Adapted from Square-9.com.

Case Study | Mortgage Lender | Global Search | Square9

Meet McCue Mortgage

McCue Mortgage is a Connecticut-based, customer-focused mortgage lender and servicer founded in 1949. The company primarily focuses on servicing loans which includes: administering the collection of payments, remitting insurance premiums, and forwarding taxes to municipalities. The company has raised the standards of excellence for mortgage services in Connecticut, providing superior customer service and education. During the 2007-2008 housing crisis, then McCue Mortgage president William J McCue was appointed to a state committee to make policy recommendations for the state, and in 2009, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell proclaimed November 29 to be “McCue Mortgage Day.”

Challenge

With such a long and successful history in the mortgage lending and servicing industry, McCue Mortgage accumulated a collection of paper documents. The company’s Vice President, Melanie McCue, explained that the documentation for a mortgage loan file can quickly exceed 200 pages. These files have a mandatory retention period of the life of the loan plus an additional 7 years. With 5,000 loans in the office, many loan files had to be stored off-site, causing delays when a file was retrieved.

Retention mandates were only part of the concern, though. As such a community and service-driven company, Melanie McCue couldn’t help but wonder about the effect all this paper was having on the environment. “In terms of carbon footprint, the amount of paper we were generating, plus the carbon emissions to send it offsite, and then bringing it back and forth, was very wasteful. We’re a family company, and climate change is an important issue to each family member.”

Solution

McCue Mortgage began looking for a solution through Charles IT in Middletown, Connecticut. Charles IT then referred McCue to The ACT Group in Cromwell, Connecticut, which connected them with Square 9. McCue Mortgage was impressed with Square 9’s  demonstration of the software and was happy to work with another Connecticut-based company. After a demonstration and quote, McCue Mortgage felt strongly that Square 9’s solutions fit their needs and decided to begin the implementation process.

Benefit

According to Melanie McCue, the company’s staff adopted the solution relatively quickly and appreciated the software’s ease of use and the indexing process for documents. Not only did indexing help them find documents through search filters, but it also instantly provided key information, reducing the need to comb through lengthy portfolios. “People were excited. They thought it was cool,” said Melanie McCue of the initial employee reaction to the solution. “They liked how fast you could find information without searching through a file cabinet for a file.”

This ease and speed at which employees can now find their documents seem to be the benefit that resonates most with the company. When referring to the way McCue Mortgage used to pull information from offsite storage, Melanie McCue said, “It wastes time; it takes time; and you don’t even know at the end of the day if you are going to get what you were hoping was there, so I am thrilled that we are now able to ascertain within minutes if we have the paperwork that’s needed.” McCue Mortgage was also able to eliminate their reliance on paper, something much of the staff is very happy about. “We’re not the paper waster we were,” said Melanie McCue. “Thinking about the trees and whatnot we were wasting… just kills me.”

Results

McCue Mortgage had not only set plans to go completely paperless, but they were also able to reduce their office space by 75% due to the saved storage space. By using barcodes on each document in a loan package, McCue Mortgage is now able to scan documents into the system and automatically label them with the document description field. This ensures that the company will be able to identify the information they need quickly when a request is received from a customer or from an auditor.

The company already has plans to implement additional functionality into their Square 9 solution, including the ability to email documents directly into GlobalSearch. Melanie McCue mentions to anyone considering GlobalSearch and GlobalCapture that “training is important and that having at least one person sit through the full training makes a world of difference.” When asked if she recommends Square 9, she said, “I would definitely recommend Square 9.” “I do think the product is something that’s really changing our culture,” said Melanie.