customer stories
Customer Stories
Service First Mortgage cuts three days from cycle times and unlocks same-day underwriting with Ocrolus
Mortgage | Analyze, Inspect, MeridianLink integration
Service First Mortgage is an independent mortgage banker headquartered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and licensed in 13 states, with about 85% of its volume in Texas and the rest concentrated in Minnesota, Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma. Founded in 1997, the company is approaching 30 years in business and has run on MeridianLink for 13 of them.
Challenge
Service First Mortgage needed income calculations its loan officers, processors and underwriters could all rely on at application, so issues surfaced early instead of after a file reached underwriting.
Solution
Ocrolus gave the team income calculations with the source document behind every number. Representation and warranty coverage on those calculations helped leadership make Ocrolus a requirement, and the MeridianLink integration keeps the work inside the LOS.
Result
- 19-day average from application to clear to close, down from 22 days
- As much as 40% of files became same-day underwrites
- Same-day initial credit decisions guaranteed on qualifying files, against a prior 24 to 48 hour standard
- Income questions surface at application instead of after the file reaches underwriting
Challenge: finding income problems after underwriting instead of at application
Late last year, Service First launched an internal initiative to rethink how work moves through the company.
"We had an initiative late last year that we called our Reimagine process," said Dee Hoyle, Executive Director of Operations at Service First Mortgage. "We've been really trying to utilize technology as much as we can."
Post-pandemic margin compression was part of the catalyst.
"We were making less on every transaction, so we really have to be cost efficient," Hoyle said. "Any dollar we can control, we want to control."
Income calculation was the clearest example. Underwriters keyed figures into the agency tools by hand, which meant loan officers, processors and loan officer assistants learned income had to be recalculated long after the file had moved on.
"We were really looking for a tool that could be easily adopted to allow our LOAs and our loan officers sooner in the process to get comfortable knowing that they could rely on that income calculation," Hoyle said.
"What I found that was really causing delays, back and forth, stress and friction was where we have unforeseen things that come up after the file's been underwritten," Hoyle said. "These are things we should have known at application."
Solution: a number everyone could trace back to the document
Service First had evaluated income automation before, and ease of use was the first thing that separated Ocrolus, because the people using it every day are not all underwriters.
Jessica Brindle, Operational Support Director at Service First Mortgage, tested a competing product as well. “I absolutely had to read the directions,” she said. With Ocrolus, “95 percent of it I was able to stumble through and figure out without even having a demo on it.”
“The layout, the look and feel of it is clean, smooth and easy,” Brindle said.
"If it's intuitive, you can immediately get in there, get to work and build that trust," Hoyle said.
Reimagine had already seeded the idea that income automation was coming, so when Ocrolus went live it went live as policy rather than as a suggestion.
"We had already laid the groundwork that this isn't going to be an option," Hoyle said.
Requiring it only worked because the output held up. Every figure traced back to the document it came from, so the team could check any number against its source and came to treat Ocrolus as a second set of eyes rather than a black box.
"With any of these AI tools that we're utilizing, you've got to be able to let go," Hoyle said.
Letting go was possible because the team was not being asked to trust a number blind. Representation and warranty coverage on the income calculations Ocrolus provides is what made that argument land.
"The reps and warrants that Ocrolus provides were a great way for me to do that," Hoyle said. "That really helped push us forward with change management."
Leadership paired the requirement with an incentive: a guaranteed same-day initial credit decision on qualifying files run through Ocrolus, against a prior standard of 24 to 48 hours.
Automated submissions to the Fannie Mae Income Calculator removed a manual step the team had been avoiding.
"The fact that I do not have to manually enter that is a huge time saver," Brindle said.
Adoption still had to clear one more hurdle. After 13 years in MeridianLink, Service First's users do not want to leave it.
"Getting them to adopt an outside tool is generally a challenge," Hoyle said.
The MeridianLink integration removes the round trip of uploading documents to a separate site and keying results back in.
"Now we can do it directly from MeridianLink," Hoyle said. "That's just scratching the surface of what we've seen."
Because Ocrolus reads what is already in the loan file, Inspect flags mismatches between income documents and the income entered on the loan application early.
"Since we've had the integration, we have seen an increase in Freddie recommendations now that it can read the 1003," Brindle said.
Ocrolus Inspect compares borrower documents against the 1003 and flags discrepancies before an underwriter touches the file.
“I’ve noticed a lot more where employer names are slightly different,” Brindle said. “We used to always have to manually write a condition to tie them together, but now Inspect is helping.”
Result: same-day underwrites and a three-day shorter cycle
"We’re consistently at 40 percent of every file that we do has all income validated. So that’s all types of income," Hoyle said. "Those are the hard numbers for us."
Same-day underwriting, which the company had never done, became routine.
"We were right around 20 percent of our files with same-day underwrites, which we've never done before," Hoyle said of the first two months. The rate has since climbed to as high as roughly 40%, moving with loan parameters month to month.
Service First has also seen more Freddie Mac recommendations since the integration went live. Cycle times came down too.
"We're now down to averaging 19 days from application to clear to close," Hoyle said, against a prior average closer to 22. "We used to consider anything less than 21 days a rush."
The result that doesn’t show up in a report is the one the team feels most.
"It cuts down friction dramatically," Hoyle said. "An underwriter doesn't have to be the bad guy on these things."
"I could have saved an hour of that back and forth conversation," Brindle said. "It's nice to back up that my underwriters aren't being tough."
Key outcomes:
- Average application to clear to close down to just under 19 days from roughly 22
- Same-day underwrites went from zero to as much as 40% of files
- Guaranteed same-day initial credit decisions on qualifying files, against a prior 24 to 48 hour standard
- Income questions surface at application instead of after the file reaches underwriting
- Fewer conditions and fewer back-and-forth conversations between underwriting and sales
- More Freddie Mac recommendations since the MeridianLink integration went live
Why Service First Mortgage recommends Ocrolus
The roadmap is part of the reason.
"We started with Fannie, now we've got Freddie, and we continue to see that develop," Hoyle said. "That gives confidence in it."
The partnership and the people are the other.
"When you're looking for a partner, you want a partner that you feel like is in it with you," Brindle said.
"I feel like Ocrolus is part of that with us," Hoyle said.
"Having a partner like Ocrolus that we trust, we're down to averaging 19 days from application to clear to close. We used to consider anything less than 21 days a rush."
Dee Hoyle, Executive Director of Operations at Service First Mortgage
