The Cogent Road

Gravity. Contact Management / Lead Distribution Software for the Mortgage Industry

For the past six months we have been working on an new contact manager/lead distribution application called Gravity. Its been an intense, time-consuming project. Yet the final result helps me forget the struggle and effort required to bring this to market.

Alan (my business partner) and I realized that a mortgage vertical CRM/Pricing Engine/Lead Distribution/Credit system didn’t exist. To fill the need we integrated our existing Funding Suite credit platform into a brand new, mortgage industry specific sales / lead management system we created. The result is a new software application called Gravity, a very powerful, easy to use application that helps loan officers more easily close loans. It also tracks every referral source (from both business partners and past clients) to present the true, lifetime value of every contact.

Gravity Feature List

• Distributes leads based on unlimited customer criteria.
• Associate spreadsheets with mailing campaigns - search for lead by any uploaded criteria.
• Call Taker role – who can immediately distribute lead to “next-up” loan officer.
• Customized “Applicant Interviews” that can vary by campaign or product offered.
• Create unique web-based, self-service applicant interviews for any number of different web-pages.
• Run credit (with ability to ensure specific interview fields completed
• Integrated pricing engine – with graphical financial comparison tools
• Drip e-mail campaigns

When we launched Funding Suite, (Cogent Road’s first enterprise software application) back in November of 2007 we transitioned from a service reseller to a true software company. For the first time we now designed, manufactured, sold and supported our own software code. Those first few weeks of November, 2007 were some of the busiest in my life.

Roohmz Mortgage, our second enterprise application, brings to mind a lot of the same energy and turbulence as Funding Suite did three years ago. Since we won the mortgage industry’s Release of the Year, we have had very strong demand for the application. And we discovered, as a software company we still needed to master an additional skill – creating a smooth, short implementation process.

Unlike Funding Suite, Roohmz Mortgage requires significant customization for each client so that Roohmz can enforce consistent, high quality, fully compliant loan origination – no matter what process the lender uses. This meant we needed to spend time with every client to show them how to use the embedded software tools to customize the application. This was entirely different for us – and we made plenty of mistakes. In fact, we are still learning.

Implementing clients took us by surprise. We quickly discovered we needed additional tools to help clients fully self-service their customization. My partner and I rolled up our sleeves and implemented all new clients – then met nightly to compare notes and design new administrative tools. Initially implementations took up to eight weeks – now we can roll a client live in just three.  I’m hopeful we can get it down to just two weeks.

I am just back from this years Mortgage Banking Convention – and happy to announce Cogent Road was honored with the industry’s top software award for our Roohmz Mortgage application.  We were up against some stiff competition (including new releases from industry stalwarts such as Equifax and All Regs) – but Cogent Road walked away with the hardware.

Click to Read the Article

Though attendance was down from the earlier in the decade, we were still very busy demonstrating our (now award winning) Roohmz Mortgage application nearly non-stop during the two-day event. We have a number of strong leads and a number of clients currently being installed.

Roohmz Mortgage has helped Cogent Road move up segment – as we now routinely talk to some of the nation’s largest lenders. In the past, our Funding Suite application made it difficult to grab the attention of large lenders. It appears that Roohmz Mortgage is the right application at the right time – and even more so for larger lenders. It’s been a difficult two years building this application – as we poured millions into it despite a rapidly deteriorating economic environment. The risk is now paying off.

There are too many companies that are so afraid and beaten up that they’re in a batten-down-the-hatches mode. Progress by its very nature means doing something different. Correct use of technology is one way to progress, but it has to be coupled with sound business strategy. What’s the right mix of technology and strategy to ensure success in the current difficult mortgage market? How does a company get over the fear of moving beyond old processes that may seem familiar? Sometimes that’s hard.

There’s a saying that history predicts the future. However, if you live by that adage your future will always be the same as your past. Rather, you need to use history to reshape the future. In my view there are four steps that lenders can employ in order to grow and progress.

1. Growth Is Always Possible. Right now is the ideal time for growth, in fact. In a difficult economy, and there’s no question that the economy is brutal, the protect-and-preserve mentality is comfortable, but that won’t lead to you getting new customers and growing your business. If you have the mindset that growth is possible, you can get better returns now vs. any other time in history.

2. Create A Vision. How do you grow? You first need to know who and what you are and what you want to become. Unless you have a vision, you’ll become tomorrow what you were yesterday. Further, you need to have a vision that is free from the limits of fear. Once you have that vision it’s important to communicate that to others in your business.

3. Establish A Focused 40 Every Day. This is mentally tough, but critical. What is a focused 40? You need a focused period of 40 minutes every single day where you will have no agenda outside of thinking of new ways to achieve your vision. You need a strategy to get to your vision. During this time you need to hole yourself up in your office and have no interruptions. Also, you need to document everything that comes up during those 40 minutes. Some of these focused 40s may not result in much, but eventually ideas will come. Remember, you need to be consistent in order to formulate a plan to achieve your vision.

4. Take Action. Thinking is great, but thoughts alone won’t bring about results. Resist the fear of trying something new. You also need to resist the fear of failure. Act on your plan and you can truly achieve your vision.

By doing these four things you can really make your vision a reality. Together these four steps will help you progress. It may seem simple, but it takes work. Here at Cogent Road we haven’t taken a dollar of investment money. We succeed because we have products that customers want to buy. We’ve attained our vision and will continue to improve the mortgage space by delivering technology to help lenders innovate.

In our experience, Software as a Service applications are typically straight copies of legacy based software programs adapted for the internet.  They lack new benefits made possible by having multiple, role-based users connected to a single database.

Facebook grew because it was (one of) the first consumer applications that created NEW software benefits based on internet connectivity – namely one’s ability to connect to others and  broadcast content. These two simple, yet new software benefits translated into 500 million users.  (Realizing there are about 300 million in the US, you can understand what a huge accomplishment this is). Why is business software so slow to incorporate these concepts?

Roohmz Mortgage was created as Software as a Service to bring Facebook style “broadcasting and connection” capabilities to the mortgage industry. Since a mortgage loan is handled by numerous people inside and outside of the mortgage lender – it made sense that software that fostered collaboration and continually monitored for mistakes would result in faster loan production and higher loan quality. Two things the industry desperately needs.
These two simple features (collaboration and monitoring) translate into a near endless stream of brand new benefits never before offered in the mortgage business (or many other industries for that matter). As an example, look at the very manually intensive task underwriters undergo every time they attach conditions to a loan file. To see how Roohmz elegantly addresses this specific problem – take a few minutes to see the video below.

How Roohmz Uses Collaboration to Manage Underwriting Conditions

Mortgage clients are getting on board with the concept, and demand continues grow each month (three more installations this week). We also remain busy creating brand new ways in which collaboration and monitoring can solve other loan production bottlenecks.

I wonder if the insurance industry, or the legal profession could use this application? Hmmmm……

I just learned this week that Cogent Road’s Roohmz Mortgage application has been named a finalist for the mortgage banking Technology Release of 2010. Wow, what an honor – and everyone is thrilled just to be named among some pretty strong competition.

The winner will be named at the annual mortgage banking convention in late October.

Let’s hear it for the Three-Peat!

For the third straight year, Cogent Road has been named to the mortgage industries Top 50 Service Provider list.

Winning it this year means a lot to all of us because the past two years have been very, very difficult. The mortgage industry has been ripped apart – and reassembled inside-out. We’ve not only survived the turmoil, we’ve been able to:

• Roll out an incredible workflow and collaboration platform called Roohmz Mortgage.
• Invent a brand new way of keeping lender’s compliant – without human effort.
• Launch our AVAIL automated mortgage qualification tool
• implement a direct sales channel
• create a few strong partnerships with complementary vendors
• significantly increase the average size of our client
• and increased revenue.

And, in the next few months we will roll out an entirely new version of our Funding Suite credit reporting platform. We will bring to the credit reporting industry technical functionality that has never been seen before. Exciting times.

If you’d like to read the Top 50 article, you can click on the image below.

Cogent Road makes the cover of Mortgage Technology Magazine

You can tell it’s summer in San Diego when surfboards show up in cubes at the Cogent Road office. Our office is about 15 minutes from the beach and in the summer a few of us hit the waves after work. The reality is that sometimes people disappear after lunch.

We’ve updated our Funding Suite application to help mortgage originators easily comply with Fannie Mae’s new loan quality initiative. The basic idea was that Fannie Mae wants originators to check that the loan applicant has acquired any new debt obligations prior to funding. If so, the new debt to income ratio could trigger a provision forcing the lender to buy back the loan at Fannie’s discretion. Not good.

To assist we first received approval from all three credit bureaus to offer “soft inquiry” credit reports for the purpose of reviewing the credit profile for changes prior to funding. This new report “called a Credit Refresh” can be ordered with or without credit scores – and is automatically audited by the software to reveal:

1. any new tradelines (new debt obligations) not previously reported
2. any changes in debt balances for existing accounts
3. any new credit inquiries (which we will verify as to whether was a result of a new credit application)
4. any new public records or tax liens

If the lender wants a more detailed review, a new “side by side” viewer displays both the original credit report used for qualification purposes along side the new Credit Refresh report. All in all a very slick, easy to use solution.

Here is a two minute video of our Credit Refresh tools in action.