The Coming Reality of the Paperless Office

2018-20

The Coming Reality of the Paperless Office

The advent of the fully digital mortgage process is just around the corner

Pundits have been hailing the arrival of the paperless office since computers entered the workplace. Still, completely digital mortgage enterprises remain a rarity.
Even absent a fully digital mortgage world at this point, one thing is already as clear as a sunny day in the park to many industry observers. The speed, accuracy, reduced cost and convenience of digital processing have begun to revolutionize the entire mortgage cycle.
Mortgage originations and closings involve hundreds of pages of paperwork that need to be validated and vetted against numerous regulatory and risk-based measures. Those pages, in turn, must be shared with dozens of separate vendors for processing and subject to compliance and quality-control reviews.
Mortgage originators can create a competitive separation if they can ensure documents are transmitted and processed digitally — if there isn’t a still-existing need for them to be wet-signed. The tools to provide this digital capability already are being developed and rolled out.
Mortgage originators who don’t take this trend seriously — and fail to upgrade their services to accommodate a digital future — will look antiquated by the end of the decade. Even now, the technology exists for mortgage originators to go almost entirely paperless, which can save them a great deal of time and money while raising the quality of their customer service.