How Gold Star Drove eNote Adoption with Snapdocs eClose and eVault

About Gold Star

Founded in 2000, Gold Star is committed to industry-leading technology to deliver an innovative, five-star experience to borrowers. “We always say we’re a tech company that does mortgages,” said Dave Williams, CIO/CISO. “We want to be first to market, reduce manual paperwork, eliminate shipping costs, and really just focus on the value we deliver.”

With the mortgage industry continually transitioning to digital processes, it is ever more apparent that lenders need to scale eNote transactions* to remain competitive. For lenders, the key to driving this shift is identifying the eVault partner that will actually deliver on the value promised including operational savings and improvements to the customer experience. Gold Star Mortgage Financial Group began its eNote journey with this in mind, and turned to Snapdocs to drive transformative change in the business’s digital closing strategy.

How Gold Star transitioned to eNotes

Snapdocs and Gold Star conducted research in partnership with Stratmor and discovered that the closing process has the most impact on the borrower’s experience with a lender. “Borrowers don’t remember a lot about the experience, but if you don’t have a good closing experience, that’s the last thing they remember and it will impact your referrals,” Williams said.

In line with the organization’s tech-first values and research findings, Gold Star wanted to evolve its borrower experience. The company was already completing hybrid closings; it was time to take it to the next level with eNotes.

“We wanted one partner that offered an eClose solution that supports eNotes and an eVault,” explained Williams. “Plus, Snapdocs being tech agnostic with strong integrations was key because it doesn’t just set us up for now, it sets us up for success for many years in the future.“

Snapdocs worked with Gold Star to implement a process to scale from a first live hybrid closing to a first eNote stored in the eVault, to many. 

The process looked like this:

• In-depth kickoff customized to Gold Star’s goals and needs
• Testing and training
• 25-30% immediate hybrid closing adoption at launch
• eNote implementation
• First eNote completed—next day after rollout and with no errors
• Accelerated hybrids to deliver documents to the settlement agent within 2-3 minutes
• Further rollout and support to eNote
• Continued rollout and support to achieve 90% hybrid and eNote adoption by end of 2023

Williams said one reason for the successful and quick transition was Snapdocs’ white glove support and easy integration into existing systems. “Having the integration with Snapdocs to integrate with our proprietary software was a game changer,” he said. “Same with having white glove service so we could deliver a seamless experience from start to finish.”

“It’s not just support for the loan officer but for the settlement team as well. Snapdocs is there to help everyone in the process, always available, issues are solved in minutes, and it’s just an amazing experience,” he added.

 

Results

eNotes reduce dwell time and lost or damaged promissory notes, save lenders money on each loan signed digitally, and provide a more efficient process for lenders and borrowers alike.

After starting its journey with Snapdocs’ Digital Closing Platform and eVault, Gold Star also saw an increase in loan referrals due to an enhanced customer experience.

“[Our] loan officers started getting more referrals because now we were offering a differentiated experience for borrowers by offering this digital process and seeing 9 and 10 NPS scores increase,” shared Williams.

Gold Star realized the benefits of eNote and eVault fairly quickly, completing its first eNote within a few months of implementation. From there, the business scaled to 70% hybrid adoption, 23% of which include eNotes, and expects that number to grow to 90% by the end of 2023.

Advice for Lenders

One of the major pieces of Gold Star’s success with eNotes is creating internal champions for the new technology. Change can be difficult, but it’s less intimidating when you hear about real successes from people you know and trust.

“We started [the rollout] with a controlled group in our main office and our top performers,” said Williams. “Getting your top performers to champion your product is all you need to make eNote adoption successful to sell their winning stories.”

*eNote transactions are defined as mortgage closings in which the promissory note is digitized.