Drive and Drift

$5,000 print ad, $15,000 for a PR firm, Can't Miss Annual Conference: Priceless

While the 'must attend conferences' used to have the tag of "priceless" with regard to their intrinsic value I find myself struggling with what they have become.  A majority of the conferences I attend have lost some of their flair and I honestly can't remember the last conference I attended that I was flying home saying I can't wait till next year's event. 

Sure there is the opportunity to meet with prospects and key customers but I'm seeing a trend of the key people staying home and an abundance of mid tier staff attending.  I'm guessing the economy is part of the cause... with more focus then ever on shareholder value and even survival for some it's hard to justify time out of the office.  I also find the conference topics to be less leadership and ingenuity and more confirming than in the past. 

I guess I expect any event that I'm paying $1500 per head for + travel and booth etc ($15-20k typically per conference) to be accretive.  Give me a conference agenda that really adds value to our industry and our business.  Challenge the way I'm thinking and force me to sit back and say "wow, what a great idea".  Think about it... when is the last time you had that happen?

So maybe I'm being hard on the industry but someone needs to break this cycle.   For any MISMO fans out there, there's an old acronym of "STP" which stood for Same Ten People and that's about the agenda for most events lately... freshen up the stories, freshen up the solution sets and give us enough content to force the leadership of today's top banks/lenders to consider these events "can't miss".

Do that and you'll have taken the first step in creating real change in our business.

Loan Mods: Go eSig!

With the nation's largest lenders actively looking to rework the details of many at risk loans this creates an easy hit to ramp these efforts up in the right way.  Most of the industry has grown these groups rapidly both in volume and staff  and the rate of that growth has caused many lenders to cut corners to simply keep up with volume.

This modification can be a simple process.... a document is prepared which summarizes and presents the new loan structure and is printed and shipped directly to the customer.  What stands out is that this newly signed document is not recorded or notarized.  The last two points are the biggest issue that has held many back from driving eSignature solutions into the mortgage process. 

Let's summarize the opportunity:

• Motivated Borrow who needs to execute this document to stay in their home
• High Cost paper fulfillment process ($6-$12 per based on shipping method)
• Speed and Shortening of the decision has significant impact
• Cost of a delayed return can have broad facing implications
• High volume and constrained resources

Given that everyone I've talked to is executing these mods as an exception paper based process and literally no one I've ran in to is using eDelivery/eSig to expedite these signatures what I'm curious about is why so few of our lenders haven't automated this process. 

Moving eSig into this scenario does two things.  1) it get an organization moving with an eSignature deployment and strategically this has high value  and  2) it cuts the cost of this cycle by nothing less than a week or more and the costs by 70%.   

What I don't fully understand is why the nations largest servicers haven't moved on this opportunity aggressively and maximized their ability to scale this process and leverage the opportunity to set themselves up to reuse a very manageable investment for years to come.    Challenge your process now, move forward knowing that solutions exist that can be deployed in weeks and trust that your investing in a technology that has some legs.  What are you waiting for?

Pick-a-Path Adventures

I grew up completely enamored with the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children versions of Homer's Greek epics told in "the Iliad" but the current market reminds me of fond memories of another type of book that used to find it's way into my backpack on the way to school.  I'll start by saying that I hope many of you at some time in your life had the absolute pleasure of reading a Pick-a-Path book on your favorite subject.

If you've never heard of one, it really was an amazing concept.  You the reader, were immersed in the most dire and urgent of situations to consider and were presented with no less than 3 options to pursue.  Given the impending urgency to resolve the problem you pick the direction that best met your mood, astrological influence, social upbringing, moral code etc, and turned to the appropriate page.  And here's where I fell in love with the book's design: if at any point you decided that outcome simply wasn't what you wanted (your hero died, the world blew up, your true love never came), you simply went back to the previous page and picked another option which of course had to be better!

I offer that short analepsis in relation to our businesses we manage today.  Not to the extent that we exerted absolute control over life's outcomes at 11 years of age but rather the tools we have available to us to to better navigate the right course through our own stories we are writing years later.   This then leads me to the creation of this blog and its future entries.

Given the quite incredible credit crisis we're in and the resulting transformations that the lending community is going through at the moment, I find my own company and our shared industry with an outcome I don't quite like.  I am quite willing to admit I don't know the answers but I do this know this; where noise and discomfort grow in a process and community, someone will find a way to make money fixing it. I see no reason to let that opportunity go buy without improving our own outcomes and better ensure that the path we do chose..... is of our own choosing.

Over time my intent with this blog is to present any combination of process ideas, industry observations or personal challenges that I welcome comment on.  I have a realistic approach to this blog outcome I hope... I am not likely to change how my friends, my coworkers or customers respond to me but I can absolutely change how I respond to them.  This is my attempt at doing something different  and offering a forum to share ideas, concerns, observations that while serve as great conversations in many 1-1's might have value to a larger community. 

My closing disclaimer is that my opinions offered today or at any point in the future on this forum are highly likely to be biased in favor of eLynx's platform and services. 

Copyright @2008 Michael Pelfrey -- Views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.