Gateway Financial Holdings Inc. said a decrease in shipping costs helped it recover the costs of shifting to a hosted digital service for mortgage originations in six months.
By scanning paper documents into digital images and using electronic reports rather than paper ones where possible, "we're averaging 27% savings on overnight charges," Jim Leone, a senior vice president at the $1.9 billion-asset Virginia Beach company's Gateway Bank Mortgage Inc. and its director of technology and secondary marketing, said in an interview last week.
Gateway Financial has 18 loan originators in 13 of its 37 Gateway Bank and Trust Co. branches, but the mortgage unit has centralized its processing, underwriting, and closing operations at the unit's headquarters in Raleigh, Mr. Leone said.
In July, 14 months after the mortgage unit opened, Gateway Financial began using the BlitzDocs Collaboration Suite technology hosted by Xerox Mortgage Services, he said.
In addition to the reduction in shipping costs, "there are some intangibles that are hard to put values on," Mr. Leone said, such as the ability to access document simmediately after they are uploaded.
When an originator uploads a loan file or an outside document arrives, the system triggers an e-mail alert to the staff, Mr. Leone said. "We take advantage of those."
The technology has simplified both the audit process and the selling of its loans into the secondary market to buyers that include Countrywide Financial Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Citigroup Inc., Mr. Leone said.
"It's as simple as pushing a button to deliver that file to the investor."
