Digital mortgages

While the West Coast still reigns as the epicenter of technology development, the Detroit area has quietly emerged as a proving ground for digital mortgage innovations.

Amber Baldet is exiting JPMorgan Chase to start her own venture, and another female executive is taking charge of the blockchain effort. BofA makes major progress on digital mortgages and gets gun-shy after Parkland. Plus, GM’s one-sentence dress code.

The bank says its partnership with Lender Price will help streamline and simplify its home loan process.

Applications can now be made on the bank's app or website, but closings will still be in person. With this move, BofA joins Quicken Loans, Lenda, SoFi and others offering a mostly digital mortgage. The trend is sure to continue.

A BankThink argues that Treasury's GSE cash infusions are just the return of stolen money; MUFG wants its Union Bank to be one of the nation's 10 largest; fintech promises a 30-minute mortgage; and more.

Readers react to a drive for more public banks, weigh in the launch of an online-only bank, chime in on what millennials need and more.

Lenda, launched in 2014, currently makes mortgages start to finish in two weeks. But it's aiming to make it a process that can be finished on a borrower's lunch break.

Servicers are still trying to figure out how they can best take advantage of the growing use of electronic notes and other digital mortgage tools by lenders and the secondary market.

Governments are studying ways blockchain can safeguard property records and simplify how they get tracked.

The bank will spend an additional $1.4 billion on technology in 2018 to gain share and boost efficiency, executives said Tuesday. But they were peppered with questions about whether the big investment will yield a big financial return down the road.

Banco Santander joined existing investors JPMorgan and USAA as well as others in raising $25 million in secondary-round financing for Roostify, which seeks to build a paperless mortgage process.

Despite digital mortgage advances, borrowers think it still takes too long to get a loan, J.D. Power finds in its annual customer satisfaction ranking of originators.

Stephen Sessler, the director of mortgage banking at the $4 billion-asset Camden National Bank, provides other lenders a peek at the benefits and pitfalls of digital mortgages.

Digital mortgages transform the customer experience with slick user interfaces and data integrations that streamline the process of getting a borrower hooked up with a lender. Now it's time to disrupt the rest of the process.

Tech-savvy mortgage broker Sindeo is back in business, following an acquisition by Renren, a Chinese social media company and an investor in U.S.-based fintech firms including Social Finance and LendingHome.

It's not only regulation that is hurting profitability, but also banks' failure to adapt to the internet age, according to a recent study.