Citizens Bank sees digital mortgage tools as a way to expand relationships

Citizens Bank is generating one-third of its mortgage applications online, thanks to a suite of tools the company rolled early this year and a partnership with San Francisco-based fintech firm Blend . Citizens' suite of digital mortgage tools is part of an effort to improve user experiences for mortgage customers and grow customers relationships, according to Sonu Mittal, head of retail mortgage lending at the bank. Citizens aims to be a “trusted adviser” to the customer in the home-buying journey, from house hunting through loan repayment, he noted. To this end, Citizens partnered with Blend to deploy its white-label digital mortgage application platform, which includes web-based document collection; validation of assets, income and tax data through secure sign-on; task reminders; and real-time co-browsing with loan officers to assist with filling out applications. "We now have the ability for the customer to complete the application when they're ready, on their terms," Mittal said. Smoothing out the customer experience was a key consideration in choosing Blend, a move designed to align the product with changing customer expectations. "They’re leveraging an open technology, which allows us to seamlessly integrate with the other pieces that are needed to bring the home-buying experience to life," Mittal explained. Citizens' overall mortgage business generates roughly $22 billion to $23 billion in annual originations, and the retail business, which Mittal oversees, accounts for roughly $7 billion of that. As one-third of the bank's mortgage applications now come through Blend, the strategy already is having a noticeable impact. "That just shows you that customers are looking for solutions like this and expecting us to continue to make the mortgage process easier and efficient for them," he added. Brian Kneafsey, head of client operations at Blend, said the firm currently processes about $2 billion in mortgage applications per day and about 100,000 applications per month. Blend's roughly 150 customers include Wells Fargo , U.S. Bank , SunTrust Banks and Movement Mortgage and, last year, it did about $230 billion in mortgage originations for banks and non-bank lenders. "While the use cases might be different in some scenarios, the core underlying application that we're delivering is the same for banks and non-banks," he added. "Citizens wanted a solution that could support their consumer-direct group as well as their distributed loan officers," Kneafsey said. "They also want to use a lot of the information they have about customers in the process. So, you could do single sign-on; pre-fill the information that you have, including the assets that you might have with Citizens; and really move towards what we would describe as a 'one-tap lending process.' That's not where they are today, but that's really the vision they've bought into." Emily Steele, president of North America for Swiss fintech provider Temenos , recently told FinAi News that getting customers through origination processes in one session is more of a factor in curbing abandonment rates than just reducing the time it takes to complete those processes. Kneafsey said Blend and Citizens will likely expand their partnership to other types of loans over time, "so that the bank can give a single experience across lending products." He didn't provide a timeline for when that expansion could happen. Blend isn't the only game in town trying to digitalize and streamline the mortgage application experience. HSBC Bank USA , the U.S. arm of HSBC Group, announced this week that it’s teaming with San Francisco-based fintech Roostify to launch a digital mortgage platform. Roostify also powers platforms for JPMorgan Chase and TD Bank . Acknowledging the competition, Kneafsey said Blend is striving to shave the application process down to a "one-tap" experience. He added that there's "no reason," given the information that banks already have on their customers, that they couldn't provide a pre-approval, or approval, instantaneously. Also see: Banks Finding More Entry Points to Real Estate Tech Asked who Citizens' main competitors are in the mortgage space and whether the bank looks over its shoulder for any online lenders like SoFi , Mittal identified direct competitors as Huntington Bancshares, BB&T and U.S. Bank. "But there are more non-banks in the mortgage industry than ever before, and some of them have a pretty big market share," he added. Citizens also recently launched the Citizens One mobile app, built with fintech provider Black Knight, where customers can make mortgage payments; calculate equity impact; view loan statements and tax and insurance information; and find localized insights on price trends. According to the bank, app download rates have reached a peak of 1,700 per week since its launch in the first quarter of this year. "We are trying to make sure we can help the customers who already have a relationship with the bank or who are looking for a bank that can meet their needs in multiple dimensions, or with multiple products, rather than just the mortgage itself," Mittal said.

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Citizens Bank sees digital mortgage tools as a way to expand relationships

Anthemis’ Williams: Fintechs in a race to become customers’ primary financial provider

CARD, a prepaid card startup, wants to build a banking platform off affinity marketing

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