Lenders: Humanize Your Brand To Compete With Mortgage Disruptors

One of the themes we follow closely at The Basis Point is the impact of mortgage disruptors on industry incumbents.

LOs across the country are staying up at night wondering how they can compete with a Zillow or CreditKarma in the mortgage game when those companies already have tens or hundreds of millions of customers on their platforms.

The answer is simpler than you think.

These disruptors have the customers, but haven’t figured out how to lend at scale yet. That’s your bread and butter. There’s time on the retail side to learn the customer acquisition game while these customer acquisition-master-disruptors learn the lending game, which is harder than it looks.

To do this, though, orgs have to get used to communicating a large brand.

Old school orgs let LOs be the entire brand. That’s outdated.

If you want to grow customers at scale, firms need to develop their own voice alongside the LO. In three to five years, we’ll still have loan officer salesforces on the ground, but lenders will need to develop their own corporate brands to compete with disruptors. This brand will over time feed LOs leads, letting them focus on personalization, advice, and a kick-ass customer experience.

That will build a more sustainable business that can handle pressure from a disruptor.

The challenge of this is weaving a convincing corporate message with LOs as the human face. Humanizing a brand is an art form. Since lenders have the mortgage backbone and the LO salesforces, they can create that personable brand in a way the disruptors haven’t figured out yet.

Julian dives deep into this concept on Jake Fehling’s Mortgage Impact Podcast, which also features insights from our friends Dave Savage of Mortgage Coach and Alex Kutsishin of Sales Boomerang. This episode is a quick primer on the future of mortgage—it’s 19 minutes long and Julian’ section starts around the 11 minute mark.

Check out the podcast here.