Reimagining Mortgage Origination

The Executive Vice President for Single-Family Lending at a Fortune 500 Financial Institution tasked my team with reducing the time and cost of mortgage origination—making it as seamless as securing a car loan—for both lenders and consumer.

 

Resolution

To address this challenge, I facilitated a two-day design sprint with the executive leadership team to leverage their expertise and reimagine the mortgage process. Together, we identified seven strategic areas focusing on a platform approach to eliminate costly frictions and create a competitive advantage in mortgage originations.

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Building on the sprint, my team conducted over 60 user interviews with consumers, mortgage professionals (loan officers, underwriters, processors), and real estate agents. These insights refined the platform strategy and identified key seeding products to certify borrowers' credit worthiness and reduce cost and time of originations for lenders. We validated consumer desirability through business experiments, securing over 2,000 consumer sign-ups for a service aimed at speeding up mortgage readiness and origination.

 

Partnering with a leading product agency, we used agile and design practices to build and launch the product. Despite several pivots due to regulatory concerns, the product gained traction with housing counselors before ultimately being discontinued. However, the project had a lasting impact: it accelerated company’s adoption of lean and design-driven product development, leading to the establishment of an active product design team and a mobile development team.

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This foundational work also paved the way for a downpayment assistance two-sided digital marketplace, a highly successful product that became a cornerstone of Freddie Mac’s platform strategy, showcasing the power of leveraging exponential technologies and customer-centered innovation.