Established as a subsidiary of BankSouth in 2011, BankSouth Mortgage found that by 2017, the core finance system used by their parent company couldn’t give them the granularity needed for mortgage accounting.
“A big pain point was pulling data out of the general ledger,” states Stacey Wright, SVP Controller at BankSouth Mortgage. “Because the software functioned as the core financial system for the larger organization, it wasn’t really niched down to the mortgage side of things.”
With many manual task loads and cumbersome processes on top of that, BankSouth Mortgage knew it was time to find a solution that could not only handle their mortgage-specific processes, but also help their accounting department run more efficiently.
Upon searching for loan-level accounting tools, BankSouth Mortgage found both Loan Vision and one other industry-specific solution.
“We demoed [the other solution] before Loan Vision, and it just didn’t feel right,” remembers Wright. “It didn’t feel like we were getting what we needed for the expense.”
Once introduced to Loan Vision by Carl Wooloff, then Director of Sales & Marketing, BankSouth Mortgage knew they’d found the solution they were looking for.
“The conversation with Carl was great,” says Wright. “Then actually seeing what [Loan Vision] can do, it lures you in all on its own.”
The assurance that the company made the right decision was only strengthened by the implementation process.
“The best thing we did was having a Loan Vision Consultant on site during our implementation,” remembers Wright. “Transitioning is a lot of work but having someone there with us for a whole week to answer all our questions and walk us through every step, I can’t say enough about the process.”
Once Loan Vision had officially kicked off at BankSouth Mortgage, the “night and day” differences in granularity were prominent.
“The drill down capabilities [of Loan Vision] are great,” says Joshua Savage, CPA, Chief Financial Officer at BankSouth Mortgage. “The level of detail you can get to, even down to the invoice associated with each entry, it feels like you can just keep clicking further and further down.”
BankSouth Mortgage also found the efficiency they were looking for by scaling productivity without additional headcount and cutting their month-end closing process by 30%.
“We did $1 billion last year with the same number of accounting staff that we had [before Loan Vision],” says Wright. “Additionally, we’ve also been able to reduce our month-end close from 8-9 days, down to 5 or 6.”
