Since launching Financial Services Cloud (FSC), Salesforce has continued to add generic financial services functionality, but also demonstrates an ongoing investment in sub-verticals like the mortgage industry. Prior to 2019, FSC did not have a wide range of features designed specifically for mortgage brokers, bankers, advisors, underwriters, or agents and their teams, so they began to develop additional items such as a mortgage-focused data model, a loan application process, and document tracking and approvals. Given the additional, extensive releases that have occurred in the Salesforce platform since its original release, here are the top five things you should be aware of if you are considering FSC as the CRM+ for your mortgage operations:

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1. Identifying as within the mortgage industry does not limit your access to FSC features

When subscribing to FSC, your mortgage organization gets the best of several worlds, including all the features generally available to Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Financial Services Cloud itself. Just because you will likely benefit from taking the additional steps to enable mortgage-specific functionality does not mean you will lose access to any of the other tools mentioned, which is especially beneficial for multifaceted organizations like retail banks.

Want to track a mortgage loan prospect from the moment you first start advising them? Leverage the standard Lead object. Has the prospect turned into a more firm, tangible sales opportunity? Convert their Lead record to a Person Account and related Opportunity. Have they reached the stage of submitting a loan application? Create a Residential Loan Application from the FSC Mortgage package and relate it to the Opportunity and Loan Applicant, which is your Person Account. You can quickly see how your firm or client will benefit from the full range of functionality and how it might enable the coveted 360-degree view of each customer so that employees might provide the strongest possible service. 

2. Mortgage extends the FSC data model even further

We have already mentioned a few of the pieces of data provided specifically for mortgage users, namely the Residential Loan Application and Loan Applicant.

• While these are probably the primary pieces of data that come to mind, FSC Mortgage also includes (but is not limited to) the following:
• Loan Applicant Address, Income, or Employment – these objects provide the required contextual information about an applicant to effectively provide a decision about extending credit after an application is submitted
• Loan Applicant and Loan Application Asset – these related objects record details about the subject property, as well as any other relevant assets owned by the applicant(s)
• Loan Applicant and Loan Application Liability the related objects record details about the mortgage liability itself, as well as other relevant liabilities the applicant(s) is responsible for
• Loan Application Financial, Property, and Title Holder – these objects hold the minute details related to the monetary transaction, subject property, and individuals to be listed on the title regarding a given mortgage
• Loan Applicant Declaration – this object is used to record information about issues like foreclosure or defaults where the applicant(s) is involved
• Document Checklists – these objects are used to take documents related to the application process through the appropriate steps of review and approval

In addition, the generic FSC data points like Households and Financial Accounts allow you to tie your mortgage-related information into a customer-centric model. Imagine a scenario where your company is a retail bank that provides both standard deposit products as well as mortgage origination. One of your customers is the Smith family, which is led by parents John and Jane. John and Jane have joint checking and savings accounts, and their college-age son Joseph has his own checking account as well. The Smiths are fortunate enough to own both a permanent family residence, but they also have a cabin on a lake up north, where they like to spend weekends in summer. The FSC data model will allow you to record all this information – three individuals, three Financial Accounts, and two mortgages (all the way from application to funding) – within a single Household and a single view (or differentiated views if desired) for all your employees regardless of if they are a teller on the front lines or a mortgage loan originator.

3. Digitize your processes from application to funding

Within the FSC package you will find prebuilt Screen Flows, which walk users or customers through a variety of steps and automation in a wizard-like fashion.

• The Screen Flows that are relevant for mortgage users are based on the US Uniform Residential Loan Application (URLA) and include the following steps:
• Assets and Liabilities – this flow allows the gathering of financial details once at least one Loan Applicant has been added to the Residential Loan Application
• Borrower Information – this flow collects more demographically-oriented information about the individual Loan Applicant(s)
• Lender Loan Information – this flow is important for identifying specifics around the property in question, title, loan, and qualification
• Mortgage Flow Launcher – this flow is intended to allow customers to submit general inquiries for assistant related to a loan or application
• Summary View – this flow provides summarized sections of mortgage data available in FSC based on the URLA
  

With the full power of the Salesforce platform backing the FSC and mortgage features, your organization can use what has already been built as a template if you have additional customization needs beyond what is offered out of the box. The standard Flows can be cloned and edited so that the active version is more meaningful to your users.‍

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4. Do not let your customers miss out on borrower access via Experience Cloud‍

“An informed customer is a happy customer” is an adage that reminds us to over communicate with our clients, as the average human would rather have information about a given topic rather than be left guessing as to what is happening. Domino’s Pizza was one of the early adopters in recognizing the validity of the statement with their user-friendly pizza tracker, which indicates exactly where in the process a customer’s order is from the moment it is placed to the moment it is ready or delivered.

A mortgage loan application is no different – consumers crave knowledge about where they stand in the process and what they can do to move things along. Sure, email traffic confirming certain stages have been completed might do the trick, but it does not truly solve the ability for a customer to have on-demand access to the information. Enter Experience Cloud, which is a generic set of Salesforce functionality used for countless reasons by various industries but has a unique value proposition for the mortgage industry. Grant online access for your customers to gain access to the most updated information, but also enable them to participate in the process by directly interacting with the application if additional information is needed, etc. For example, you can even have them directly enter all their own relevant information directly into your Salesforce instance, such as the Address, Income, or Employment data we previously mentioned. Hooray for reducing the number of attributes that need to be rekeyed manually after someone has already taken the time to record them!

5. Leverage Mortgage Business APIs for POS/LOS integrations

As with any technology today, it is not entirely useful in a silo or if it does not yield actionable outputs from the inputs, especially considering the large number of inputs that go into a Residential Loan Application.

• Beyond allowing customer participation in the process, FSC has three main Business APIs for use with the mortgage data model:
• Application Mapper – this tool can be used to create additional records related to an application, such as a Person Account and their Financial Accounts, which serve as more permanent placeholders for your customers and their Assets or Liabilities beyond the way they are used in the mortgage data model
• Mortgage Application/s – these two options provide access to methods for getting, updating, or creating a Residential Loan Application and its related information between systems

Integrations with third party systems are incredibly common with FSC as other tools tend to be the systems of record for various attributes, so be sure to take advantage of these offerings as you design your enterprise architecture.

If your firm or client is interested in learning more about how to apply FSC tools to your mortgage business, please reach out to discuss further!