:41you're managing reactively and one you're managing proactively, and it shows up directly in that pull-through
08:48rate and time to close. So that's Express Equity and Lender Portal, one platform from a borrower's
08:54first click to a funded loan. If you want to see this in your own environment, please visit
08:59firstclose.com slash express equity, and I'm happy to take any questions at this time. Tracy, let's jump into
09:07some of these questions. The first one that I have for you is, with borrower expectations shaped by
09:14consumer apps like Rocket and Better, how does Express Equity point of sale and features like
09:21Lender Portal deliver a credit decision in minutes without requiring a social security number?
09:27And what does that specifically mean for pull-through rates?
09:33Sure, that's a great question. So soft pull credit eligibility upfront has no social security number
09:40needed for that qualification. We get instant equity off of the property and the AVM. We know
09:46their mortgage balance. We can bump against that decision engine or product and pricing engine to see
09:52what the eligible programs and we surface those immediately. It really removes the biggest funnel or
09:57the biggest friction point that causes abandonment. The more that a borrower has to enter, the more that
10:03they're going to stop, right? They're not going to complete that application. So by not requiring that
10:08social security number, getting that validated information right up front and then presenting
10:13those offers to the borrower in just a matter of minutes makes all the difference.
10:18Tracy, every lender has different loan programs, pricing engines, and LOS environments. How does
10:26Express Equity adapt to those existing workflows rather than forcing lenders to change how they operate?
10:34Yeah, you know, changing software is always a big deal and no project team wants to take that on
10:39voluntarily. So we want to make it as easy as possible. So instead of bending your workflow to fit with
10:46ours,
10:46we really take on your workflow by taking your credit into consideration, your guidelines for equity and
10:53CLTV. We take into consideration your DTI guidelines. Your lender portal actually does follow the same core
11:00milestones as your digital application, but without the rigid linear flow. So loan officers can work
11:07how they already do and loans sync to the LOS. So, you know, I think the biggest thing is giving
11:13that
11:13loan officers the flexibility to use the system with all of the validated information, but we're not
11:19making them change how they do their work. We're still allowing them to bounce between screens and so on,
11:24all while keeping those borrowers and those loan officers within the guardrails of proper equity,
11:32DTI, LTV, credit policy, things like that. So we don't need the lender to take on more work. We just
11:38need to let the system do the work for you. Now, most lending teams would say that their biggest
11:46operational blind spot isn't the application. It's everything that happens after the application.
11:52Loan stall disclosures go unsigned and nobody knows until it's way too late. How does the lender portal
12:01give loan officers real-time visibility into exactly where every borrower is in the process? And what does
12:08that do to pull through rates when a team can proactively act on stalled applications instead of
12:14finding out 45 days later? Yeah, no, that's another really good question. Good one. So with the cards
12:23across the top of the screen that we saw in lender portal, we're going to surface information that is
12:28important. Things like, when were the disclosures due? When were they generated, delivered, viewed,
12:35signed? We have flags for inactive loan files so a lender can say if the file hasn't been touched in
12:41X number of days and it has to be surfaced in a card. We have unsigned disclosure reminders. We have
12:48document upload reminders. So anything that's important for the lender can be surfaced up in
12:54these cards across the top. So if I'm a loan officer, I open this up and if there's a card
13:00across the top,
13:01that's something I have to concentrate on, right? And so when it comes down to how does that
13:07affect my turn time, right, that's going to narrow my turn time down and decrease that turn time and
13:13time to close because I can see everything that needs my attention. So instead of waiting for a
13:19phone call from my processor or waiting for something for underwriting, I can come right into this screen,
13:24see everything across the top, and work those things accordingly, all by those risk factors.
13:30Tracy, thank you so much for joining me today. To our audience for more information
13:35about First Close Express Equity, click the link below.
