 We got touch base on the mortgage needs, you know, what are the users, who are the participants, who are the actors, who are the clients and how we manage to deliver user experience that could transform the business of these guys, you know, on this side, these guys. I categorically have taken these three pins, actually there are five clients who are using this application, but these three are working in, you know, different areas of mortgages. So, have you guys any time taken any loan, typically home loan? Yeah, mostly yes, right? So, we are typically called borrowers. And this, if you look at it as a typical, you know, journey map or, you know, I won't say journey map, but mind map, wherein we are talking about, you know, what is the mortgage industry in US? Who are the actors? What are the different, you know, segments of industry? And, you know, what are the load? Also, if you see the loan origination is the first part where people like you and me would, you know, go to bank to apply loan, then, you know, bank would process our loan, then it would fund and, you know, then it gets into servicing where we start paying the EMI's. But any idea, you know, how big is this mortgage industry in US is? It's actually $10 trillion industry, which is 10 folds more than a credit industry that, you know, you buy credit card, you buy other loans, it's 10 folds more in, you know, in US. But this loan origination where people like you and me are doing most of the work are being burdened with these many tasks, if you look at it, whereas banks will have streamlined process. Why? Because every time a borrower is new, buyer is new, there is a new property, there is a new valuation and everything happens differently. Everybody has a different income, everybody has a different, you know, appetite for, you know, the loan or property choices are different. Now, when you look at the journey, you know, from here, typically what happens is you start thinking about buying a property that, you know, somebody else is buying property, my friend is buying my parents have asked me to buy property. So let me, you know, start thinking if I can really buy a house, yeah, you can buy, then, you know, yes, I want to buy property, then you move to the next step is, you know, I need loan, it seems because property prices are high and I don't have enough funds. So let's apply for loan. Then you apply, then it gets into the status, you know, that, you know, I applied 10 days back, is bank really processing it? Do they need any documents from me? Are you guys doing it well? Is there anything that I need to do? These kind of things would come here. Then your loan is finally approved. You move into a new house, you plan renovations, and then, you know, that's by and large the end of the journey. Now, most of the banks would actually focus in this area from let's apply to loan approval and the status part. They won't go above and beyond this, they won't do any augmentation of services. By augmentation, what I mean is, you know, when you provide a service to an extent, but you increase your touch point, increase and reach your touch points to an extent where, you know, you involve more actors into it. For example, when you are thinking about buying a loan, can bank do something here? Or when you are thinking this, yes, I want to buy a loan, I want to buy property, can bank help you here? Or in your new renovations, in your new house, can buy do something here? So when let's say, our guy Steve, you know, he is thinking to buy a loan, what he would do typically? I'll just tell you high level, what is the composition of, you know, this deck is, these are the problems that he would face. These problems, these are the activities that he would do. These are the people that he would interact with. And these are the channels. So when you think that, yes, I want to buy home, I want to buy property, you would typically interact with your colleagues, with your family, with a broker and with your friends, maybe over the phone, over the chat, over in person meetings. Then you see, yeah, then, you know, what's my affordability? You know, I can probably, you know, go to some sites, think of some financing, and think of some, you know, check my paystubs is how much I can really afford, how much I do really have in the banks. And then you figure out the affordable locations in consultation with the broker. But while doing so, right, so when you talk to family, you get the information, but is it really appropriate? What is the real reliability of that information? When you talk to broker, you always have a fear of being misguided. And when you go to the sites, there's a lot of cognitive load, because there are a lot of information that is not personalized to your needs. Similarly, when you decide now, I want to buy a property, you would shortlist a property with a bunch of actors, you would, you know, do back and forth, you will make site visits, you will do a lot of legal activities there, and so on and so forth. So we are, by and large, I'm trying to, you know, get you into a context of a buyer. And I'm sure you must most of you have gone through it. So where we typically have problem is, you know, am I really doing it right? Am I really, you know, is this the right process? Is the guy guiding me properly? Because if you notice, and if you look at it in this perspective that any mortgage or any home loan is the longest financial commitment that you would make in your life. Apart from people who are investors, they would buy multiple properties, but people like, you know, generalized people, they would buy, you know, one or two properties, one for the second home and one is like, you know, are like primary living home. So that is something, you know, ban law is the case in the US mortgage industry also. So here, when you're doing the first time and probably the last time in life, you need a lot of hand holding. That doesn't happen. That doesn't happen. Neither here, when you go to bank and tell them that, you know, I want to apply for loan. How would you do? So you go to a loan officer, which in India we typically call an agent, right? He'll tell you that, okay, bank needs these documents. For him, it's a monotonous process. For him, he would, you know, handles many such clients every day. But for you, it is new. So you would ask 10 questions and he might get irritated with that. Then he would give you some loan application form in typical US, you know, industry, this loan form is standardized, unlike India. But it is very lengthy. It is around 300 field form. And it'll ask you for assets. It'll ask you for liabilities. It'll ask you for your income, your expenses, everything. And that has to be documented and correct to the last digit. So once you go to bank, once you specify your need, apply for the loan. And then, you know, you move on to check the status. Currently, banks don't disclose the status on their own unless you call them up. And you don't have number of a bank. You have what you have is only a number of this guy, this agent. So you would call up this guy or meet him personally or send an SMS to him. This guy would connect with the bank, underwriters, you would check the status, he would give it to you back. This is too much of a lengthy process. You take the status, then your loan is approved. You need renovations, you again, go to site, go to different places, go to talk to your friends, get the fixes done, and then you move to the property. So this is a typical journey. Now, we designed a product that could transform this business. This is something that we saw when Steve is actually looking at this, what he is doing is job. There are numerous touchpoints and there are numerous, you know, back and forth transitions with different actors to whom you had interacted previously, you would interact with someone, you would give you some input. But a simplest way to put this thing together is to come up with a system. You know, when Steve can interact with the system, the other actors can interact with the system and everything is available on the system itself. So he doesn't have to go back and take, you know, the other channels likes of telephone calls, which are not documented or which are not recorded. So this is something that we did. This was typically simple to achieve and to conceptualize. And what we got out of that is this of a business input, business impact. What we are talking about is 50% reduction that we could found in our clients cycle time. What we mean cycle time is when you go to the bank, when you apply for loan, they would give you some documents, you send them some documents, then you go back, this is cycle, right? So if they could reduce 50% time in that and mind you, the loan origination cost only is $9,000 on an average when you borrow $300,000 of mortgage property. So $8,000 for every customer that bank is spending and you end up reducing the time on that. Then the loan officer, the agent became 40% more productive by not doing mundane tasks. By that is, you know, not giving you status updates every day, right? Not being in touch with you all the time over the phone, but because you can do it on the system on your own. And then the pull through rate, that is where, you know, the onboarding rate comes in, where, you know, your service augmentation comes in, you get more involved, you have more touch points into the system. That is where you, you know, we saw 25% of improvement. Now, these numbers with previous slides sounds really interesting and some sounds really simple, but that was really not simple thing. We took a lot of process, we took a lot of steps, we took a lot of, you know, back and forth transitions, we did something, we tested with the people and then we realized, oh, this is not working. So let's come up with some different approach. So the approach final that you see is, you know, by and large, pretty similar that you would, you do anyways in any other, you know, a project of yours. You first find the scope, then you do the secondary analysis, then you do conceptualization, then you do design, do some usability analysis and finally release the product. Typical, you know, MVP structure, but activities that we did were slightly different here. We didn't do routine things in most of the stuff, wherever it is routine, I'll just skip this thing. So secondary research, no great deal, you will find a lot of authentic material on web, you will find a lot of, you know, SMAs around, you will find a lot of literature in terms of research papers and everything around. We did that. We did that completely. But we did competitor analysis also here. By that, what did we do is we took 13 usability parameters. So by the way, this is, you know, a TCS kind of copyrighted Excel wherein we kind of or a model statistical model, where we do statistical analysis on the competitors to figure out how much usable is a particular application is. So we have around 13 parameters, starts from ease of use, speed of use, learnability, consistency, content, accessibility, etc. On these 13 parameters, we evaluated six major lending banks. So if you can see BB&T, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Quicken Loans and City, we evaluate it. What we got or what we understood is none of them actually fits into all these criteria. Because and you as a borrower, you don't want somebody or some application which is good in two areas. You know, it is easy to use, but it is really efficient. It is really not efficient. It is really time consuming that you do not suddenly want. So none of them would impact this. In fact, Chase proved to be the most, you know, least, least usable, you know, kind of application. Then we did touch point analysis. If you remember the previous diagram, the previous mind map, there were at least 50 touch points that we could figure out from the mind map, which we then put it in this format. And we try to analyze them further. There are six actors in this. So your loan officer is there, your borrower is there, your, you know, underwriter, processor, and a lot of people are involved into this. And they keep communicating over the phone, SMS, WhatsApp, email and every possible channel. Now, interesting thing, I'll just take a couple of minutes to explain this Excel because this is something different. So how did we do actually or go about the touch point analysis? This is not readable actually, but you know, I'll just read out. So the first column is I want to. So what I want to do? Second is frequency. How frequently I would do that on the system? Third is the drivers, you know, what would make me do that? Fourth is what is the context of information? And then the patterns and some notes, which is loosely, you know, kind of arranged. What I want to, let's say I want to make a payment. Why do you want to make payment? One, because you got a notification from the bank or you realized, oh, today it's night, I need to make payment of my homeworld. Or, you know, you just realize that, you know, my payment is past you. I should have paid that. Or, you know, it's a good day. It's an auspicious day. I just want to pay my mortgage on this day. So these are the drivers. So once you take the task or intent, what you want to do, you find the driver, you find the frequency, you know, how many times you will do that mortgage payments are typically, you know, automated, you give your consent to the bank and they deduct it, but not in US. They at times do not give that consent. They want to make that payment, you know, every month because that payment, you know, there could be a lot of needy gritties in multiple user set. Now, in this context of information, what are things that you would need while making payment? You need due date, you need frequency, you need, you know, you know, what is your due date? What is your payment amount? What is the, you know, status? Can I make additional payment? Can I make, you know, future payment also? Such things can come here. And this by and large is pretty loose kind of a Excel, I would say, or a format or model. But this did help, you know, us to come up with the right touch points, right channels and provide the right interface. Then we looked at the demographic data, you know, what is the typical age of a first time buyer in US? So it's basically 32 years, you know, the first time by the first time when you decide to buy home. And the same is reflecting in the in these statistics. This statistics is from one of our customers who, you know, have this demographic of their users or their current customers who are being in services sector. So if you see the largest part or the largest area is, you know, here, where you are typically in the range of 32 years, not no need to talk about the persona specifically, because, you know, we all know what persona is, but we a novel and a different thing in our persona is that our persona had not only goals, but it also had emotions. Persona feels happy when the payment is paid. Persona, you know, the suggestion is happy when you know, he doesn't have to care about the status of his loan. He doesn't have to care about the documents that he needs to, you know, give the bank when because the application can give you. We set thereafter creating the persona, we set the experience goals. What are the experience goals is like, you know, if we want to design the application, what is it that that application should serve to the user? So it should have smoother onboarding so that, you know, your new buyers, your new, you know, potential customers of your bank should not have what you say any hassle while onboarding. You don't ask a lot of documents. You don't ask the documents which you already have or you can figure out from different sources. You can just eliminate that. Then you need the retention because typically people would go for refinancing, that is, they would transfer the loan. So you need to retain through a good service augmentation. You need to support your first time buyers, you know, maybe through learning material, maybe through contextual help, maybe through intelligent messages and good notifications. It has to be, of course, easy and efficient. Technology should take up the human, you know, aspects. If there is some mundane activity, then maybe technology can aid that, maybe technology can use that and a consistent quality. What happens is typically, you know, when you are interacting with the bank or loan offices, you would, you know, often you will feel that, you know, or you will get an experience that, you know, I'm not getting a good feel of this customer. So let me not, you know, let me not, or let me neglect this guy to an extent or, you know, I'm not getting the, you know, satisfactory, you know, response from the customers or from the banks. So that a system would certainly not do. It will have a consistent quality to deliver. So with these experience goals, so what we saw so far is we identified the problems, we identified the, you know, user groups, and then we set the experience goal thereafter. Then we got into the, you know, system design style. So we did a lot of, you know, card sorting activities. And the different thing that we did here in card sorting activity is, you know, if you notice this is a wall, a glass, you know, that was there lying in the passage of one of our, you know, offices. And we asked people to kind of the target audience, you know, what we had is to come in the morning, look at this activity, look at these cards and reshuffle this based on their expectations, their needs and their, you know, kind of likes and dislikes. And then we told them that once you do it, it is not done, you know, you can always go back, you can always think, you can think through and you can come back to this wall again and reshuffle. So we did this activity for two days. People used to come in the morning, they used to take coffee breaks here, they used to look at these maps and they used to change these sheets and, you know, these post-its. And we used to take, you know, pictures of the photographs or after every 30 minutes so that, you know, we could record what is happening, what is changing and what is, you know, resulting into a good system. So this resulted into a, you know, high level information architecture that we could, you know, design for a system. While we do that, we cannot, you know, again go back in the system and neglect the users that, you know, previously what other systems we often realize that. Now let us look at the first time borrower as a persona. He would always be concerned about, am I doing it right? He would like to know what is my contribution to the bank and what is my, what is bank share in the property or the loan that I am buying. Then what is my monthly payment? Can I make it a low payment? What is going to be my tenure? Then he would also be interested in knowing, you know, how should I actually approach this? Is my approach really right? Am I, is my property really legal? Are my all documents really clear on this property or will I get into any litigation after once I move into this property? So all these questions, we framed it for one persona and then we designed a page or, you know, started designing the system or the navigation or the screens for one particular user. So if you look at this, so these is a subtle guidance to the users, to the steps that he is actually carrying out. For smoother onboarding, we don't want, you know, we did not want to go for, I think I just, I'll have to, you know, run you through. But then, you know, this is basically the mortgage rates, you know, that you can choose from, it gives you 30 years fixed, what's the product? What is the good for you? You also have financial calculators here that you can go back and check. This guy is your, you know, loan officer whom you can connect with, you get the messages within the system. So that was the part. Then we moved to the other users, the loan officers, this guy, if you see this guy, the loan officer, his objectives to look at the system are different. What he is looking at is what is my loan pipeline? How many are my customers in what stage? How many have actually applied for the loan? How many documents, you know, am I supposed to receive? How many are defaulters that he needs to know? Then whether my applications are being processed properly by the bank or not, that is another thing that he would want to know. What is my priority for the day? You know, how my day looks like? What is, you know, you know, how should I stay in touch with my, you know, users? How should I go about it? Can system really help me? And I don't want to miss my SLS because my increment, my salary and my incentives based on the SLS. With these in mind, you'll find it really overwhelming. Initially, we also thought of that. But then when we interacted with a lot of loan officers, they felt, you know, I'm getting everything that, you know, I need on this one single page. If you see, this is the loan pipeline. This is the applications that are being submitted. These are the SLA marks. And this is the day. And these are 100 messages that this guy is supposed to respond to. Then I'll just quickly skip this. Another thing wherein we, you know, in the, this is the loan application form around 300 fields, we tried to put it on mobile phone and it worked really fantastic. We gave hidden accelerators wherein we took, you know, a couple of forms which we could read using OCR techniques and then it can give you a head start of, let's say you upload your W2 is like form 16 in US. It give you head start of 40% in the form. If you upload the tax return form, it'll give you head start of 30%. And this was one of the trials. This was, you know, another one for the tablet. But then this was another one wherein we kind of played a jigsaw puzzle as you start completing one of the, one of the other, you know, segments of your application, you know, the, your home will start unveiling from this. So that's what the objective of, you know, kind of keeping it interesting. So that, that this is something that really appealed to a lot of people that we saw. And then the service augmentation part that I was talking about, you know, is, you know, helping you while you're browsing the property, this guy is actually looking at this property. It'll help you what is the banks, the best rate that bank can give you and at what percent and am I really eligible for that loan? So then what did we do? How did we analyze this? We conducted seven cognitive workflows. We conducted seven semi-structured usability tests and more importantly and differently what we did is we had around 10 plus business viability check. Basically, you know, you give presentations to your business guys, you give presentations to your, you know, SMEs from working in the different banks and in this particular sector. And from then there, we could learn, you know, what the users are facing difficulty. In quickly in one minute, I'll just want to cover. So this is what is done now. Okay. So this has been running in, you know, in US markets with five customers getting a lot of attention. But what's the future? Now, we can't only give mobile application or tablet application and stay back. What we can do perhaps with artificial intelligence or maybe with augmented reality or with connected world is if I'm looking at a property, if I point out my finger or point out my camera or my phone, can system tell me that this property is actually approved by Bank of America and I know your income and I know all your documents that you already have in the system. So, you know, you are actually eligible for this loan and this could be your interest rate. And then you say that, you know, okay, let's apply and you apply. Or you look at one property, you point out the finger, the point of the camera, the other property, you can compare the properties, you can see the best fit, you can also see whether the property has clear tax or not. All these things we can perhaps do with, you know, additional this thing, you know, advent of technologies. Moreover, what you can also do is reduce the burden of loan officer. When I'm talking to loan officer over the phone, can system, you know, recognize and can system learn about my conversation if I'm talking about certain documents, can system intelligently suggest the loan officer that, you know, you are you should ask for these documents to this guy. So on this note, I think I'm overrunning during the time. So thank you for attending this. And thank you for being part of this.