Freedom and Opportunity

As I reflect on 2022, there are two words that come to mind. The first is freedom.

I’d like to share a true story about one of our first mortgage lender clients who joined the BeSmartee family in 2016. We’ll call him “Steve” so that I may protect his identity and be able to share some details.

I first met Steve in 2016 and, after a few calls and demos, he signed with BeSmartee because he believed in our vision to automate everything possible, helping eliminate manual tasks, so that his loan officers could focus on the relationships with their borrowers.

Steve decided to start with our BeSimple product tier as a direct replacement of his existing mortgage POS. Then, he spent the next 12 months unlocking every piece of BeSmartee automation possible to get to a 99% lights-out disclosure process and a sub $3,000 cost to close.

In down years, Steve broke even. In normal years, Steve made profit. And, in the boom years of 2020-21, Steve was able to make more profit than he could in 20 years combined! In April 2022, not needing to deal with yet another downmarket, Steve retired. Now, in his mid-forties, Steve spends his time traveling and supporting his three teenage sons’ education and sports ambitions.

I share this story because I want all of our clients to have the freedom that Steve has.

• Freedom from market variables beyond any one person’s control.

• Freedom from manual tasks that are better suited for automation.

• Freedom from an old mindset of choosing between direct-to-consumer and traditional-retail.

• Freedom to counter industry costs that now have risen for nine consecutive quarters, topping $11,000 per closed loan.

The second word that comes to mind is opportunity.

While 2022 was a brutal and bloody year, it was also a year of opportunity for many of our clients who looked beyond “business as usual.” 

This year we helped ~45% of our clients pursue new revenue opportunities in NonQM, Home Equity and Wholesale to help counter the rapid drop in their core revenue streams. Additionally, we also helped five clients with their acquisition of eight competitors by supporting the consolidation of more than 2,400 employees and 19 different disparate systems into one BeSmartee platform.

In addition to new products, channels and acquisitions, we also performed 22 distinct Phase 2+ implementations for current live clients looking to expand their BeSmartee feature sets, thereby enabling our clients to achieve additional operational efficiencies and changes in business models.

Now, as I look toward 2023, the same two words persist.

In mortgages, our clients can count on BeSmartee to continue doing the following:

First, we’ll stay focused on our core offerings.

We expect to engage with all of our clients to deeply understand your current state and future plans. We’ll look to leverage more than 165 integrations and more than 900 points of configuration to help you unlock more BeSmartee features that already exist today. For example, with credit reports expected to skyrocket by 200-400% in 2023, you may want to take advantage of our soft pulls, or credit card processing feature so that consumers may pay for their credit reports.

Second, we’ll stay focused on enhancing and adding to our feature sets that support the purchase market.

This includes new integrations with best-of-breed providers, along with new features we’ll build internally. For example, we are currently in development for our Flexible PreQual feature which will allow your borrowers and real estate agents to downgrade (and even upgrade) their pre-qualification letters.

Third, we’ll be the first to release a merged forward and reverse mortgage POS that will help your originators unlock reverse mortgage opportunities while originating forward mortgages, and vice versa. 

As borrowers (or loan officers) go through a Form 1003, the application workflow may prompt for Form 1009 questions, and run the application through both forward and reverse Product and Pricing Engines, thereby increasing your ability to serve more borrowers. And, if clients are new to reverse, we’ll even refer you to reverse lenders, or takeout partners.

In commercial business lending, you can count on BeSmartee for the following:

First, we are integrating our Flashspread product into more commercial lending LOS’s which will expand our reach to ~55% of all commercial lenders.

Second, we are moving beyond all types of tax returns and expanding into business financials and tax transcript reconciliations. These two new expansions will enable us to serve commercial lending by furthering our ability to automate tedious and error-prone manual processes into an automated lower cost process to support deeper business workflows. 

Lastly…

I want to thank every one of our clients for your continued support and trust in BeSmartee.

While 2023 will continue to be challenging, rest assured that you have partners at BeSmartee on this journey with you. It’ll be a good year because together we’ll make it so.

Let’s give our businesses freedom from the status quo and rethink the landscape in front of us. There is opportunity in the chaos. The time to act decisively with confidence is now.

Sincerely,

Tim Nguyen

CEO & Co-Founder