The mortgage industry isn’t waiting around for a comeback. It’s already pivoted. If your technology stack hasn’t kept up, you’re not just behind the curve. You’re losing deals, draining resources and missing out on the fastest-growing segments of lending.

Today’s borrowers expect precision, speed and a digital-first experience. Meanwhile, lenders are navigating compressed margins, rising competition and shifting product demand. Those who adapt quickly will win. Those who don’t? They’ll get left behind by faster, leaner competitors with more flexible systems.

Lending has changed. Has your tech?

The golden age of refinance is over. Purchase loans are harder to come by. And homeowners are staying put, opting to access their home equity instead of refinancing out of low interest rates. That’s why demand for home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and home equity loans is soaring.

In Q4 2024 alone, U.S. HELOC balances increased by $9 billion, marking 11 straight quarters of growth. These aren’t one-off surges. They’re clear signals that borrowers are changing course, and lenders must follow.

Yet many lending institutions are still anchored to outdated software that can’t accommodate these shifts, and that’s dangerous to the bottom line.

The cost of stagnation

A lender’s ability to evolve shouldn’t be blocked by their own systems. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

Consider this: You want to roll out a new loan product tailored to a growing regional market. Maybe it’s HELOCs, construction loans, or financing for manufactured homes. But instead of spinning it up in days, you're mired in approval cycles, vendor tickets and professional services contracts just to update a workflow.

By the time your platform is updated, your window of opportunity has slammed shut.

This isn’t just slow—it's a strategic failure. And for many lenders, it’s the direct result of being tied to inflexible platforms that nickel-and-dime for every update or configuration change.

When your vendor is the bottleneck

Some tech providers have quietly built business models around inertia. Need to adjust a form? That’s a fee. Want to add routing logic by loan type or state? Another charge. You end up paying more to move slower, stuck in a loop of dependencies and delays.

In this environment, agility becomes a myth. But the market won’t slow down to accommodate legacy systems, and borrowers won’t either.

If your tech vendor isn’t enabling speed and scale, it’s time to ask the tricky question: Are they solving or creating problems?

The POS is where modern lending starts

One part of your tech stack sets the tone for every borrower interaction: The point-of-sale (POS). It’s not just a front-end interface—it’s your competitive edge.

An outdated POS becomes a choke point. It forces borrowers into generic workflows, ignores nuanced product requirements, and offers little to no configurability without costly vendor involvement.

That’s why leading lenders choose platforms like Floify, which was purpose-built to support agility. Floify’s POS offers built-in flexibility, empowering lenders to:

• Configure loan workflows by product type, branch or geography
• Launch and test new products without writing code or paying for professional services
• Adapt to regulatory changes and market shifts without waiting on support tickets

With Floify and its new Dynamic Apps, a no-code feature that lets lenders tailor loan applications based on loan type, your team can move as fast as the market demands with no developers and no delays.

Customization without complication

Let’s talk real-world. Say you want to introduce a construction loan offering in one state and a HELOC in another. With a rigid system, you’ll likely face a national rollout requirement or force both products through a catch-all process that serves neither borrower well.

That’s not scale. That’s sabotage.

Today’s market demands precision. You need a POS that supports loan officers in tailoring the experience to local markets and unique borrower profiles. Whether it’s by ZIP code, branch or loan officer, customization must be granular and fast, without trade-offs.

More products, same broken processes?

Offering new loan types is only half the battle. If your back office can’t process them efficiently, you’re creating friction, not growth.

Every time processors or underwriters have to work around your tech stack to close a loan manually, you’re introducing errors, wasting time and inflating your cost to close. That’s a slow leak on your P&L that will only get worse as volume returns.

Automation, configurability and streamlined workflows aren’t perks. They’re the new baseline for operational survival.

The lenders that will stay ahead in 2025 and beyond are the ones who can launch new offerings fast, localize their approach, and do it all without breaking their workflows or the bank.