Customers Prefer Providers that Prioritize Integration

When scanning the enterprise mortgage technology space, it’s apparent that the companies who rise to the top are those who promote the integration of complementary services. With so much mortgage software available now, lending teams are hungry for platforms that value these integrations and provide open frameworks that allow other “best-of-breed” applications to create their own integrations – expanding their service capabilities and reach.

How does integration propel companies to success?

Does your platform integrate with my LOS? Does your platform integration with my CRM? How about Software X? These are very common questions that lenders and loan officers ask software providers when vetting a tech purchase. Potential customers want their systems to be seamless. They’ll prioritize the platforms that integrate with those they already have, use, and love. From a business perspective, it makes sense to embrace this demand. By leveraging partnerships, platforms please customers by allowing them to continue to benefit from their other platforms. However, integration can add key functionality from a recognizable brand and much more quickly than would normally be possible.

Why does a failure to integrate hold back other enterprises?

Where mortgage software companies go wrong is when they close their platform off or become overly selective in their partnerships. When companies try to build what others already specialize in, they run the risk of creating a feature or service that customers won’t use. This makes sense; these customers have already chosen a preferred platform for that functionality. This wastes valuable engineering time that could have been spent strengthening core functionality or developing new desirable integrations.

Software connectivity has truly come into focus in 2017 as the inconveniences of a lender software stack that doesn’t integrate threatens to negate the efficiencies created by implementing technologies and automations in the first place.

Who is doing it right?

A good example of an enterprise software company that wins with partnerships is the popular Salesforce CRM. Salesforce wisely built a platform that promotes the ability of other 3rd party developers to build functionality on top of the Salesforce base. Jungo, the mortgage CRM add-on, is a great example of this concept. You are able to add Jungo to Salesforce in order to customize the CRM for mortgage and real estate professionals. When you add Jungo to Salesforce, you get all of the core CRM benefits of Salesforce with mortgage-specific functionality. These benefits from Jungo include marketing templates, workflows, and referral partner tracking. Thanks to their focus on integration and openness to working with developers of other applications, Salesforce expects to bring in over $8 billion USD in revenue this year.

At Floify, we have fully embraced openness and integration. Our engineers continue to identify and build high-value integrations in-house, while our third-party integrations provide an open framework for 3rd party developers to create complementary applications that can be utilized within the Floify platform.