Accenture recently enhanced its Mortgage and Compliance as-a-Service (MCaaS) offering by providing an all-digital technology stack option, making it, as the company claims, the first end-to-end digital lending platform provided on an “as-a-service” basis.
MCaaS, which was introduced last year, aims to simplify the outsourcing model for lenders by providing an end-to-end mortgage-lending solution coupled with the U.S. mortgage industry’s only warranty for compliance and investor risk.
With the new all-digital configuration, lenders now have a fast pass to digital lending and are freed from the need to continually upgrade their legacy mortgage technology and processes to keep pace with innovation, meet consumer demand for a digital process or ensure compliance with the latest investor and regulatory requirements, Accenture says in a release.
“To remain relevant to home loan borrowers, lenders must quickly make the transformation to digital, despite the challenges they face of limited resources and a very low risk tolerance,” says Michael Detwiler, an Accenture senior managing director who leads Accenture Credit Services. “Because we are free to assemble best-of-breed technologies for use by our trained staff, we can create MCaaS workflows that will deliver the exact experience lenders want to offer their borrowers. Today, that experience is end-to-end digital.”
The new MCaaS digital lending configuration helps enable mortgage lenders avoid the following scenarios:
- Investing in the wrong technology stack: Among other issues, this can lead to failure to deliver a digital process, non-compliant delivery, excessive maintenance costs, poor interfaces to required third-party services, and lower margins.
- Limiting technology investment to a single platform: This is highly unlikely to meet a lender’s needs.
- Failing to focus on the customer-facing aspect of the lending process: This can lead to tech-heavy implementations that leave consumers unable to serve themselves, degrade the consumer experience and increase non-compliance risk.
- Inability to recruit, train and deploy a sufficient number of qualified staff to meet the needs of consumers: This is important because consumers still want lenders to offer some level of human guidance and support to augment the digital processes.
- Non-compliance risk due to too many parties involved in the overall lending process: This can make it difficult for the lender’s vendor-management department to monitor the process effectively.
“Part of the problem stems from the confusion over what actually constitutes a ‘digital mortgage,’” explains Faith Schwartz, senior advisor for Accenture. “Even Millennials – who are actively driving the digital shift – seem unsure, with one recent study showing that while they crave a digital experience, they also like having an expert available to guide them through the process. Lenders that invest aggressively in the hope that they may stumble upon the right combination of elements to allow them to meet everyone’s idea of the digital transformation will be disappointed.”