Executive Mortgage Roundtable

Synopsis: You can now view our Mortgage round table where we had an open discussion featuring guest speaker Sarah Weber, Sales Innovation and Marketing Manager of Renasant Bank. While exploring how the Mortgage industry has evolved in 2020, we uncovered how Sarah and the Renasant team are leveraging Salesforce Financial Services Cloud along with Pardot to transform their mortgage lending processes and dramatically change their customer experience.

Speakers: Sarah Weber, Sales Innovation and Marketing Manager of Renasant Bank | Taylor Richardson, Senior Marketing Cloud Consultant at EMS Consulting

0:00:05.9 Taylor Richardson: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining EMS Consulting Mortgage Roundtable Discussion. Today we have the pleasure and honor of having Sarah Weber, Sales Innovation and Marketing Manager for mortgage lending at Renasant Bank. She’s joining us to talk about how she and the Renasant Bank mortgage and lending team has been able to leverage Salesforce Financial Services Cloud along with Pardot to really transform their mortgage lending processes. They’ve been able to elevate their customer experience beyond the status quo and even navigate the mortgage industry challenges of 2020 as we’re all painfully aware of. My name is Taylor Richardson, I am a Senior Marketing Cloud Consultant here with EMS, and I would like to introduce Ms. Sarah Weber. Thank you so much for being here, Sarah.

0:01:00.3 Sarah Weber: Absolutely, happy to be here.

0:01:03.3 TR: Real quick, just a little bit of housekeeping for our attendees here. If we have any questions during the presentation, please utilize the Q&A chat feature here in Zoom. We will be addressing any of those questions at the end of the presentation with any time that we have remaining and anything that we can’t get to we will follow up via email. If you have any questions about how that works, you can also chat directly to the panelists. Myself and Brittany will be able to help you out in any way. So to kick things off, let’s actually, Sarah, if you don’t mind, I would really like to start kind of at the beginning. And for those who are joining us today, that was really around the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 when Sarah at Renasant approached EMS Consulting. And so thinking back to that time, Sarah, and what you and the Renasant Bank team were trying to… What you were really up against. What road blocks were you trying to solve for? Can you tell us about how that decision came together for you and your team, how you landed on Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and what you were looking to achieve with it initially?

“What roadblocks were you looking to solve, and how did you come to choose Salesforce Financial Services Cloud?”

0:02:47.0 SW: Absolutely. So a little bit of my background that Renasant Bank was mostly trying to drive production and volume in all three of our channels and we had retail, consumer direct, and wholesale. I became very heavily involved in consumer direct and when we stood that channel up, we realized that we did not have a CRM solution. And if any of you are in that space, you certainly know that you have to have a great CRM in order to be successful in that space. So we began looking at CRMs, not only for consumer directs but also for retail and many of our high producers were very adamant about needing a CRM and, as I mentioned, we simply did not have one. So we started to look around and we looked at tons and sat with many, many vendors and we came up with Salesforce and at the time we didn’t have the budget for it. So we actually walked away from Salesforce for about a year and we went to another vendor. I won’t mention their name, but we realized very quickly why we needed to be with Salesforce and why the alternative vendor was just not gonna work. There was very little customization, the options weren’t there, the workflows certainly weren’t there, and it just was not a good product. So at that point I went back to the drawing board and looked at all of our problems and knew we needed a solution and went back to Salesforce immediately and when we did that we were led to EMS and it’s been a great partnership since.

0:04:35.2 TR: That’s wonderful to hear. Thank you so much for those details. And so you engaged with EMS and you had the unfortunate experience of trying something else and it not working out. So really, what issues were you looking to solve? Not with the previous vendor necessarily, but I understand not having a CRM in place and having your top producers really tell you, “Hey, we really need this.” Can you describe to us what were some of those needs that they were expressing? What were some of those specific gaps in the member experience or the borrower experience that you were really trying to overcome with Salesforce?

“What were some specific gaps in the borrower experience you were trying to fix?”

0:05:19.5 SW: Sure. And it varied depending on the channel, so I’ll address retail first. We have couple of really high-volume producers, and with those high-volume producers, there’s a lot of fallout in their pipeline because they simply just cannot stay in front of all of their applications, all of their pre-qualifications. So unless you maintain constant contact with these prospects or these borrowers, you are going to lose that loan. And we were experiencing a lot of fallout, and in order to not have that fallout, typically you have about a 70% retention from application to close.

0:06:02.5 SW: The standard we try to aim for… And when you look at that and you see that your fallout for some of these producers is high, and then you start implementing things like drip campaigns and text messaging and things of that sort, and you see how your pipeline continues to increase and you are not experiencing as much fallout. So as for retail that was the primary made we had… And then of course, you have referral partners, so we wanted a way to stay in front of our referral partners, and then for consumer direct, it’s a little bit different, you certainly want the same thing, you want drip campaigns, you want emails, you want text messaging and all of those, but you also need a way for them to manage leads, they get leads in in real time, and if you don’t call those prospects within 30 seconds, the chances of you losing the deal is extremely high, so we needed a workflow and we need it to fund system integration in order to make sure we were getting the most from our leads that we were getting from places like Bankrate or Lending Tree, and we’d realize it very quickly, not many CRMs have definite integration systems, have the workflow capabilities, and when you’re spending lots and lots of money on leads, you really need to make sure that conversion is there.

0:07:30.0 TR: Absolutely, absolutely, that makes perfect sense. And how smart of you too, to address with each of your different customer experiences, with consumer direct versus retail, understanding that those problems and those challenges overlap somewhat, but that they are different priorities and you need to address uniquely. I’m glad to hear that we were able to help out with that. These are some pretty lofty initiatives to go after and to try to solve, especially with all the legacy banking systems that all need to work together and come into a centralized location. It sounds like Financial Services Cloud became a straightforward decision, but I am curious to know, how did you know that MuleSoft… And for those who may be not as familiar with MuleSoft, MuleSoft is Salesforce integration Cloud, and it offers an API-led interface and way of connecting all of your systems. So Sarah, how did it become apparent to you and your team that MuleSoft was actually going to be a big part of your solution as well?

“How did you know that you needed MuleSoft?”

0:09:06.7 SW: Sure. Yeah. And that’s a great point on Financial Services Cloud, I’ll touch on that really quickly. Our… The bank side for Renasant is actually using nCino, and so leveraging an enterprise system is always huge. And that worked out really well and worked out to our benefit. Now, MuleSoft was basically our saving grace, we… Unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s actually not a terrible LOS, it’s pretty user-friendly, but we use Mortgagebot. And I’ve been on several LOSs and they all have their perks and their downfalls, but one thing that Mortgagebot has done a great job of is creating APIs and ways to tap into data. So we realized at that point when we went to Mortgagebot what we were asking for, and they certainly didn’t have it on their roadmap at the time, and MuleSoft was the solution to that, so I’m not so sure it would have worked out had we not figured out the MuleSoft connection, and it basically taps into our data mart, and it pulls data within about 30 seconds, and so it’s essentially real time from our LOS into Salesforce, and in part that is the marketer’s dream maybe in marketing, that has been a game changer, it makes automations and task very easy, it makes grading content, very easy. So between the two of those, we realized very quickly that we could make it work even with a more legacy LOS, and that they were connecting well with Salesforce and it worked beautifully.

0:11:38.7 TR: And really what you’ve accomplished and is really no small feet, obviously requires a lot of organizational support and alignment, I know financial institutions, banks, credit unions, even mortgage companies, definitely, they either struggle or they completely nail organizational alignment. So I would love for you to give us some details a little bit, ’cause I know you shared some great stuff the other week, which of your teams were paramount in bringing this vision to life, who did you feel like you had a really great alignment with across your organization to pull this off?

“Which of your departments were critical players in this transformation?”

0:12:19.7 SW: Sure. And of course, we had internal partners and external, and it took everyone involved in order to make this happen. I have about 110 line officers at Renasant and we originate about two and a half billion a year, and when you’re looking at that many users and all of the needs that we had, our scope was pretty huge, so with that, we started to bring in internal teams and that looks like our digital team, we have a full digital team here at Renasant, we have our business analyst in IT, data services certainly has to be involved, and then you start getting involved with your operations staff and asking them what their needs are from alert to processor saying, your loan has been in underwriting too long or you haven’t sent it to underwriting. And you start gathering needs from everyone involved, and then we come together, I have a CRM analyst on my team, and we circled up and between our IT partners and the digital team, we made one big Salesforce happy family.

0:13:29.2 SW: So here at Renasant, we do have a full support staff. And then externally, of course, we had EMS as our external partners, and say, “You guys have done a great job of writing,” and other vendors that we’ve made it along the way, which has been fantastic. So each component that we’ve added along the way, we’ve had to tap in to different people, telecommunications with our finite integration system certainly had to be involved, so you realize with your scope how large it is, and at that point you can kind of back into, “Who do I need to be involved in this to make it successful and to make sure I’m getting the best return possible?”

0:14:13.9 TR: Wow. And I could appreciate too how… Not to throw us off the trail too much, but the knowing how big it could possibly get, the importance of iterating and figuring out where do you start first, and iterating your way there is crucial as well. That’s fantastic. Thank you. So now, as of now, as of today, as at this moment, your mortgage processing team has had FSC backed by MuleSoft and with Pardot for about almost a full year now, so how would you say that your processors and funders day-to-day lives are now compared to what they were a year ago before this launched?

“How is day-to-day life different for your mortgage processors and funders now after the transformation?”

0:15:03.6 SW: Sure. And it is a all-encompassing system at this point, and I’ll use an example with COVID. So once COVID hit, as many of us have experienced, you start to get complaints and things that you have to address in a ticketing system and you have to manage in order to remain compliant and prevent CSV complaints and things of that nature. So our servicing team started to get a lot of requests and a lot of emails on forbearance and payment questions and so on and so forth, so having those thorns during this time dramatically changed our servicing team. They were able to stop maintaining communication with borrowers via email and do it purely through Salesforce, so now we’re able to track it, we’re able to make sure that we’re staying compliant, our auditors can go in and in one spot have everything that they need at their fingertips, and we had to stand up that page layout and that solution pretty quickly, it was in a matter of a week.

0:16:19.9 SW: So for their lives in this odd world that we’re in right now, we made it a heck of a lot easier. Our operational staff has gained a lot of benefit with email notifications, and then beyond that, you have other components and departments within the mortgage world that we’ve leveraged Salesforce with for not only operations and sales and our servicing team, but then you also have the benefit of LLAs and how they can maintain pipelines and help their LOs. So everyone involved that touches the file from beginning to end has some sort of benefit, whether it is in high volume times, you get an email reminding you to follow up with this title that you totally forgot about, or if it’s something more complicated, like a servicing to you for COVID complaint. But pretty much everybody has had some sort of benefit.

0:17:21.5 TR: That’s amazing. And I do wanna ask you a little bit more about some of those here in just a second. Before I do though, on the flip side of what you just talked about with your team’s ability to adapt quickly to how car customers and their needs are shifting rapidly. So on the flip side of that, how would you say that your customer experience, your borrower experience compares today versus to a year ago?

“How has your borrower experience improved since the transformation?”

0:17:53.6 SW: Sure. I would say that actually starts at… Before application even, we have many of our loan officers adding potential borrowers prior to application to drip campaign. So with that you don’t even have to be a borrower or a customer of yet in order to see the benefits of it. So once we get your email address, your name and your phone number, we will add you to our system and you will be added on to a campaign, and you will be hearing from us for the next 180 days. And so with that, that has been a great way to keep in front of our customers, and then it is a benefit to the customers, even at the loan process because you’re continuing to get updates on your loans from Pardot, and things of that nature. So we provide status updates, kinda keep them in the loop as to where they are in the loan process and that’s beneficial for our referral partners as well. And then post-close, you have the additional post-close campaign. So they’re continuing to see information from us in the event that maybe rates are down and there’s a good refinance opportunity. Salesforce makes it very easy to pull data, to scrub data very quickly and see where your opportunities are, so you can actually help your prior customers in great environments like we’re in right now.

0:19:25.1 SW: If they had a five percent rate, which I’m not sure anybody does these days, but if they had a five percent rate, then we can certainly add them to our lead list and we can start dripping content to them in order to let them know, “Hey, you might qualify for a lower rate that would reduce your monthly payments.” It really starts in the beginning. Yeah.

0:19:47.8 TR: That’s fantastic. And kind of a mirrored or similar to what you were talking about with your pipeline fallout, to be able to talk to them and keep that conversation going from the moment they first interact all the way to the point where they do an application. And then all the way through to funding is just absolutely crucial as we all know and I really appreciate all of that. Thank you so much. So I know you talked a little bit about it just a second ago, that your overall investment has really helped you navigate the uncertainties of 2020. Obviously, with the COVID pandemic popping up starting in March, the rapidly shifting consumer and the customer expectations too. I would love to zero in on some of the details about your responses to the changes with what our consumers have needed over the past six months? You mentioned being able to do service cases, to set up some cues. Would you mind giving us some details, of course, no trade secrets or anything like that, but we would love to know more about how you were able to respond and how quickly?

“How did Salesforce help your bank navigate the initial challenges of the COVID pandemic?”

0:21:11.5 SW: Sure. And I’ll speak to this not only from a mortgage perspective but also from the bank side as well. Of course, with PPP and with the forbearance issues that you have, maintaining those pipelines for PPP and then maintaining those customer complaints and questions and all of that, as I mentioned previously, was critical. And if you don’t have a good way to manage it, you were drowned. You’re looking at thousands of people that unfortunately are not able to make their mortgage payments. So when you look at that volume, there’s no good way to manage it when you only have a small servicing team, and when you only have a small group of people that are able to sort of manage your PPP inquiry. So we certainly leveraged page layout, we leveraged the servicing queue. We set up a more dynamic way to manage PPP and that has been extremely beneficial and it has decreased our man hours that we would have had to have produced otherwise. So the expectation for customers, I would say overall, has been fulfilled. Simply by us being able to communicate and manage their inquiries in a more timely manner.

0:22:32.7 TR: That’s amazing and a similar follow-up question there. When you were on the fly making these decisions to set up all of these different cues to manage the PPP inquiries and the forbearance inquiries, did you have to involve any external partners for that or were you and your internal team able to completely own that process?

0:22:58.9 SW: We did. We actually went to you guys, EMS, briefly, simply to help us with our servicing queue. I have a team here that manages development and rollouts and updates and bug fixes. But oftentimes when you’re working on projects that need to be done very quickly, it’s beneficial to reach out to your external partners that you know can get it done a lot faster. Because we had to be so quick in response to the forbearance inquiries, we reached out to EMS and you guys handled a lot of that for us in about a week. And then additionally we had to… I manage all of our websites here at Renasant, so I had to make some changes with our vendors that manage our websites and our forums that connect into Salesforce. So everybody was really fast in response and it didn’t take as much time at all in order to make the changes that we needed to make.

0:24:00.9 TR: Well, I appreciate that very much and I’m really glad we were able to help. I’m glad that you did reach out to us. I think that that is where we like to shine, is to really be an ongoing extension of the team and to allow you really, since you were at the center and really need to be focused on how to serve your customers best, by leaning on us to be able to execute the Salesforce stuff, really allows you to not have to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty and the technical pieces of it. So we’re so glad to have been able to be there for you for that as well, so thanks for coming to us.

0:24:35.2 SW: Yeah.

0:24:37.6 TR: Cool. So as of today, we all know that things are still developing and things could happen tomorrow that are not on our radars today. But with a lot of the upheavals of the CARES Act and the PPP program, so what would you say are… Besides coming down off of all of that and having a breather, what issues or challenges are you and the team looking forward to or even starting to address right now, post-initial COVID?

“What future challenges are you anticipating addressing as we continue navigating the pandemic?”

0:25:13.9 SW: Sure. COVID has changed all of our lives. I don’t know about you guys, but 2020 for me has been pretty interesting and not that great at times. So we certainly have seen the challenges this year. I think that moving forward, we’re trying to all get back to normal as best we can, and so I’m trying to approach a roadmap of the fourth quarter now that we’re in, which is scary and also 2021, and we have a lot of plans. Of course, you’re gonna have to continue to maintain what comes our way for COVID relief and all of those good things that just come with the pandemic, but moving forward, we’re trying to get back to normal as much as possible, and so I’m actually really focusing on additional build-out for other channels, some additional integrations and applications. So I’m trying to move forward and not focus on the negatives so much at this point, but we will continue to maintain any needs relative to COVID.

0:26:25.4 TR: I can appreciate that a lot and I hate to say the same thing over and over again, but we’ll definitely get through it together, and I appreciate that positive outlook very, very much to just keep looking forward and look to the future, and I can appreciate too how after the past six or more months and being able to handle most of what has been thrown our way, there’s at least some relief that we can get from that. Do you think that there were any, and I use the word opportunity delicately, because obviously this has been a scary time, but do you think that there would be any opportunities to help people who were potentially in a really tough situation that you would be missing out on or that would have been impossible to handle? Really, you were able to handle a lot of what your consumers have come to you with, but out of all of those, which of them stands out as would have been completely impossible if you happened to have done this initiative, the FSC bring up last year?

“What about the past year would have been impossible to handle without your FSC transformation?”

0:27:43.0 SW: Sure. I think the servicing queue it would have ruined us. I mean that slightly dramatically, but our two options is at the point of managing the forbearance problems, was to hire a large staff attempt, and that was gonna be a huge expenditure or to come up with a better way for our current existing team to manage these inquiries. And when we looked at the cost, it made a lot more sense to just stand up with early Queue within Salesforce. Otherwise, we all know what our per head cost is, and when you start looking at that for the foreseeable future, we’re not out of the woods with this yet, so that was gonna be a lot more expensive, and not only that, but there’s training hours to go behind that, there’s taking your current staff offline in order to train. So we would have been in a really bad spot, and I think that our customers would’ve certainly suffered had we not been able to get that solution set up as quickly as we did.

0:29:01.4 TR: That’s… Yep, I can definitely appreciate that for sure. So, really and truly, I know that it’s really… It took a lot of, like you said, internal partners, external partners… Some things that you said in your last answer really made me start realizing a lot of mortgage teams out there too are probably looking to make their first step. A lot of our attendees today probably are really wondering, okay, since we haven’t necessarily done all of this work a year ago, maybe a lot of us really have struggled through the last six months, really and truly. So I do want to ask you, first before this IT question here, but first question is, what advice might you have for any of those teams who are struggling to figure out what that first step is? What is that first step in your opinion and in your experience, if you could tell your former self and kind of second follow-up to that, how involved was your IT team, ’cause I know that is of concern to a lot of folks as well.

“What advice do you have for mortgage teams looking to make the first step toward digital transformation?”

0:30:22.4 SW: Sure. I would say you first need to know what you’re trying to solve for, right. None of us have a solution without knowing our problem, so I think starting with where is there a need and we all have them, but where is there a need, and when you start to look at that, oftentimes, you can see where Salesforce will meet that need. For us, we knew that we had a CRM need, we knew we had a form integration need, we knew we had an email solution need. We knew all of those things, and when you start to add all of those up, it pointed directly to Salesforce. So, coming up with what your needs are and sort of listing them out and then finding a partner, like EMS, in order to make that scope, see what it looks like, get your statement to work and see on paper exactly how it’s going to solve for those problems and IT’s a big part of that. I’m very fortunate here at Renasant. We have a fantastic IT team. We have great business analyst. The mortgage division here works very well with our IT team. I have weekly calls with them and they gather our needs and they go back to the drawing board and they come up with solutions, and if they can’t, then we reach out to EMS or other partners that can. So our IT involvement has been pretty huge.

0:32:00.9 SW: I would say probably 20-25 of our IT staff members have been involved in this project to some degree. And they continue to be involved, they manage our MuleSoft connection and we’ve been able to leverage MuleSoft for other things as well. So IT is a critical piece and I would strongly encourage everyone to establish good relationship with those guys ’cause they are very important.

0:32:24.1 TR: Absolutely, absolutely. And especially, if you’re considering… MuleSoft is a big part of that too, and I know of our IT folks love MuleSoft, so, I wanted to clarify that as well too. And you’re so fortunate you have… All the organizational alignment is just such a dream come true, so in so many ways, I think that you have kind of a lovely story. And I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today, Sarah. So before we wrap up, actually, I do have one more question for any of us on the call today who are thinking about, who are maybe closer to making the jump to Salesforce, When you were rolling Salesforce out to your team, what was that user adoption experience like with your processing and your funding team? Did they take to Salesforce pretty easily or did it take a while… Was there a concerted effort with internal training? How did you guys handle that?

“How did you roll out Salesforce to new users in your organization? Did they adopt?”

0:33:29.1 SW: Sure, I am a big proponent of burn the ships, and if they don’t have access to it, they’re not gonna be able to use it. So we rolled out in phases. So we initially rolled out in our retail team and our larger producers. And we started to see what that looks like. And then we rolled out to the entire field for retail, and then after that we rolled out consumer-direct. And now we’re to the point where we’re taking all of our reports that people have historically gotten off of what we call data mark. They have to go into Salesforce to pull a report. So kind of making sure that… We all are creatures of habit, right? Because we’re creatures of habit, burning the ships, removing the other options and then requiring them to get into Salesforce was our strategy. That might not be for everyone, but that was the way that I tried to approach it. Certainly recording, because processors, underwriters, we have set out coordinators, we all look to our reports daily. So that was a really good way for us to require adoption. When you start pulling reports from certain areas, then that kind of forces people to adopt the system.

0:34:49.1 TR: That’s really smart. Awesome, cool. Well, that is our final question that we have, at least the planned questions that we have today. Thank you so much, Sarah. I really just can’t thank you enough for sharing your experience. For sharing your story. For all of your advice as far as choosing Salesforce and what that roll out might be like. What the past, present and future might be like as well. We just really, really appreciate you leaning on us too as a trusted partner. And we look forward to continuing that relationship, obviously on into the future. But before I let you go, actually, I did want to actually talk real quick to Brittany, my co-host here, as well as we have Chris Russell here from EMS. I know we’ve been collecting some questions in the Q&A section of Zoom here. So I want to open up to Brittany or Chris, did we receive any questions and would we like to start going through those?

0:36:01.2 Brittany Mays: We did. Hi everyone. We did receive a few questions, and I believe the first one is actually going to be on the EMS side. We do have Linda here. She is our CIO, Linda Reid. And Linda, we have a question, What is the difference between Salesforce financial services cloud and Jungo?

Attendee Question: “What is the difference between Salesforce FSC and Jungo?”

0:36:25.8 Linda Reid: Sure. Hi everybody. Nice to meet you. So it’s a big difference. So Jungo is really a small application that was built on the Salesforce platform for mortgage services. What we call financial services cloud, is the Salesforce platform that has a data model that supports all different types of financial services companies, mortgage, entire banks, credit unions, wealth, insurance. So when we say financial services cloud, we built Sarah’s mortgage process on the entire financial services cloud, so that, number one, it’s a very personalized and branded experience for Renasant Bank. And also that the vision for Renasant is to put the whole bank on Salesforce, right? So financial services cloud would support that and other product lines. Jungo was really built to give small, very small mortgage operations some pre-built functions within the Salesforce platform, but you very much are limited to how it works and things like that. And our experience is, our mortgage customers and banks and credit unions want a personalized experience. They wanna be able to react very quickly to other things, like Sarah talked about during COVID and being able to bring up the service support function because that’s already available in the bigger platform. So that’s kind of the difference between the two.

0:38:04.6 BM: Thank you, Linda.

0:38:07.8 BM: We also have a question, I believe this would be for you, Sarah, and I’m gonna read it exactly as it’s said, and if we need more clarification, we can ask the gentleman who asked it. It says, “Please define retail and consumer direct at Renasant. Sounds like consumer direct or high producers going to real estate brokers. Now, I hear Zillow mentioned.”

0:38:34.5 SW: Yeah, absolutely. So for us, as I’ve mentioned, we originate in three different channels, consumer direct is… I hate to make this comparison, but it’s sort of your Rocket Mortgage model. So they are in a call center and they receive leads in from lead sources that we purchase, and then they outbound call. So it is a more digital experience, there is not a lot of personal interaction there, but we have a large team in Florida that originates purely through a digital capacity.

0:39:16.2 BM: Cool.

0:39:16.3 SW: I hope that answered the question? If not, I’ll be happy to clarify further. And then retail, of course, is your normal model as the real estate agents and referral partners and kinda bid from the ground.

0:39:30.6 BM: Excellent. Thank you, Sarah. I do have another question. Are you using Text for milestone updates, and if so, if you’re using Text updates with borrowers, what pitfalls should one avoid?

Attendee Question: “What is your advice for using SMS for mortgage loan milestone updates?”

0:39:47.5 SW: Compliance would be my first thing. I think we all can agree compliance is sort of the… They get in the way of a lot. So a pitfall and a concern, I would say, to address initially is talk to your legal team, talk to your compliance team. One thing that we’ve really addressed in the text world is how we wanna manage opt-out. Do we want to require our customers to opt-in, or do we want to say you can opt-out by texting X. So I think it’s every financial institution’s decision on how they approach it. Ours is a little bit more conservative, so while we have the functionality to text and we’re actually standing that up very soon, we haven’t kicked it off quite yet. But yes, we will be providing milestone updates to our borrowers and to our referral partners on where their loan is in the process, whether it be sent to processing, sent to underwriting, appraisals ordered, so on and so forth. And if our borrowers wanna opt-out, they can opt-out.

0:40:54.3 BM: Excellent. Thank you. Linda, we do have another question for EMS. I heard EMS has its own point-of-sale for mortgage companies. Can you touch on that, please?

Attendee Question: “Does EMS have its own point-of-sale for mortgage companies?”

0:41:05.5 LR: Sure, absolutely. With the mortgage processes, the POS for your consumer to fill out the loan application and to upload the required documents, we have built in our journey over the last many years working with banks and mortgage companies is they’re there looking for third-party solutions. There’s different ones out there, Blend, Roostify, BeSmartee, but you have to build an integration and now you have another platform, you have to sync data. So we found where we wanted to make it easier for our clients more streamlined, so we built a POS, we call it Digital Mortgage on the Salesforce Community, which really lays over your Salesforce instance, so there’s really no data integration, it’s really that portal into your data you already have on Salesforce. Which really is very similar to those, and then it gives them a very streamlined very user-friendly experience to be able to fill out a, we call it a pre-app, which eventually turns into a full app, the ability to upload their documents for them to be able to see the status of the loan as it’s progressing through Salesforce, which is integrated with your LOS, so they see all the milestone phases. And it’s really that consumer portal where they can see everything going on with their loan application and their loan all in one place. Hopefully that answered the question. [chuckle]

0:42:41.9 TR: Awesome. Yes, I think it did. Linda, I think we might have lost Brittany here for a second, but thank you so very much.

0:42:50.0 TR: Do we still have any questions?

0:42:56.3 BM: And yes, we do have one more question. Does the POS include credit pulling and Fannie, Freddie AUS pulling?

0:43:09.0 LR: That’s in process, so it doesn’t, as of today, but that we’re actively working on that within the POS and building out both the credit pulling and the actual pricing options integrating with Optimal Blue. So that the consumer can actually see their price options for their 15-30 year mortgage as well as the AUS. So all of those things, we’re enhancing those, we’re doing quarterly updates again, to be able to offer a more unified experience on the Salesforce platform to our clients without having to go to another third-party application.

0:43:50.0 BM: Excellent, thank you. And unless there are any other questions right now, that’s all I had.

0:43:56.4 TR: Great. And I was actually gonna say we are at time, so if any of our attendees, if you have any additional questions for EMS or for Sarah at Renasant Bank, please, please, please go ahead and direct those over to Chris Russell, his email address is here on the screen, [email protected], or you can reach him at the number there. We will absolutely get those questions answered for you, and we’ll be able to do that over email. You can also visit our website www.consultems.com, you can also shoot our wholesales team an email at [email protected]. Sarah Weber, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate all of your insight and your bravery for doing all of this work and for trusting EMS and for taking the time to share your story with us today. For all of our attendees, thank you so much for coming. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Be well, be safe. We will see you soon.