Guaranteed Rate has just taken a major step closer to the world’s first fully digital mortgage with its latest cloud-based technology service for homebuyers. Transfersafe continues Guaranteed Rate’s efforts to modernize the mortgage process by allowing for instant online collaboration between a borrower and the loan officer and their team, sharing documents in a secure, encrypted cloud environment powered by Box. Borrowers can sign and upload loan documents electronically and receive immediate feedback and next steps from the platform’s consumer-friendly interface, shortening a process that used to take days into minutes. Transfersafe eliminates the need for faxing documents back and forth and potentially unsecure e-mail exchanges and safely stores a document history through the mortgage application process.
“Transfersafe is the next major step in our evolution of the mortgage process,” said Victor Ciardelli, president and CEO of Guaranteed Rate. “We’ve already brought our online loan application to the market, which has funded more than $3 billion in loans to date, and one of our founding principles has always been to use technology to improve the home buyer’s experience and streamline the process for loan originators alike. Now, we’ve introduced Transfersafe to make getting a mortgage quicker, easier and more transparent.”
Transfersafe’s user-friendly platform enables instant collaboration between a home buyer and a loan officer. After the borrower’s application kit, forms and disclosures are posted, the borrower receives a notification message from Transfersafe that their mortgage application is ready to be signed. Once a borrower signs the forms through industry-leading eSignature technology powered by DocuSign®, they are walked through a step-by-step process to upload their key mortgage verification documents into Transfersafe: income documents (such as W-2 forms and paystubs); asset documentation (checking and savings accounts, investments, etc.); homeowner documents (sales contracts, proof of insurance); and other key documents (gift letters, lines of credit, drivers licenses, etc.).
A borrower’s documents can be dragged and dropped from their desktop into Transfersafe, directly from their computer or by taking a photo of the document with their smartphone or tablet. Optimized for mobile use and built in HTML5, Transfersafe works on all mobile device operating systems: iOS, Android and Windows. In addition, an online payment option for appraisals is scheduled to be added to Transfersafe by early 2015.
“If there’s any industry ripe for disruption from smart technology, it’s the mortgage industry,” said Martin J. Logan, chief information officer of Guaranteed Rate. “Transfersafe takes some of the calcified, slow processes of getting a mortgage and brings them into the modern age of cloud technology with a simple, intuitive user interface. Where a big bank might need to devote years of their IT resources to develop their own platform, we’ve been able to be more nimble by employing best-of-breed solutions like Box and DocuSign and focusing our development efforts on creating a faster, safer experience for a homebuyer.”
