The Super Bowl of TPO Is About to Kickoff 

This Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday: the biggest day of the year for football and advertising. This year, the roster of advertisers will look a little different. Many household names—like Coke, Pepsi and even Budweiser – will be sitting on the sidelines. While two of the biggest names in mortgage—United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) and Rocket—will be running national commercials, rumored to cost $5 million for a 30 second spot. (Rocket is expected to be running two.) What this signals, in my opinion, is the kick-off of a bruising showdown to see which mega-lender will dominate the wholesale mortgage market.

And the venue—the Super Bowl – couldn’t be more appropriate. After all, this is where the tech-race in the mortgage industry started five years ago, when Quicken, now Rocket, took out Super Bowl ads telling America how fast and easy getting a mortgage could be. At the time, was that entirely true? Maybe not yet. But it did a couple of things. It raised the bar for the retail side of lending. It focused a great deal of attention and investment on technology like point-of-sale solutions and the need to enhance the consumer experience. Full disclosure: It also created opportunities for fintech companies like Cloudvirga.

So, basically, at this point, we’re seeing the same forces, and to a very real extent, the same catalyst shaping wholesale lending. After all, getting a mortgage is still relatively hard, but it’s even harder for first-time buyers, self-employed individuals, etc., which is why mortgage brokers still control more than 16% of the market share, and why that share will go up in the future as the mortgage market shifts from refi to purchase, as it is expected to later this year.  In fact, UWM is predicting that broker market share could eventually top 30%. Hence why the largest lenders in the country are now moving aggressively to build that share using technology. What we’re seeing is a replay of what happened in the retail, and if large wholesale lenders now want to compete, they’re going to need to start leveraging technology to even the playing field.

In 2020, we announced a new TPO platform that will give large wholesalers the ability to deliver the same kind of technology and functionality that Rocket TPO and UWM are offering. Simply put: It will keep them in the game.

Our new TPO platform transforms the way large TPO lenders will work with its brokers. It really provides two things: a branded point-of-sale solution to attract and engage prospects and consumers, and it gives the broker more control of the process and allows them to work collaboratively with their wholesale lender.

Much like a traditional point-of-sale, Cloudvirga’s TPO platform enables a broker to do a number of things: search for eligible products, quickly prepare product comparison reports and present them digitally to consumers and prospects, import FNMA 3.2 files and manage the 1003 Loan Application, , re-issue credit, leverage electronic verifications (assets, income, employment) and order appraisals, etc. In addition, prepare and deliver initial disclosures that the consumer can, of course, e-sign.

In addition, the consumer can prepare and upload a loan application in minutes, monitor their pipelines along with the broker, and, most importantly, see conditions in the status of the loan on a real-time basis, and share and clear them with consumers digitally. And last, but not least, manage and set the closing process. Basically, Cloudvirga’s TPO is everything brokers need to be competitive in today’s digital market.

Already seven national wholesalers, including finance of American Citizens Bank, the country’s largest depository in the wholesale space, are implementing our solution. And we have a pipeline of other lenders that we’ll be announcing in Q1. Let the games begin!