Mortgage Organizations are Seeking Tech Solutions

The Mortgage Banking Association had a large conference in Denver in late October (if you were there, we were the people with the Voodoo donuts!). Following the conference, MBA sent out some interesting insights about top industry concerns. According to attendee feedback, tech solutions are on everyone’s minds. Here’s a snippet of the email MBA shared:

We asked attendees at MBA’s Annual Convention & Expo what is The ONE Thing our industry needs to succeed? As attendees voted, the dots on the board grew.

In the end, Technology Solutions was the winner.

While cloud based solutions used to make organizations concerned about security, highly secure industries are beginning to recognize that they can get cloud solutions that offer a range of benefits and even increase data security. This realization – and the now-obvious fact that technology can give organizations a competitive edge – is driving the mortgage industry to look into new innovations.

Virtual desktops, one rising tech solution being adopted by more mortgage organizations, are designed specifically to help high security, high productivity-demand organizations succeed. The benefits that the mortgage industry specifically gets from the desktop as a service (DaaS) flavor of virtual desktops include:

• A robust tech solution without increasing IT staff
• State of the art security measures that are maintained for you
• Fast desktop provisioning to easily meet scaling demands (i.e. seasonal bursts, new branch offices or servicing centers, etc.)
• Built-in environment compliance (if required or desired)

Couple those technical benefits with the fact that virtual desktops are ideal for contractors, remote employees and organizations that don’t want to issue or maintain physical endpoints, and it’s easy to see how this particular technology solution fits in well with the needs of mortgage organizations.

Dizzion, a virtual desktop and end user computing solutions provider, works with several organizations within the mortgage and broader financial services industries. Here’s how one Dizzion client in the mortgage banking industry is using tech solutions to enable productivity and gain a competitive edge.

Mortgage Industry Case Study

A leading national mortgage due diligence and consulting service provider needed an easy-to-deploy, high performing way to give all employees (in offices and remote) fast, secure, reliable access to large files containing sensitive data. It also needed a highly scalable solution as work load fluctuations resulted in varying use of contractors.

The organization had already identified virtual desktops as a good solution for its needs and had a solution in place. However, they were not satisfied with the existing solution due to latency issues that caused it to not adequately meet expectations. Additionally, the organization was not receiving adequate support from the desktop service provider, causing additional frustration.

Prior to adopting virtual desktops and during its time with the previous VDI provider, the organization provisioned laptops in house and shipped them to remote workers (largely due to security and control concerns). This represented a large burden on the in-house IT team and caused concern that contractors could be using these company-provided devices to perform work for competitors.

How Dizzion Provided a Better Solution

When exploring new options, the organization identified five potential paths:

• Continue with the existing VDI solution
• Build a VDI solution in house
• Move to a VPN solution
• Supporting company-provisioned laptops for all users (effectively abandoning desktop virtualization altogether)
• Adopt Dizzion

Dizzion was able to directly address the organization’s existing latency issues by utilizing a Dizzion virtual desktop POD housed in the organization’s existing data center. This was particularly key to adequately support the large files typically handled by mortgage due diligence organizations.

Dizzion was also appealing because of the ability to provide secure endpoint solutions and PCI compliant desktop environments. (The organization opted for a compliant virtual desktop solution to put their clients at ease regarding data security and to help the organization more easily meet different industry-specific compliance standards.)

The Results from Engaging Dizzion

Because the organization bills based on the number of documents reviewed, the latency issues it was experiencing had a direct impact on productivity and revenue. Dizzion was able to address this issue and allow users (located around the country) to download large files in seconds rather than the 10-15 minutes per file it had previously taken.

Dizzion’s zLink+ endpoint solution provided an additional benefit as the organization no longer had to ship provisioned laptops to contractors. Even with previous VDI solutions, the organization was still shipping hardware to users because of security concerns. With zLink+, contractors have secure access to their virtual desktop without a company computer but the organization does not have to adopt a BYOD approach (which would raise additional security concerns). Using zLink+ devices also stops contractors from using this organization’s hardware to perform work for competitors as desktop access is revoked when the contract ends until the contractor is re-engaged.

This mortgage due diligence organization is now confident that end users in-house and remote can quickly and securely access large documents from anywhere and the company is no longer in the laptop provisioning businesses, allowing it to increase employee productivity and revenue across the board.

You may also like:

• 5 Considerations for Supporting BYOD
• DaaS: Where Technology Meets Business Strategy
• Security Past the VPN