Live from Las Vegas, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez sat down with Praveen Chandramohan, who leads CoreLogic’s origination solutions, to discuss the company’s latest innovations and how they are addressing key challenges in the mortgage industry.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Well, we are live from Las Vegas.
00:08I'm Diego Sanchez, president of HousingWire, and I'm joined today by Praveen Chandramohan
00:15of CoreLogic.
00:16Praveen, it's so great to talk with you today.
00:19Likewise, Diego.
00:20I'm so happy to be here.
00:21I love the content that HousingWire is producing and bringing a lot of exciting innovations
00:27to the industry and bringing visibility to that.
00:29So love that.
00:31Love that.
00:32So before we dive in, could you briefly introduce yourself and also your role at CoreLogic?
00:37Yeah.
00:38So I've been with CoreLogic for about 10 years, and what I do now is I run a business that
00:45is focused more on leading origination solutions.
00:48So with a focused effort on how do you help customers retain and grow their business.
00:55So we'll talk a lot about that today, but I also lead an originations fulfillment business
01:00that's focused around verifying and qualifying a borrower, which we've done some segments
01:05before that when we spoke about previously.
01:08Mortgage has been a challenging industry for the last couple of years, but maybe we're
01:12starting to percolate a little bit.
01:15So what mortgage industry challenges are you and your team focused on right now?
01:21So when we talk to a lot of our customers, and we do business with a lot of top mortgage
01:26originator lenders and lenders across the spectrum, two themes emerge.
01:32One is how do you use technology to drive down the cost of the loan?
01:36And second, how do I retain and grow my business?
01:40So everyone's looking for top line growth these days.
01:44Some of the industry stats are pretty glaring when you think about the mortgage industry.
01:49There's retention rates in general hover around the 9% to 11% range, which if you think
01:57about it is unheard of when you compare to other industries.
02:02There's some recent stats around borrowers don't go back to their originating loan officers
02:09for repeat business.
02:10They only do that for about 18% of the time.
02:14And when you think about that, it's disheartening because the cost of acquiring a customer is
02:20in the thousands.
02:21The cost of retaining a customer is in the hundreds.
02:24So why wouldn't you want to retain your existing customers?
02:28And then there's also things about how do I grow my customer base?
02:32What do I need to do in getting a better network out there, depending on the model that you
02:37do business with?
02:38So let's dive in on that growth aspect of what you're working on.
02:42How do you help clients with that really kind of dismal retention and recapture rate?
02:50Yeah, so CoreLogic is uniquely positioned to do a lot of things.
02:55So if you think about the background of CoreLogic, at its DNA, at its core, it is a data and
03:02analytics company.
03:03And what we do is, so the vast amount of data sets that we have.
03:07So if you think about 22,000 counties that we have various forms of data acquisitions
03:15from.
03:16We're a company that grew via acquisitions.
03:19So bringing in a lot of the property 360 data underneath, bringing in household analytics,
03:27it just puts us in a position where if you have coverage of all of the 150 million households
03:32in the U.S. and you can provide data and insights about the household to the customers,
03:39then they're able to then use that information to drive more retention.
03:45So largely speaking, I would say the industry approach to retention has been a three-pronged
03:54approach.
03:55Some do all three really well.
03:57Some sort of vary in their spectrum.
04:00The first is all about customer segmentation.
04:02And in the banking world, KYC, know your customer, is a very popular term, which in the mortgage
04:09industry is translating to relationship-based lending.
04:13And the way to do that is really know your customer by creating the right customer segments.
04:19And that's where CoreLogic shines.
04:21We're able to marry property intelligence and household intelligence through all of
04:25the 200 different analytical models that we have, 50 years of historical data that
04:29we have, billions of records that we have around property.
04:33We're able to create a customer segmentation framework for our clients that then they can
04:38use to understand.
04:40And ideally, you'd want to get to customer segment size one, where every interaction
04:46with your customer is personalized for that customer and that customer only.
04:51So that's sort of the first approach.
04:53The second is really reacting to what I would call events that happen.
05:00So very popular in the industry is credit triggers.
05:07The second is MLS triggers.
05:09And off late, we've introduced a brand new technology around location triggers.
05:14And using all of these, you're sort of reacting to what your customer is doing.
05:19So location-like, maybe open house triggers.
05:22Correct.
05:23Exactly.
05:24And so what happens here is you're not only solving for reaching the right audience, but
05:31you're solving for reaching the right audience at the right time, which is timing is very
05:35important.
05:37And the third is probably, I would say, from a cost and retention perspective, the most
05:42effective, which is play the long term, which is how do you create a customer engagement
05:49platform where you engage with your customers and you really create a flywheel for a customer
05:55for life, which is sort of the holy grail that everyone wants, right?
05:58How do I create a customer for life framework?
06:01So that's the retention framework.
06:04And then when you think about growth, it's all about how do I create my buy box and how
06:09do I expand my customer base?
06:11And customers do this in a variety of ways.
06:14One is through understanding what the segment that you want to gain more business and having
06:21various marketing techniques to go reach to them.
06:24The second is really through an indirect growth, which is recruiting the right loan officers
06:29if you're in a distributed retail model, having the right network connections, and expanding
06:35your realtor network, and so on and so forth.
06:37So that's sort of where we see the industry is going, and CoreLogic is uniquely positioned
06:41to help that.
06:42So a lot of different opportunities for retention, recapture, growth.
06:49But if I'm an LO or a branch manager or production leader, do I have to go to like a hundred
06:54different places at CoreLogic to get access to those products, or is it kind of unified
07:00in one place?
07:01Yeah.
07:02No, great question.
07:03So we've been working really hard behind the scenes to invest in a platform called Arraya,
07:09which we're building it as a one-stop shop to access all of these solutions.
07:15And so we launched Arraya last summer, and there's a ton of productized versions of a
07:23lot of the solutions that we just discussed in a way that's consumable for the customer
07:28with just one click.
07:29So things like market intelligence, where you can understand everything about the market,
07:35what loan officers look at the performance, look at the recruiting history, understand
07:40what realtors to connect to.
07:42All of that is packaged in a ready-to-use format within market intelligence.
07:46When you think about precision marketing, it's all about how do I use that location
07:50intelligence to then understand what are my household behaviors so I can reach out to
07:56the customers when they need it the most.
07:59Things like loss leads and payoff analysis, where you understand where your customers
08:06that you did not end up doing business with, where did they go, so you can start to sharpen
08:11your competitive edge.
08:15Things like property intelligence, where you really position your loan officers, and even
08:21in underwriting, your processing team, to spend less time researching things about the
08:25property, but through a click of a button, get everything that you need about a property.
08:30Property characteristics, their propensity scores, their ABMs, their lien information,
08:36everything that you need all in one place.
08:37So we're really, really excited about where ARIA is going, and specifically for the retention
08:43segment, making that a one-stop shop for loan officers or originators to come in and access
08:50that data.
08:51So, as an individual LO, do I have to go to my lender, the company that I work for, and
08:59get them to buy enterprise access to ARIA, or are there individual subscriptions available?
09:05How do people access?
09:06ARIA, the way we think about ARIA is, the goal is to meet the customer where they want.
09:16So if you think about a spectrum of users, so you have individual loan officers, mortgage
09:21brokers, that really want to sort of think about their growth, which then translates
09:26to their company's growth, depending on the channel they operate on.
09:29We've created an e-commerce model, where you could go in, put in your credit card, subscribe
09:36to the product, and you would get full access to all of the tools in ARIA.
09:42For lenders that want a little bit more enterprise model, but don't necessarily want to go through
09:48the motions of creating these large analytics layers themselves, we create user interfaces
09:54and bring this data either in ARIA, or we can integrate to the CRM of your choice and
10:00bring the data over there.
10:02And so you really get the power of all of this data from the ARIA platform, but we try
10:07to meet you where you really need the data, so you don't have to alter your workflow to do that.
10:14Third, which is very unique to CoreLogic, is we also make this data available in a lot
10:19of these cloud marketplaces, and a lot of the larger and more technology-savvy lenders
10:26have started to invest in these massive data lake environments that then makes this data
10:32available from an enterprise perspective.
10:35So we have native cloud integrations to Snowflakes, Databricks, Google, Salesforce, any of these
10:41larger cloud platforms that you can think of, where this data is available in your fingertips,
10:46and then you can start to execute campaigns, customer reach-outs, recruiting loan officers,
10:51networking with realtors, all of that in one place.
10:54This is a big deal, innovation.
10:56I love a unified dashboard, so this is very exciting.
11:00What's on the product roadmap for ARIA in 2025?
11:05Great question.
11:06So ARIA is growing and growing rapidly.
11:09What I'm most excited about that's coming up is a product called One Home Owner.
11:16One Home Owner is all about, when we talked about retention, we talked about homeowner
11:22engagement.
11:23How do you create a customer for life value proposition?
11:25So One Home Owner is all about positioning the lender to create their own personalized
11:33brand experience, but helping customers where they need the help the most, which is homeownership.
11:39If you think about some of the stats, about 4 million customers transact today or every
11:45year in terms of purchasing a new home, but about 85 million don't.
11:52So how do you create an experience where you're not just transacting with the 4 million that
11:58are in market, but you're helping the 85 million that are not in market today?
12:03And One Home Owner is all about that.
12:05So I'm not going to give any spoilers in terms of the features and functions, so we'll hold
12:11on to some of the cool features that One Home Owner has, but the big problem that it is
12:17trying to solve is keeping homeowner at the center, which then creates a value proposition
12:24where a mortgage lender creates a consistent brand experience for the homeowner to make
12:31them live without worrying about a lot of the things that bother a first-time homeowner
12:41around home management, building wealth, the framework around what do I do when something
12:48breaks in my home?
12:50We try to solve all of that.
12:52And from a mortgage lender perspective, it unlocks that customer for life value chain,
12:57and then it's a great flywheel for the lender to be at.
13:00That sounds really interesting.
13:01Maybe we'll have a future conversation where we can talk more about that product.
13:05Yes.
13:06I'm really excited about where Arraya is going and how we can unlock all of the retention
13:12and growth needs for our clients.
13:14Well, Praveen, this has been a really interesting conversation.
13:17Thank you so much for joining me today.
13:19Diego, thank you so much.
13:21Look forward to having more conversations in Arraya in the near future.