Innovation Award Winner: Gold Star Mortgage uses data and analytics to outpace the competition

Staying competetive

Gold Star President and COO, AJ Franchi, attributes the 22 years of success his company has achieved to their ability to be adaptive, stay nimble, and perfect the art of making good decisions. He says that making good decisions requires:

As Gold Star has shifted their focus to improving data and analytics, they’ve been concentrating on two key motivators. The first is the need to discover ways to lower the cost of origination and continue to be competitive. AJ points out that a company can’t maintain growth relying on gut instinct alone. It takes trustworthy data to keep everything aligned.

"That really provides a competetive advantage for us to be able to compete. And what's the point of being in the market if you're not going to be competetive?"

AJ Franchi, President and COO, Gold Star Mortgage

Peer benchmarking

Gold Star’s second motivator for prioritizing data has been for peer benchmarking. They’ve used Insights™ by ICE Mortgage Technology® to keep track of what’s going on outside their own walls, and to understand how they’re stacking up in comparison. They chose to use Insights because they found that the platform provides the most robust data around Gold Star’s peers in the market, and because it's ready to implement and use right out of the box. As soon as Insights was up and running, it quickly became a key tool for daily decision-making at Gold Star.

"It's very easy to get lost in your own world and to think you know how you're performing. You can always benchmark against yourself to measure your improvement, but you need to know where you stand compared to your peers as well, because it's a very competetive business."

AJ Franchi

Growing at scale

Along with leveraging data to understand the market at large, Gold Star has been very successful at using data and analytics to drive change within their organization. Innovative data analysis has helped them identify processes that are tedious or redundant, and automate those processes. Automation has enabled them to stabilize their staffing model and allowed them to stabilize their staffing model and use their current team to scale with market fluctuations

"You can prepare for ebbs and flows in the business if you're effectively managing your data. We saw a lot of companies just add, add, add bodies and now they're laying off. We really try to steer clear of that because it's culturally degrading. It's very difficult to control your culture if people are constantly going in and our and you have a revolving door of staff.

When you're just on this hiring treadmill like people were in the last two years, I'm sure they made a lot of money, but they also did a lot of long-term damage to their business that they're not going to have to rebuild from. If you have strong access to your data, you can insulate yourself from that. That's really how you build a long-term business instead of the short-term cycles that a lot of companies get stuck in."

AJ Franchi