For months, I’ve been working with a mortgage wizard. He isn’t a salesman. He is brass tacks and salty. I’ll call him Robert to protect his privacy and to selfishly guard my pilot partner. For more than 25 years, he's worked the operations side of mortgage origination, primarily as a processor, with stints in underwriting. Now he runs a multi-state contract processing business and handles most of his volume personally.
When he recounts loan scenarios, he doesn’t speak in the broad strokes of a salesperson. He is meticulous, in a way that absorbs decades of edge cases and exceptions. You can tell he has single-handedly clear-cut paths through gnarly thickets of mixed income and murky lender guidelines. He is insufferably focused on the details, and doesn’t tolerate bullshit. In fact, he routinely fires clients who don’t meet his standards.
Robert’s love of detail and his disciplined approach to process betray his military family upbringing. Decades of experience make him a sought-after advisor. Nearly every time I’ve been on a Zoom with him, he fields a call from one of his loan officer clients. He’ll rattle off an obscure guideline from a NonQM lender, or he’ll walk through the nuance of an income calculation. On another occasion, he asked me to hold because he needed to finish pulling a rabbit out of the proverbial hat for an imminent closing. Then he jumped back into our conversation without missing a beat. Watching him reminds me of my wife, who is a medical director, giving calm advice over the phone to one of her frantic residents.
Robert is clearly more than your average processor. He is the operational core of several mortgage companies. His daily heroics are the reason why hundreds of families will successfully close on their family homes on time this year. He is exactly the kind of person I’d want working on my mortgage, but I promise you, there are not enough Roberts to go around.
When I worked as a loan officer, processing wasn’t on my radar; the sales motion got all the glory. But now I see the processor’s desk is where the mortgage really happens. It’s especially consequential for self-employed and self-made borrowers. These files often swell to 700 to 1,500+ pages of documentation, including business bank statements, K1s, 1099s, lease agreements, and more. Income qualification methodology can vary by program and lender. Inexperienced processors or loan officers can quickly get in over their heads.
Over the last few months, I’ve personally interviewed processors, loan officers, real estate agents, and borrowers in ~40 sessions. I recently pored over ~250 forum and review posts as part of a voice-of-the-customer study, and I had Claude agents analyze a FHFA and CFPB borrower survey of ~50K respondents. The same picture keeps materializing.
To truly transform the borrower experience, we need to nail processing.
The benchmark cost for originating a loan is in the five figures. A large controllable chunk of that is coordination labor attached to the processing desk. Think document chasing, conditions clearing, status chasing, and the opportunity cost associated with closing loans too slowly.
Industry AI conferences are saturated with loan officer co-pilots and chatbots. They demo well, bolt on quickly to incumbent systems, and play well in enterprise sales meetings. But is a loan officer assistant improving the borrower experience, or is it just making marginal improvements to the workflow?
What if every loan officer got a processor of Robert’s caliber? Not more software that they have to click through. Someone they can text or email. Someone they can fully delegate a file to and know that it will be handled. Someone accountable with a license. What if every borrower had support like Robert? Meticulous, process-driven, disciplined, knowledgeable, experienced, communicative.
If that happened, we might not see so many borrower quotes like this one I pulled from my research:
"I was up-front the whole time with the LO that I was self-employed, that my file might require a little more work than the standard person's; hey, might want to get an early start on it; could we try and close early?"
"I don't have a problem with anything they asked me to provide."
"However, the manner in which it was handled was simply horrible."
It is clear the there aren’t enough Roberts to go around, and that is a problem worth working on.
Scoreboard:
Interviews: ~40 | Design Partners 1 | Processor-minutes per closed file: coming soon
My Ask:
If you know a great mortgage operator like Robert, I’d love to meet them. I’m trying to learn from the best. Reply to this email with an intro. I’ll share the aggregate.
Thanks for reading!
Jeremiah