Maxwell Financial Labs (himaxwell.com) has a vision to create a permanent competitive advantage for small & medium lenders. They provide a 2-sided platform: tools and services for lenders and loan officers to manage the mortgage and refinancing processes; and a borrower experience that makes it quick and easy to apply, automates large parts of the mortgage workflow, and significantly shortens the time to close.
When I joined Maxwell in October 2018, the product team had a list of projects planned to address existing client needs. Primarily integrations to support document transfer, signature collection, and asset verification. While I was learning about our partner lenders and working to understand the complex mortgage industry, we added new Loan Operating System integrations, created a pre-approval letter generator, and found innovative ways to automate the borrower experience.
We worked to develop a broader product & service strategy while cycling through incremental projects. With help from our amazing customer support team, we connected with our lender partners regularly and we saw some patterns emerge. We prototyped and tested several solutions for both borrower and loan officer tools.
One of the patterns was visualizing progress; we would need a variety of levels of detail and more than one way to show progress in the UI. Knowing "where I am" in the mortgage process was a consistent need for borrowers and LOs alike.
We found that certain automations, especially those that auto-populate private borrower information, needed more measures to reassure users about their security and safety. Where needed, we emphasized connection status, progress, and completion.
We designed a simple, elegant messaging experience to connect borrowers with their entire lending team, and to allow LOs to deliver important messaging with a consistent look across channels.
And we designed simple, predictable behaviors to sit atop third party integrations for things like asset verification.
Over time we settled on a direction that was consistently received well by borrowers and lenders. We had a big-picture vision and specific steps to take in the short term. Ways we could shorten the time to close, keep borrowers connected with their whole lending team, automate where we should, integrate where we should, and expand the capabilities of our partner lenders to help them compete.
Eventually Maxwell's services grew to include loan processing and underwriting functions, further reducing the time it takes for a borrower to be able to make an offer, and the time it takes to close the loan. The company has become one of the largest mortgage service networks in the country.
