The Game Changer

Just under a month ago, we decided to shake things up a bit and make a move from my old mortgage company to Cardinal Financial. Making the decision to move, was certainly not an easy one. My branch had tripled in size since 2014 and our volume had consistently doubled year over year, so things were going fine. The easy move would've been to stay put, however my capacity as a producing manager was at its limit. The only way to grow my personal business would've been to hire more staff. The same was true for my loan officers. We all spent way too much time babysitting our files through to closing and couldn't focus on finding more clients. We were always putting out fires at the last minute and scrambling to get our files closed on time. We did a great job of always making those closings happen, but more often than not, it was a fight to make them occur on time. The current market conditions also had their hand in our decision, due to a contracting market (rates going up, refinances drying up) there is going to be margin pressure rearing its ugly head. As margins shrink, there is less money to spread around, if you can assume the cost of doing business is fixed, then the first place where costs are cut is in Loan Officer compensation. Once you do that, you lose the loan officer. With Cardinal, I've found a mortgage company where the cost of doing business is as low as it can be, so we have some builtin margin insulation to protect us from the margin pressure that will only build throughout the year. So how is Cardinal's cost of doing business so low? How are the other pain points previously addressed solved? The answer to all of those questions is simple, Octane!

Cardinal's proprietary loan origination system, Octane, is unbelievable. The bulk of the tasks that traditional mortgage companies have to rely on human interaction to complete is automated in Octane. The system is never sick, never on vacation, works 24/7, therefore your files are working even when you aren't. The system does the menial tasks for you like borrower letter's of explanation, system created and uploaded to the client dashboard for an e signature. Redisclosures are done for you, the system detects a change of circumstance and auto-generates the new LE. Once the minimum requirements are met for the system to generate the CD, it's done. You don't have to request the cd to be sent from the closing department because we don't have a closing department, Octane does it for you. Documents go out in minutes, the file is ctc'd, the system knows that the cd was esigned, docs get sent out automatically. No more waiting for your closers to prepare the closing documents once your file is ctc'd because the system automatically released them. You have a borrower that would like to change the terms of their loan, simple, a couple of clicks and you are all set, no need to reach out to secondary to have them pull the rate stack from the day you locked and have them adjust your lock, then reach out to underwriting to have them adjust the rate on the approval, then have the file redisclosed, Octane does all of that for you. Workflow is measured in minutes, not hours or days.

Now granted, I have only been here for just under a month, in that time, I have closed 2 loans thus far this month, have another 2 cleared to close and have a handful of others in process. I am uncovering surprises daily, none of them are bad, they are more like, no sh*t, the system does that too? This system is truly a game changer! If you would like to have a confidential talk about what Octane can do for you and your business, reach out to me.