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Just as modern technology has already redefined how users perform their daily tasks in industries like healthcare, education, retail and banking, ICE is investing in technologies to power the future of mortgage servicing.

Beginning this year, you’ll notice big changes in our servicing technology that will help your team work smarter and faster while providing more consistent service levels for your customers. This approach will give your team:

• The ability to converse with the system to express what you need to do
• Fingertip access to relevant reference materials and next steps
• Fewer flagged exceptions that require specialized review
• Automatic audit trails that can be used for oversight
• Improved utility through continued use

In rethinking servicing technology, we are focusing on bringing more experiences into the way technology responds to the user — anticipating what users are trying to do, what resources they need to accomplish a task and what they’ll need to do next. In this way, our technology is designed to streamline work processes to get your team members to a desired, consistent outcome faster.

A deep dive into the three Cs

We are architecting our solutions to provide an experience unlike anything in servicing today, and these solutions rely on the three Cs — conversational, curated interactions that are context-aware — as our guiding principles.

Here’s what that thinking looks like in the context of servicing technology:

Conversational

Back-office servicing staff are used to managing their tasks through a complex interface that involves navigating multiple screens, tabs and datasets. This process typically involves a steep learning curve to master the languages and formats specific to their servicing software.

We are bringing to life something completely different: a chat-based interface that uses plain business language that any servicing professional can understand, without relying on obscure acronyms, codes, or specialized syntax. We call this a conversational interface, and having it can make it easier for servicing teams to get up to speed quickly and carry out tasks more efficiently. Our system is designed with intuitive prompts that correspond with users’ roles to offer additional guidance upon request. For example, the user could reanalyze a loan or view the most recent escrow analysis simply by typing that request into the system.

This conversational approach can make performing servicing tasks more approachable, creating greater efficiency and flexibility within teams.

Context-aware

In the past, system users had to navigate between multiple screens to locate specific loan information, including customer service representative notes. With our new context-aware experience, the system presents users with information curated for the tasks they are performing. The language used is straightforward, designed to be easily understood by servicing team members rather than obscured by technical jargon. The technology understands the workflow and aids in its progress.

The combination of a conversational user interface and a context-aware backend helps users understand the nuances of an exception and suggests a path forward. It also automatically creates an audit trail, so you have a record of the activities that occurred on each exception.

Curated

Previously, software developers would attempt to predict all possible data a user might need, resulting in an overwhelming amount of information for users to sift through. Now, we've adopted a curated approach.

A curated approach means the system anticipates and presents only the data that is relevant and necessary for each step of the user's task, streamlining their experience. It guides users by providing useful resources such as links to regulatory guidelines or internal procedure manuals.

For example, take a user who is set to reanalyze a loan. If there is a factor that could impede this task, such as a processing stop or an override on the loan or critical information they must know before taking action, the system will proactively look for these items and display the information. Our context-aware technology is tuned to the user's specific role, and at each stage of the process, the system only presents the data the servicer would need to fulfill the request. This helps in pinpointing any critical issues and responding to significant inquiries necessary for successful task completion.

In other words, both the data and experience have been curated to lead to an improved outcome.

Better outcomes for homeowners

Technology built with these principles yields an added benefit: consistency. Two users looking at the same borrower with the same loan and the same conditions should get the same result regardless of the number of years they have on the job.

Even the greenest employee would be prompted with simple, clear language when loan conditions might require an override code and take appropriate action without having to memorize a lot of complex codes and syntax. This lets servicers provide more efficient and consistent service levels for a better borrower experience. Additionally, because the three Cs are built with intelligent technologies, they will improve through continued use.

Getting ICE’s technology to this level of intuitive operation meant taking a deep dive into our customers’ worlds so we could understand their pain points. Because servicing is complex, we wanted to understand which processes or functional areas are giving teams the most headaches or where there could be potential risks. We apply data and automation to these areas to help ease production hiccups and burdens for staff.

These advances took some time to develop, and they will soon permeate our suite of servicing capabilities, including customer-facing applications. Beta users are already using our new escrow exception processes, which we plan to make available more broadly later this year.

Servicing will always be a complex and ever-changing landscape. We think intelligent technologies – used in combination – will make everyday processes a lot easier for your entire team and the industry.