After our initial engagement, the client discovered that they could outsource nearly 70% of their work for producing mortgages, with their in-house team supporting the remaining 30% of the workload.
Assivo helped the lender optimize their labor stack. The client was able to retain their highest-performing US employees for essential tasks like important decision-making, tasks that require critical thinking, and interacting with their borrowers to enhance the customer experience. With the grunt work off their plate, we helped the client promote a better work environment for their in-house team with more satisfying and fulfilling work.
Further, as we mentioned at the beginning, our client was able to double the value of their total loan originations from 2019 to 2020 by working with Assivo. This also includes nearly doubling the number of total loan originations they performed each month, from about 275 loans per month in 2019 to over 500 loans per month in 2020.
Overall, the biggest benefits to the client were two-fold–both from a cost perspective and on a capacity level. The assistance with capacity came immediately, and the cost benefits were second.
While other competing lenders expanded their internal hiring efforts to keep up with the jump in demand, they were met with higher fixed costs to cover payroll and other expenses related to supporting an in-house team. Once mortgage demand normalized and origination volumes fell, they still had employees to pay, leading many of our client’s peers to go through painful layoffs and high personnel costs.
Instead, the client paid Assivo per loan origination. This structure allowed the client to convert fixed expenses to a variable costs for nearly 70% of their work. As a result, once the correction settled in, our client didn’t have to cut staff or downsize since a large portion of their costs were relative to their volume–unlike their competitors. For instance, by Q3 ‘22, the volume of mortgages secured had already shrunk to 1.97 million, down 19% from just the prior quarter and nearly 50% down from Q3 ‘21.
The Assivo team is flexible, quickly scaling up or down in line with demand. So even though mortgage volumes have compressed since the height of 2020, our client has been able to retain their profitability in recent years through their new variable cost structure.
