Bridging the Distance Between You and Your Customers

National Bank Mortgage

National Bank Mortgage has been serving military homebuyers from various locations throughout central Texas since 1889, offering VA, FHA, Conventional, Texas Vet and First Time Homebuyer loans. The company originates, processes, underwrites, approves, closes, and table funds all loans in-house, giving it the ability to issue approvals within 24 hours.

The Challenge

National Bank faces particular challenges in addressing the needs of its customers in the military. Homebuyers and sellers are often based outside of the United States, where "express" mail delivery can take weeks instead of days because regardless of where the serviceperson is stationed, the package must go through Europe.

Faxing wasn't any more reliable and email didn't work for a variety of reasons:

1. Military servers or firewalls often restrict large attachments like closing packages
2. Recipients had difficulty opening attachments
3. Personnel are required to save attachments to a portable medium like a CD or Zip disk, yet few military machines are equipped with the appropriate drives.

These issues, coupled with the typically high turnover rate for military homeowners and complicated VA loan process, impeded workflow and created global closing nightmares for National Bank. Lee Huffner, Assistant Vice President, was in search of a faster, easier and more reliable way to deliver mortgage documents to military customers who move frequently or are stationed overseas. She soon realized that SwiftSend LoanDocs is the best way to reach anyone in the mortgage process who is out of the area.

The Solution

National Bank easily installed and began using SwiftSend in its loan origination process. Huffner was thrilled with its ease of use, security and speed. "We got (SwiftSend) up and running in a flash and it worked," she said. Her team soon realized that SwiftSend eliminated the headaches associated with doing business overseas. "We had a military customer stationed in Afghanistan who wanted to refinance. He chose National Bank over a competitor because we were able to use SwiftSend to send his wife the loan documents within a matter of minutes. I received immediate feedback that the papers were correct and the borrower was very impressed."

The Results

National Bank was able to cut closing time for its overseas military customers in half. "The biggest benefit with SwiftSend is time savings, since we're always striving to close loans faster," said Huffner. "We also like the fact that SwiftSend works in conjunction with our LOS: The documents always look really good and print with no problems." National Bank has also realized tremendous cost savings by switching from express mail to SwiftSend. And, according to Huffner, SwiftSend's ability to easily accommodate the serviceperson based in Afghanistan "helped us gain a new customer".