Insellerate platform stays in the middle to be ‘true’ CRM

Insellerate describes itself as a specialized CRM system focused on the mortgage industry as it combines features from CRM and LMS. CEO Josh Friend sat down with MPA to discuss recent developments at the company and how they are helping improve the loan officer-borrower relationship.

MPA: What are the new developments at Insellerate?
Josh Friend: (A) couple of things. One is we really expanded our APIs and our platform so as to make it easier to integrate with. So as lending continues to use more and more technology, our platform has now been built really to be a central hub for a lot of lenders’ technology. So something we’ve seen from our clients, and they’ve asked us, is they have six or seven bits of technology, or some have as many as 15 things, technology used for mortgage lending, be it pricing engine, LOS, some type of content marketing system, a phone system, a servicing platform, you name it – it’s all these different systems they are using. But they haven’t been able to integrate them together very well.

So we’ve really added some API integration so that lenders can now bring all their technology solutions and be able to use it through one user interface and have one system. So it’s been a big part of what we’ve done. And then we just released our fourth version of our infrastructure and we moved to Microsoft Azure Platform as a service.

So something that we didn’t pay attention to a long time, coming from the data industry myself, was compliance and data security. Our platform now is using the latest technology in the cloud for security, scalability, redundancy. So as lenders are continuing to have a need for better security, we are now able to provide that. We are the only CRM in our space that … has the necessary type 16, type 1, and type 2 audits.

MPA: How is Insellerate improving the LO-borrower relationship?
JF: Lenders have had to take a better application, and so do LOs. It’s clunky and it’s outdated, so that’s where we come into play. … Take a look at consumer studies. What rates them as having a good experience was (that) they were communicated with in a timely manner. They got called back. They were able to reach a loan officer. They had questions. They got responses at the right critical times. They could reach out and make phone calls to them. They contacted them.

So we enable the loan officer to have a clear view of the process, and we automate communication and empower lenders to make sure that whatever communication strategy they set. … (W)e want to make sure that your loan officer calls a borrower once a week or twice a week, or the processor calls once a week or twice a week. And you want to increase that collaboration between loan officer, processor, borrower. That’s where our platform sits in the middle. It’s a true CRM.

MPA: What is a future role for LOs as the mortgage process becomes more automated?
JF: We really see the loan officer is still going to be critical. They’ll still be the expert. Again, consumers – they want to talk to someone, right? If I’m getting a car insurance, I’m being informed in a video. I still typically want to talk to someone. I have a question at least about some type of car insurance. I have an 18-year-old son and I want to double check: If he drives my car, what does that mean?  … So I think where all this technology is going, it’s going to make our LOs way more efficient. So LOs productivity is going to go up drastically, but more importantly, it’s going to give LOs much better tools to help the customer make better decisions.


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