How The 1-Person Mortgage Department At Big Island FCU Does It

The one-person mortgage department at $66-million Big Island FCU here doesn't need to use pen and paper for any part of the lending process, from origination to reconciliation-and hasn't for more than a decade. "I do all the processing myself, from start to finish, and I certainly don't want to go back to doing anything the manual way," said Karen Fukushima, mortgage loan administrator at Big Island.

Beyond the fact that her lending department is completely electronic, including marketing, point of sale, origination, contact management, documents, loan program, secondary marketing, reporting and imaging, none of the systems is housed at Big Island FCU, Fukushima said.

Instead, Big Island relies on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) bundle offered by PCLender, a provider of mortgage lending technology. The software, which is hosted on two servers at PCLender in Honolulu, Hawaii, serves more than 15 credit unions and CUSOs via the Internet, according to Nic Siemer, account manager. "PCLender saves time because all the mortgage forms are available online and all of the applicant information is automatically populated on all documents," explained Fukushima. "PCLender is always on top of compliance, and they accommodate our requests for customizations." "Small credit unions don't have the money to partner with a document provider," added Siemer. "So we provide their docs for them, with close to 2,700 forms on the system now."

Fukushima saves enough time everyday to interview six applicants. With a manual process, she estimated she would only be able to take two applications per day.

Asked why so many credit unions are still stuck in manual lending processes, Siemer suggested that switching from partially-manual to fully electronic lending processes can be cost-prohibitive and time consuming.

The all-electronic mortgage at Big Island is light years ahead of other paper-based processes at the CU. Although the CU can enter application data directly into the lending system, either at the branch or online, Big Island still starts the process with a paper application if members apply at a physical branch. That's because the paper application is archived along with the rest of the documents at the CU, which has not yet embraced electronic document and storage, said Fukushima.

Fukushima remembers back to the late 1980s when she used carbon paper to produce documents in triplicate. "If you made a mistake, you started over again," she said. "In the old days, you could remember the member's name, birth date and social security number because you had to write it so many times on the documents," continued Fukushima. "Now, you just enter the information once and it populates all the necessary documents."

Big Island offers fixed-rate and construction loans, booking about $500,000 per month in mortgages, said Fukushima. "That holds us over. We're just not able to compete with the banks by offering lower interest rates."

The credit union is looking into offering home equity and ARM products, which will be easily facilitated by the PCLender platform, she said.