All-digital mortgage company accelerates claim processing with a state-of-the-art platform Forte Group

Forte Group Develops an Innovative Loan Origination
and Point of Sale System for  Interfirst Mortgage Company

Introduction

Interfirst Mortgage Company (IMC) is a $36 billion mortgage originator that offers mortgage solutions to individuals and businesses. Forte Group designed, engineered, and delivered an innovative and flexible SaaS platform that automates the end-to-end process of loan origination.
For lenders, the platform provides an all-in-one solution for forms management, document management, customer relationship management (CRM), and marketing automation. The new platform was so transformative to IMC’s loan origination business that it created a new entity (CyberDyne) to license the technology to brokers and lenders.
CyberDyne’s Mortgage SkyNet LOS and POS include an effective CRM, paperless loan files, document management, pricing/eligibility engine, warehouse management, and institutional investor deliveries, all engineered and delivered by Forte Group.

SaaS Application for Flexible Loan Origination

Client:
Mortgage Lender Company

Website:
https://www.interfirst.com/

Industry:
Financial Services

Technology and Platforms:
MS Azure Cloud Computing Services,  Azure Active Directory, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Azure OpenAI GPT, Application Performance Monitoring and Alerting (APM), Azure Cognitive Services

Background

IMC wanted to use online processes to automate its loan origination process for borrowers. They wanted fully customizable business flows (i.e., from pre-qualification to loan closure) without the need to involve developers.  IMC also the client wanted to create an online dashboard that provides a single channel of communication with borrowers.
The dashboard would provide updates on each step in the loan origination process. Instead of emailing or calling borrowers, loan officers create tasks that are listed in the dashboard for borrowers to act on. In addition,  IMC wanted to create an online chat feature for borrowers to add and update information upon request

Business Challenges

“By having product managers working alongside the client, we effectively shared ownership of the product management practices. Forte Group has developed a multi-tenant mortgage SaaS/PaaS platform with end-to-end brokers, realtors, and lenders’ experience support. The all-in-one loan management platform we built has edge lending software features, enabling us to license the technology to other institutions under the CyberDyne brand.”

Max Shulha 
Senior Product Owner at Forte Group

Solution

The Forte team developed a next-generation, all-in-one loan management platform, which began as a .NET monolith with a React frontend. The Forte team took ownership of Agile development, testing, and release management for three core applications (Loan Application Portal, Communications Chrome Extension, Admin Portal) comprising over 20 business components and modules. 
Additionally, the system seamlessly integrates with over 10 third-party services, such as HubSpot, Telnyx, Stripe, HelloSign, Slack, SendBird, and Synthesia. As the client’s business continued to grow, the solution expanded to cover additional areas such as Accounting, Assets, Brokers, Claims, Pricing, Fees, Internal Communications and Customer Communications.

Key solution features are the following

Pricing  Engine / Loan Application Portal

Automated Loan Application Review

Software Licensing via Multi-tenant Architecture

New Communications Channels to Borrowers

Fully-managed SDLC frees the IMC team to focus on strategic objectives

Results Achieved

50% savings in infrastructure costs

Cost savings from migrating third-party solutions to in-house solutions: Blend Mortgage Suite, Dropbox Sign, HubSpot, xDoc

“Quality Guaranteed” approach to releases – multi-layer quality control with intensive test automation and continuous product quality monitoring

Cloud-ready solution using cloud-based technologies like Azure Function Apps and Azure App Service Plans

Migration from a monolithic SOA architecture to a microservices architecture to improve development speed, reliability, stability and scalability

Securing application and infrastructure using industry best practices and standards (e.g., 2FA, JWT, Azure Active Directory)

Secured end-user applications using JSON Web Tokens (JWT), implemented dynamic claim-based authentication and policy-based authorization

Commonly-used approach for securing corporate solutions implementation in organization’s application (Admin Panel CRM) – Single Sign-On (SSO) using Azure Active Directory

Variety of Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) methods for end-user applications (Apply Form POS, Realtors Portal) implemented, such as authentication via SMS, Email, Magic Link

Results and added value

0%
Savings in infrastructure costs
0%
Custom business-related service integrations
0/7
Engineering production support
0%
Increase in processing speed per single claim

Build sophisticated end-to-end lending platform with outcome-based development teams

More customer success stories

How BMO Harris

Reduced BCP Review

Time by 40 Percent

Relativity accelerates value

delivery through quality and

testing modernization