The mantra of The Money Source is “Grow Happiness.” However, the correspondent mortgage lender knew it needed better tools to capitalize on business growth. Expansion meant more loans to review and process, which required greater speed in the accounting department. The Money Source recognized an opportunity to invest in targeted technology that would help support the growth of its business and gain an edge over the competition. CFO
Mike McGowan and Eric Schirmer, the company’s senior accountant, pursued a loan-level financial system overhaul with tremendous success. In a little under two years, the Melville, New York-based company has grown from 200 loans funded per month to over 2,500.
The Money Source was manually entering loan data into their accounting system, but, facing a critical growth stage, leadership knew that the company needed more automated processes to seize a big opportunity. The new system would have to boost data importing speeds, handle larger volumes and seamlessly configure to the company’s specific loan-accounting needs. The Money Source faced not only the cost of inaction, but also the potential cost of choosing the wrong system.
“The growth has been phenomenal and the risk was that momentum would be held back if we got it wrong,” McGowan said. “When you change any accounting system, you’re changing a lot of the way you operate, how people interact with the data and your overall way of working, too. So a lot was riding on this change. The stakes were very high.”
The Money Source needed an upgrade in volume and efficiency, and time was of the essence.
Searching for a partner and provider for this major capital investment was no small task.
“We found out very quickly that there was a very, very limited supply of software that was specifically for our industry,” McGowan said. “To maximize our market opportunity we at The Money Source needed a mortgage accounting software that would offer focus, scale and customization. Bestborn provided all of that in addition to a cost-effective, user-riendly solution.”
Bestborn’s solution, Loan Vision, offers a foundation built on Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and McGowan and Schirmer found the familiar functionality and boost in efficiency to be a winning combination for the $100 million firm.
Instead of trying to navigate a competitor’s “strange, clunky piece of ancient software,” The Money Source team began the considerable transition process with a natural ease thanks to the system’s modern Microsoft look. What followed was a much more gentle learning curve, which was a welcome relief given the mission-critical nature of the accounting platform replacement.
Loan Vision offered an intuitive accounting platform far different from those offered by competitors, which all required the use of on-site consultants both during and after deployment. After the implementation by the Bestborn team and completing the structured training, The Money Source had Loan Vision up and running. The versatile accounting package allowed for minor layout customization by the client itself so that an already detailed, targeted mortgage accounting platform became The Money Source’s own. In contrast, customization costs at other vendors ranged from prohibitive to “ridiculous.”
McGowan added, “It was a huge saving to us on the cost and the difficulty because when you bring in a third party you’re not actually learning the system yourself.”
Other efficiencies are saving the company time, sometimes in jaw-dropping fashion. Recording the funding of loans is just one example.
“We have gone from one person in a half day doing a half a dozen loans to that same person in the same amount of time doing a couple of hundred with Loan Vision,” McGowan said. “And that’s just one side of it — on the sales side there are similar savings.”
It was more than a fit, it was quite fitting that a company with such market foresight chose Loan Vision. The Money Source entered the correspondent lending business when most were still very wary of the segment coming off the economic downturn.
“Even those with the wherewithal to go and do what we were doing were kind of afraid to do it, given the hangover from the previous meltdown,” McGowan said. “We were able to take advantage of that and get well-entrenched before the others started going into our space.”
Having such a major market presence not surprisingly meant high loan volumes, which put the emphasis on an accounting system that could handle the substantial business flow and be streamlined for more efficiency per staff member.
Loan Vision’s capability to drill down to the smallest detail within a mountain of data made things much simpler for The Money Source. Whether calculation of gains on correspondent loans or the “terrific” reconcile account feature, the software’s automation provided greater access to loan information for greater actionable business intelligence. And the time savings?
“We can now do something every week that we might have done once a quarter before because it was so time-consuming,” McGowan said. “It sometimes amazes me that we’re doing 2,500 loans a month. It’s a big number.”
Business efficiency is paramount, especially when dealing with the ultra-demanding mortgage and investment sectors. In the fast-paced place between loan originations and Wall Street’s mortgage-backed securities market, The Money Source has found a financial force multiplier.
“We knew if we got the right mortgage accounting system there would be a huge cost savings with automation,” McGowan said. “The difference is night and day compared to what we were doing before Loan Vision. Think about being able to import 100 loans as quick as we’d manually enter one.”
