Lender's CMO Sarah DeCiantis details launch
In this dog-eat-dog world of mortgages – with loan officers and brokers vying for market share amid ever-slim pickings – it’s the personal touch that makes one stand out. The nation’s biggest overall lender sees the value of such niceties, launching an enhanced product implementing just that.
United Wholesale Mortgage has launched its Memory Maker product with a premium on personal touches for borrowers. The tool allows independent brokers to send their choice of “thank you” items to borrowers and real estate agents, including thank you emails or handwritten notes or gifts for homeowners – among them cutting boards or welcome mats.
The tool is accessible through UWM’s EASE platform, available on every loan. Mortgage Professional America reached out to Sarah DeCiantis (pictured), chief marketing officer for UWM, to learn more.
It’s all about those LO partner points
Gifts are accessible through what are called “LO partner points,” DeCiantis said. “Through our partner point program, we have for years allowed partners to redeem partner points to send a closing gift to the borrower,” she told MPA during a telephone interview. “It was in a separate platform from where they’re doing the loan transaction. Although it got great adoption, we decided ‘how do we make it a little bit easier?”
The key lies in streamlining: “So now the Memory Maker is actually inside of EASE, which is our LOS, allowing the broker to select what they want to send to the borrower right from the closing screen,” she said. “We’ve made it easier for them to access that platform and faster to get that done.”
Product enhanced announced during AIME gathering
Mat Ishbia, UWM’s CEO and chairman, detailed the launch of an improved Memory Maker during the annual FUSE conference staged in Las Vegas by the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME). Concurrently, he also announced significant enhancements to his company’s loan processing support service dubbed PA+ that was originally launched in May of this year. The program now allows independent mortgage brokers and their processors to choose which part of the loan process they would prefer a UWM loan coordinator to handle.
“One, we’ve made it easier for them to access that platform,” DeCiantis said. “We’ve made it faster for them to get it done so that it’s top of mind. Now they don’t have to remember ‘oh shoot, I closed that loan yesterday or two days ago. I have to go to a different platform and make sure I send a closing gift’.”
She pointed to other capabilities beyond gifts. “In addition to the closing gifts, we now offer the emails – which are free – and we also have the handwritten notes. Both the email and the handwritten notes can go to a borrower as well as the real estate agent on the transaction.”
It’s a personalized touch that doubles as something of a housewarming gift: “It really kind of extends that lasting impression that you want to go beyond the closing,” she said “Of course, most people are excited at the closing table, whether they’re getting a new home or saving a few dollars on a refinance. That’s an exciting moment, and we’re trying to think of ways to extend that with personal touches.”
She pointed to UWM’s consistent track record of launching products with helping independent brokers in mind. Yet it doesn’t hurt that the Memory Maker helps UWM differentiate itself from the crowd in an increasingly competitive market, DeCiantis said.
“It really is the little things that can often create an impression in someone’s memory bank. With Memory Maker, we thought this was a really easy way to make sure there’s absolutely no reason why a broker or an LO should not send a ‘thank you’ email at minimum to both of two individuals.”
Just days after its launch, the enhanced product is already a hit: “It launched on Monday and in the first 24 hours we got 1,000 redemptions of the combination of an email, handwritten note and gift. It’s been a huge success already.”
It may be the worst of times or the best of times. But at the end of the day, who doesn’t love gifts or a nice note?
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