The mortgage industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, driven by economic uncertainty, fluctuating markets and evolving borrower expectations. Lenders are also under pressure from rising operational costs, with origination expenses increasing 48% between 2020 and 2023, according to the MBA.1 Despite these challenges, forward-thinking lenders who adapt quickly and scale efficiently can position themselves as leaders in this competitive market.

A key step in enabling your organization to stay nimble is taking the time to evaluate and optimize your current loan manufacturing process. This essential phase in the loan lifecycle not only accounts for a significant portion of the time it takes to originate loans, but also offers unique opportunities to enhance efficiency, elevate loan quality and improve borrower satisfaction.

This is why we’re continuing to invest heavily in innovation that creates a seamless loan manufacturing experience through the Encompass® platform and our broader ICE ecosystem. Our product innovation strategy is grounded in four strategic priorities:

By focusing on these key areas, we’re helping our clients reduce cycle times, maximize their operations and scale with confidence. In fact, a recent MarketWise Advisors study found that lenders are averaging a 5:1 return on their Encompass investment, with an average financial benefit of $1,065 per loan.

With each release, we are delivering new ways to help our clients save both time and money. Below is a snapshot of some of the most recent enhancements within the platform and what we have planned for the near future.

Reflecting on highlights from our innovation journey thus far

ICE has taken significant steps to advance our mission of modernizing the home finance process. Specifically, within the area of mortgage lending, we’ve focused relentlessly on delivering enhancements to accelerate operations within Encompass and help clients get even more out of their technology investment.

Streamlining loan pipeline management

Over the past year, our team has introduced a range of game-changing product innovations into Encompass that drive efficiencies across the platform. These advancements are specifically designed to help lenders cut costs, enhance productivity, accelerate workflows, reduce manual tasks and improve interoperability across the various ICE Mortgage Technology solutions. Below are just a few examples of the platform enhancements we’ve recently delivered.

Transforming traditional antiquated workflows

Over time, our industry has made incremental improvements to traditional loan manufacturing workflows. However, the organizations that truly stand out are those who go beyond simply optimizing existing methods—they reimagine how they operate to better serve borrowers. By applying workflow automation across the Encompass platform, we are creating exception-based loan manufacturing that enables users to only touch a loan as needed and automate traditionally manual, repetitive tasks throughout the process.

These enhanced automation triggers and exception-based workflows help clients cut costs and prepare to scale with industry shifts. By streamlining how users manage audits, document processing, compliance and borrower interactions, users can achieve greater efficiency, accuracy and ease in their operations, driving better results. As an example, a new Rate Lock Comparison tool, seamlessly connected with the ICE Product and Pricing Engine (ICE PPE), automates the detection of changes impacting locked loans, with the ability to automate repricing and relocks. These dynamic workflows remove bottlenecks, enabling users to focus on the work that requires their attention.

Extending the platform to drive innovation and efficiency

We are dedicated to advancing our cloud platform strategy, enabling clients to create customized operational and reporting workflows that align with their unique business needs. Our suite of over 450 APIs also helps lenders and integrators further extend native Encompass. Lenders and integrators can receive near real time feedback on changes in the loan file and respond in the same timeframe by subscribing to webhooks and using Developer Connect to perform additional automation. An example of this is the addition of our Enhanced Field Change webhook. The webhook listens for changes in loan fields and allows lenders to take targeted action based on specific loan data changes, improving system performance and reducing unnecessary API calls. By integrating API-driven solutions like this, Encompass clients are unlocking significant savings, with an average financial benefit of $149 per loan after adopting our API suite. These advantages are accessible to all Encompass users, whether on the desktop or web interface.

Additionally, the Encompass Partner Connect API framework enables industry service providers to create seamless, modern integrations with ICE solutions. This robust framework supports the ongoing expansion of our industry-leading partner network, offering Encompass clients increased flexibility and a wider range of choices when selecting service providers. For example, lenders can now configure our system to automatically order services from partners across every major mortgage service category. This automation eliminates manual, time-consuming tasks, saving lenders significant time while improving overall operational performance.

Maintaining a reliable and high performing system of record

In addition to the above enhancements and expanded capabilities, we’ve continued to prioritize performance, security and compliance management, so the platform remains the reliable foundation that thousands of lenders rely on daily to manufacture their loans.

We regularly evaluate and enhance our platform's native capabilities to help users automate compliance and quality assurance processes while identifying potential risks. In line with this commitment, we've strengthened the integration between Encompass and AllRegs®, the industry's leading resource for mortgage compliance information. Moreover, the AllRegs platform now features an AI-powered search tool to help you quickly find answers to your regulatory questions.

Additionally, we've made substantial investments in keeping our integrations with GSE AUS solutions, such as Desktop Underwriter and Loan Product Advisor, fully up to date. These integrations enable lenders to seamlessly incorporate GSE underwriting tools into their loan manufacturing workflows, helping them stay compliant with industry guidelines while maintaining efficiency.

What’s next: advancing the future mortgage technology

As we continue to invest in expanding the capabilities of our platform, we’re focused on helping clients win more borrowers, seamlessly manufacture and service their loans and retain them for future home financing opportunities and financial needs. Our strategic vision is centered on driving further innovation and strengthening the interoperability between our solutions to deliver even greater value.

Among other initiatives, we are committed to better connecting the mortgage origination and servicing lifecycles, enabling lenders who service loans to achieve a more efficient and unified experience through a single ecosystem. As an example, we are actively developing solutions to help lenders more efficiently onboard closed loans directly from Encompass to the MSP mortgage servicing system, including post boarding audits for accuracy. By allowing loan data and documents to flow seamlessly and accurately from Encompass to MSP after closing, lenders using these platforms can save significant time and improve quality.

The past several months have marked a groundbreaking period for innovation for the Encompass platform and more broadly the ICE mortgage technology portfolio of solutions. While we’ve made significant progress, there is still work to do as we advance our mission of making the lending and homebuying journey more efficient, accessible and seamless for all.

With these and many other new capabilities now available, we understand our clients are eager to dive in. To help our customers get started with these new tools and begin their own innovation journey, we’ve created a number of resources, in-depth trainings and webinars. Existing ICE clients can explore these resources here on our Customer Resource Center.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to launch additional innovative solutions that connect and streamline the origination and servicing processes and help lenders better support their customers across the entire homebuying experience. I'm so proud of what our team has been able to accomplish and we’re just getting started.

1 *MBA origination forecast and 2023 cost of origination data​