Updates and Announcements
Announcement: 2024 ICE Innovation Award winners
March 8, 2024 • 7 min read
The ICE Innovation Awards recognize industry leaders who are creating extraordinary solutions with ICE Mortgage Technology® to achieve their business goals. The winners for 2024 were selected by the ICE executive committee who reviewed key data points and identified customers who utilized our solutions in revolutionary ways to improve the end-to-end digital mortgage experience from loan production to servicing.
Focusing on growth in a challenging market, these organizations leveraged automation and data-driven insights to improve operations and overall consumer engagement. Read on for more details about how they have harnessed their potential for success, and how your own organization can be on the forefront of innovative technology.
The 2024 ICE Innovation Award winners are:
Best Use of Data to Drive Automation
Used ICE solutions to leverage trustworthy data to improve decision-making and support growth.
Origination – Mortgage Solutions, LLC
Using the closed loans chart in Encompass Data Connect®, Mortgage Solutions identified gaps in their workflow that were causing lags in turn time. The data gathered informed decisions to change the operations flow by adding many automated business rules that have streamlined the mortgage loan production process. In 2023, without increasing staff, Mortgage Solutions closed loans 7 days faster than the industry average.
Servicing – Citizens
Citizens is being recognized for its use of ICE’s Customer Service solution and advanced automation to assist their customer service representatives with identifying the top three reasons why a customer could be calling. This new call prediction capability is helping Citizen have more effective conversations with customers and be more efficient with their time by reducing the length of servicing calls and delivering a better customer experience. Additionally, Citizens has deployed a chat bot within ICE’s Servicing Digital application to provide 24/7 support – providing responses to customers’ inquiries and helping them to self-serve and find the information they’re looking for.
Best End-to-End Efficiency
Developed automation to configure workflows that support a measurable increase in efficiency and loan quality.
Origination – Global Credit Union
Analyzing processes in search of ways to gain efficiency, Global Credit Union found that pre-qualifications were not triggered soon enough to take full advantage of ICE Income Analyzer™. To enable the sales team to initiate income calculation earlier in the process, loan level flags were set that “listen” for specific documents to be uploaded into the loan. The data is then extracted by automated document recognition, triggering the Income Analyzer in one smooth, behind-the-scenes move. Now there’s no delay in the pre-qualification process, and the efficiencies are further compounded when the solution is coupled with automated employment and income verification through Encompass Consumer Connect®.
Best Use of Mobile Technology
Used automated borrower communication tools and web integrations to increase responsiveness and drive repeat and referral business.
Origination – Lennar Mortgage
Lennar took on the challenge to reimagine their workflow amidst rising volume, new technology, additional regulation, complicated guidelines, and an industry wide bottlenecked process. Their goal was to strike a balance between human skills, automation and transparency. They utilized a wide-reaching suite of ICE solutions, including the web version of Encompass, to create a new eco-system within Encompass which enables a workflow where loan level tasks will be completed by the right person, with the right skill set, at the right time. This new workflow is positioned to achieve volume and scalability, innovation, career growth track and work-life harmony.
Servicing – Cenlar
Looking for ways to bring added value to their clients, Cenlar introduced the ICE Servicing Digital℠ mobile app and responsive web solution as a tool their clients could offer to their borrowers. This consumer-focused, self-service solution is white labeled, allowing Cenlar’s clients to brand the solution to use with their borrowers. Because adoption was key to their success, ICE worked collaboratively with Cenlar to rollout the application following their clients’ color schemes, logos, etc. Today, Cenlar has the highest percentage of borrowers using Servicing Digital to review loan information, make a payment, explore “what if” payment scenarios and more.
Best End-to-End Borrower Engagement
Leveraged ICE’s consumer-focused digital solutions to provide borrowers with a seamless lending experience, from application and loan closing, to making payments, requesting assistance and loan payoff.
Servicing and Origination – PenFed Credit Union
In their loan origination efforts, PenFed was struggling with disorganized lead tracking, which was impacting sales efficiency and causing opportunities to slip through the cracks. Using Velocify®, they automated loan status emails and implemented a two-way SMS messaging system. As icing on the cake, PenFed built a bidirectional integration with an automated dialer that has increased their speed to lead by 350%. The combined effort sends communications to around 1,000 leads per month through a Velocify integration with a 50% engagement rate, 45% of whom are successfully transferred to a Loan Officer.
As an industry-leading loan servicer, PenFed needed a way to foster prolonged user engagement beyond initial or monthly transactions to enhance user retention, satisfaction, and ongoing value delivery. Influenced by the voice of member responses, and in partnership with ICE, PenFed has expanded services beyond a monetary transaction. The credit union rolled out House Happy within the ICE Servicing Digital solution to help empower and retain members. House Happy allows members to submit home maintenance requests and schedule jobs, making PenFed their partner in continually caring for their home. This is just one aspect of member service that has helped PenFed achieve a 93% digital adoption rate, with month over month member engagement continuing to grow.
Lenders' Choice for Innovative Service Provider
Provided innovative solutions and world class support to ICE customers, making a significant impact on their bottom line and boosted operational efficiencies.
Lender Price
Lender Price’s secure, event-driven architecture and seamless integration with the ICE Mortgage Technology platform enables clients to drastically simplify the management of loan programs and secondary market functions. Additionally, this design eliminates latency or downtime during critical market rallies when lenders experience higher loan searches and lock volumes. The Lender Price solution allows lenders to realize a significant reduction in the time it takes to introduce new loan products to the market, including non-QM and non-agency channels.
As impressive as these stories of success are, they’re just soundbites of the overall picture these cutting-edge technology leaders have been creating for the mortgage lending industry as a whole. Catch up with them at ICE Experience 2024 to learn more about how they’re changing the face of lending.
Related resources
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2024 Borrower Insights Survey report