The goal of this guide is to help mortgage professionals successfully transition to originating mortgages remotely as quickly and painlessly as possible.
It features brief descriptions of popular online tools and their use cases for originating mortgages online.
Here at Finmo, we’ve been a remote company for more than 2 years. We officially surrendered our Calgary office nearly a year ago. At the time around half of us were working there, with the other half working remotely.
There are a lot of pros and cons to both working in an office and working remotely. However, we found there was additional inefficiency created by trying to work both in an office and remotely at the same time.
What would repeatedly happen was that discussions would take place in the office and fail to be relayed to the remote staff (and vice versa). It was apparent that having multiple communication channels was problematic. From our experience, the problems were simply caused by human nature – not something we could easily fix. It’s natural to talk to someone in the office and make a quick decision, but it’s fairly unnatural to then sit down at a computer and write to everyone else what was said and what the decision was and all the proper context. We solved this by going entirely remote, and now all communication easily reaches everyone in the company. Additionally, by using digital tools available to us, the majority of communication is automatically recorded and accessible for future reference.
It is from this experience that we offer you this valuable piece of advice:
Do not have only a portion of your team remote working. If you are going to work remote, work entirely remote. If you are going to work at an office, work entirely at an office. Otherwise you lose the benefits of both.
| In-person process | Remote working equivalents | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mortgage App Intake | Finmo | Doorr | Velocity |
| Documentation Intake | Finmo | Floify | FileInvite |
| Document signing | Finmo | Floify | Docusign |
| Client meetings | Google Meet | Intercom | Calendly |
| Team meetings | Google Meet | Zoom | Google Calendar |
| Team communication | Slack | Microsoft Teams | Google Meet |
| Project planning | Trello | Basecamp | Monday.com |
| Scheduling | Google Calendar | Calendly | Slack |
| Lead generation | Nova Agency | Finmo | Facebook ads |
| Client follow-up | BluMortgage | Salesforce | Pipedrive |
| Sales networking | Calendly | Google Meet | |
The software we recommend for this is:
To perform mortgage application intake remotely:
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
To perform mortgage documentation intake remotely:
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
To perform document signing remotely (e-signatures):
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
Calendly features an excellent integration with Google Calendar, so you keep you and your teams meetings all catalogued in a single place. It increases workplace efficiency to establish “single sources of truth” and avoid having duplicated data across multiple applications or systems whenever possible.
You can also set your Calendly to automatically send a link to a Google Meet video chat which will be automatically created at the time of your meeting. All you have to do is join at the scheduled time (which you can do through Calendly or your Google Calendar), and you’re good to go!
To perform client meetings remotely:
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
We recommend starting by scheduling a team meeting at 9am on Monday, and at 9am on Friday if possible. These can just be general meetings for everyone to talk about what they’re working on, any concerns, etc.
Let your teams self-organize their own meetings as much as possible. It may take a while to figure out what meetings are necessary for each department.
Do not force anyone to attend any meeting while working remotely. Let people come to the meetings they find valuable. This helps reduce the number of unnecessary meetings, which is a common problem for companies when they first switch to a remote working environment.
Try to make sure that every meeting has an obvious purpose, and leads to actionable results.
Of course these are just guidelines and not rules. Structure your remote team meetings in whichever way suits your company best.
To perform team meetings remotely:
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
In a remote working environment, the main channel of communication is via what are essentially elaborate and very flexible “chat rooms”. You can think of it like texting on your phone, except a lot more powerful.
There are a few reasons for this change: Firstly, it helps keep a catalog of conversations and decisions made that can be used for reference by all team members at any time. Secondly, because often remote companies have people working in different time zones, communication through video chat software like Google Meet or Zoom becomes impractical. Lastly, communicating through the written word provides ways of easily categorizing communications, such as communications between teams, or communications about certain topics. This is a massive and important advantage over e-mail.
Additionally, Slack has started implementing it’s own video calling and screen-sharing functionality right inside the platform. At the time of writing, this functionality is not as robust as competing video-calling solutions such as Google Meet or Zoom – but that might not be the case for long.
To perform team communication remotely:
Alternative software:
Remote scheduling
The software we recommend for this is:
Trello provides an excellent place to do this. It facilitates virtually any process through simple, easily customized “kanban boards“. Projects are created as “cards” on a board, which are then moved to different “stages” dependant on their progress. Once the card has moved left side of the board (where it starts) to the right side, it has been completed.
To perform project planning remotely:
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
It’s important for everyone in a company to have a “single source of truth” for meeting times, events, etc. Google Calendar provides an excellent platform for this. It is powerful because calendars can be created and shared amongst teammates. Google Calendar also supports powerful integrations with Calendly and Slack, which help make things even more efficient.
Here at Finmo, we use Google Calendar’s integration with Slack to post reminders of upcoming meetings. Additionally we use Google Calendar’s Calendly integration internally to book video chat meetings with specific teams or colleagues – without the need to send a zillion e-mails back and forth to find out when everyone is free.
To perform scheduling remotely:
Alternative software:
The services we recommend for this are:
The first way is to hire an expert. There are many marketing companies out there that are more than willing to talk to you about your advertising goals and help you fulfill them. At Finmo, we prefer one agency over all others in this regard – Nova Agency. Nova Agency is the only marketing agency in Canada that is focused exclusively on mortgage professionals. Their intimate understanding of the mortgage industry is why their marketing gets results, where competitors fall flat.
The second way is to become an expert. This is definitely feasible, but it is potentially a serious time commitment. YouTube has a vast wealth of tutorial videos on how to create and optimize advertising campaigns. There are also amazing, in-depth training courses available on Udemy and Lynda.
If you do choose the do-it-yourself route, you should note that Finmo’s world-class lead generation calculators provide an excellent landing page for advertising campaigns. Not only do the calculators filter out borrowers who clearly can’t afford or are not ready to purchase yet (which you will get a lot of when you run online ads), they also collect full mortgage applications and documentation automatically. We highly recommend you use them in your marketing campaigns.
To perform lead generation remotely (turn-key solution):
To perform lead generation remotely (do-it-yourself solution):
Alternative platforms:
The services we recommend for this are:
This type of software manages your relationships with your borrowers at every stage of the mortgage origination process – from lead to past client. They not only keep track of what stage your borrowers are at in the mortgage process, but are flexible and extensible enough to perform other actions as well. They can create “tasks” for you at each stage, so that you never forget to perform a critical action for your clients. Additionally, many CRM platforms have the ability to automatically send out e-mails or other communications to borrowers based on certain criteria being met. Most CRMs are not built specifically for mortgage professionals, and need to be customized to the mortgage origination process. However, there are also companies that pre-customize CRMs for mortgage professionals. One such company is our (Finmo’s) partner, BluMortgage. They have the most comprehensive CRM turn-key solution available to mortgage professionals. BluMortgage features include pre-set sales stages, tasks, e-mail campaigns and even automated reports.
If you choose to customize your own CRM to your unique mortgage origination process, we recommend starting with Pipedrive. Pipedrive is simple yet extremely powerful CRM. That combination makes it an excellent starting point for diving into the world of CRM software.
To perform client follow-up remotely (turn-key solution):
To perform client follow-up remotely (do-it-yourself solution):
Alternative software:
The software we recommend for this is:
You can use Calendly and Google Meet to set up sales calls and close deals.
To perform sales networking remotely:
Alternative platforms:
Automation
By switching to a remote mortgage origination process, the majority of your mortgage data will be stored digitally. Having your mortgage applications and documents stored digitally enables access to the wonderful world of software automation.
Automation is when we make the computer do the hard work for us. If we find we tend to repeat a tedious action that we end up doing over and over again, there’s a good chance we can get the computer to do it for us. Here’s how.
Built-in integrations
Zapier
Finmo help centre
The Finmo help centre is a searchable index of over 130 articles on Finmo. The articles are grouped into easily navigatable categories, and are an indispensable resource for self-learners. We understand that not being able to find an answer to a problem can impact productivity, so we strive to provide the best documentation of any Digital Mortgage Platform.
Finmo Youtube channel
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