BCG's US mortgage industry whitepaper, powered by Blend

BCG's US mortgage industry whitepaper is worth a gander for its succinct delivery of the impacts of digital solutions in this space. Wielding my editorial prerogative, the keys...

An intense focus on the customer experience

"one-third of applicants apply using a mobile device, and over 50% submit their application outside working hours"

 A product management approach to creating/maintaining solutions

"Ideating is easy, but implementation is hard."

"a minimum viable experience in order to get to the market within 6 months, making continuous iterations based on customer feedback"

"dedicated cross-functional team of sales, operations, technology, and compliance personnel working on design and implementation"

A holistic view of the customer home-buying journey

"We will see many more digital transformations across the mortgage process and the home-buying experience more broadly." as both incumbents and emerging players try "to create end-to-end home-buying experiences for customers."

• The challenge to the industry is that none of these are capabilities are inherent strengths, which brings us to Blend, the platform used by the paper's authors to extract some of the consumer insights.
• Blend has deservedly received a fair amount of press over the past 2 years, and has been at the top of the digital mortgage origination league tables. Dimensionalizing its share of the origination market...
• "the platform processes more than 100,000 applications per month and $1 billion in loans every day." This translates to roughly $360 billion in loans annually, the vast majority from the Retail channel.
• The Retail channel in 2017 (last full year data) accounted for ~$1 trillion in mortgage loans, out of a total market of $1.8 trillion.
• The Top 7 Retail players combined to account for ~$350 billion in mortgage loans in 2017

Blend has been able to aggregate detailed transaction records of roughly a third of the loans flowing through the Retail channel, a volume greater than the top 7 Retail originators combined. An impressive accomplishment, potentially raising questions around "fintechs bearing gifts."