Product Talk: A Note From the VP of Product

It would be a mistake to think of Sales Boomerang as just another trigger system. We have a strong, focused team driving towards the mission that Alex, our CEO, has plastered on shirts, stickers, office walls, and all over LinkedIn – No Borrower Left Behind. 

Admittedly, it’s something I didn’t fully grasp at first. I had no mortgage or finance experience prior to joining Sales Boomerang. My career had encompassed building tech products for adtech, mobile, and gaming, but I saw amazing opportunity in the hyper growth happening in the fintech space so when that collided with the extreme passion that Alex brought to every conversation about the business we shared, I was convinced it was something I needed to be a part of.

So, while I first saw “No Borrower Left Behind” as a clever marketing phrase to get a few extra likes or an extra glance in a news feed, I now know it to be one of the main reasons that our team is what it is. It’s our north star. It’s what we come back to anytime we’re making a product decision. Is what we’re building going to add value for the borrower? 

It’s an interesting balance, because we service financial institutions and loan officers directly, so our products need to satisfy their needs as well, but it’s our belief that if we build tools that allow the loan officer to better serve the borrower and bring them the right opportunities then that symbiotic relationship will provide tremendous value to both parties. 

We believe that the right loan for a borrower can be life-altering and sometimes even life-changing. The ability to reduce a mortgage payment can allow for breathing room in a paycheck-to-paycheck household, or the ability to reduce the lifetime cost of the loan can put tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the pocket of the borrower. Beyond that, it can give home owners the power to use their equity to remodel a home, pay for college (or nowadays pre-school), or purchase a second property. 

We have created our Prescriptive Scenarios with these borrowers in mind. We alert the loan officer when the borrower is qualified for a refinance based on credit, property, and mortgage data, as well as additional data to allow us to prioritize the borrowers that should be contacted most quickly.  

The retention strategy for every loan officer should include a mortgage inquiry solution, to let them know when their borrower is active. These are red-hot alerts that need immediate attention. Our full suite of products, including Prescriptive Scenarios expand on this to identify both activity of your borrower, but also opportunity for your borrower. One is reactive and the other is proactive, giving LOs the ability to save business at risk and create business by adding value that the borrower may not even know they had access to.

The most interesting thing about what we’re building is that we’re just getting started. While that may sound cliche (and it is a little), it also happens to be the truth. 

Our goal is to create a better relationship between the loan officer and their borrowers. We have many exciting avenues to reach that goal, and that’s the great part about building products, especially technology products, it’s all about driving towards an outcome, working alongside users of the product, learning and iterating until you get it right. 

One idea includes incorporating a borrower history to help fuel our propensity models, using AI and machine learning to determine patterns based on the types of borrowers in our system. The longer you are running alerts with Sales Boomerang, the smarter it will get, not only about your borrower based on their history, but also about your loan officers.  Is Steve better at selling Cash-Outs than Barbara? Let’s make sure those leads flow into Steve and give Barbara the FHA MI Removals that she can convert like nobody else. 

Or how about a tool to help loan officers plan ahead to the next best loan for a borrower? The ability to check in and adjust the borrower’s goals on a regular basis to take advantage of a hot market or increase monthly payments to get the LTV in the right place for a refinance in the coming year. We’re considering that as well. 

Ultimately it comes back to the mission, “No Borrower Left Behind.” The real Sales Boomerang product is the connection we’re helping to establish between a loan officer and their borrower, beyond a single transaction to a life long relationship. The top loan officers already know that’s where the most value is – relationships.  What we’re building at Sales Boomerang will help even the playing field so that the top loan officers will need to find a new avenue to outperform the average LO, because all LOs will have the key to retaining customers through creating continual value.