Case Study

A Clear Path to Success

Founded in 1987, Evergreen Home Loans™ (Evergreen) is a full-service direct home loan lender with 65 offices throughout the Western United States. With increasing industry appetite for digital closings, Evergreen saw an opportunity to differentiate their customer experience from other lenders.

However, making any change to the closing process was no simple matter. The vast majority of Evergreen’s business consists of purchases and working with over 1,000 settlement agents, who each have different processes and levels of technical sophistication.

After evaluating alternative solutions in the market, Evergreen chose to work with Snapdocs digital closing platform to tackle both the opportunity and the challenge at once.

Now, Evergreen offers their borrowers a modern experience with easy-to-use tools. This includes the ability to eSign non-critical documents prior to the closing appointment, which can shorten the in-person closing to as little as ten minutes. Even if borrowers prefer to wet sign, they’re still able to preview the whole package, giving them confidence in everything they’ll be signing and a positive experience overall.

“We want one flow, one process. Everybody’s always working in the same environment, whether it’s a hybrid or a full wet sign closing package.”

— Tamra Rieger, COO at Evergreen Home Loans

Snapdocs’ large network of settlement agents helped to ensure rapid adoption of a standardized process. For example, signed funding packages had previously been returned to Evergreen by email, fax, or overnight delivery; today, closers and funders receive an email as soon as they’re uploaded to Snapdocs. With this, Evergreen now has a single process for interacting with all of their settlement agents for all closings, whether they are wet, electronic, or hybrid (a combination process of both wet signatures and eSigning). This has provided Evergreen with greater efficiency internally by standardizing and streamlining how they work with their partners.

Best of all, digital closings do not require additional work. Snapdocs uses machine learning and computer vision to “understand” the loan package, automatically classifying pages and finding signature lines. As a result, documents are automatically split and annotated for eSignatures without any involvement from loan officers or settlement agents. This works with any doc prep provider.

Finally, thanks to light-touch integrations, Evergreen successfully rolled out a solution to all of their branches in under six months.