Creating an Online Mortgage Service: Tips and Insights

Having started its rise in the 2010s, fintech has changed the image of traditional financial services. With online banking, online investing, and online payments already existing, it has been only a matter of time for mortgage and loans to become digital products. They are becoming much more convenient than their traditional versions, more oriented at customers, and less time-consuming. And all these benefits are completed with the fact that millennials, one of the forces that powered the rise of fintech, are ready to become the target clients of the housing market. As the demand for mortgages is growing and the market orients at the digital users, online mortgage services aim to meet the needs of the present and replace traditional loan services.

Here, the essentials of building an online mortgage service are revealed: the pitfalls, recommendations, and best practices.

Why online mortgages thrive

My colleague once wrote that fintech appeared as a result of the never-ending struggle between the everyday need for financial activities and the difficulty with which we carry them out. We can conclude that one of the many factors that promoted fintech was the human unwillingness to deal with inconvenient and highly bureaucratic traditional financial institutions.

In terms of mortgage automation software, a whole generation of people referred to as millennials has influenced the worldwide escalation of digital loan services. This is happening partly because millennials born between 1980 and 1999 are now mature enough to be the customers of such services, and partly because millennials comprise most of the purchasing population. As a result, businesses are shifting their strategies to satisfy the shopping habits of millennials by offering things like instant purchase, lower prices, and understandable products.

Online mortgage platforms are (1) more understandable than traditional bricks-and-mortar mortgage services (brokers, banks, etc.), (2) likely to move faster than a bank, and (3) probably cheaper.
According to JD Power & Associates, online loan services are experiencing a 30% higher loan growth rate compared to traditional institutions. The possibility of giving out 30% more loans should be sufficient motivation for companies to reevaluate their approaches and turn to a more customer-centric way of running their business.

But this does not mean that starting an online mortgage service will instantly make you rich. There are many things to consider before and while creating such a service. In this article, I will share the experience my team and I had at Django Stars as we developed an online mortgage service for a client.

I will start with what your development teamshould know beforehand and what to focus on when designing a user flow. Then I will discuss integrations with third-party services, and in the last part I will tell you about the peculiarities of UI/UX in fintech products.