We’ve seen a lot of reporting and discussion this year about consolidation in both the mortgage and title industries. And with consolidation comes quite a bit of mergers & acquisitions (M&A) activity. It’s a hot topic, and a fun topic if you’re getting ready to jump into the market. Who hasn’t dreamed about the multiple one might win after spending years of hard work building up one’s brand?
What we hear about a lot less, however, is the hard work that comes after another agency (or agencies) is purchased or becomes part of a merger. Now, we have two (or three…or ten) functioning title businesses, likely each with its own way of doing anything from title searches to sales.
We’ve discussed at length here that title agents are finally realizing that the old ways will not be enough to stay profitable in the coming environment. We’ll have reduced order volume, increased service demands in a purchase market, a heavier push on compliance and enforcement, changing client and market expectations and, on top of all of that, a labor shortage. For an industry that has long suffered thin margins in the best of times, making a dollar will be a lot more difficult very soon.
Now, add those trends and shifts to the challenge of integrating existing title offices into the acquiring agency’s way of doing business. It’s not only time consuming, but expensive as well. Just bringing two different production systems together (and remember, just because the acquired office uses the same brand of system you’ve been using doesn’t mean it doesn’t have custom integrations or modifications that could make it as different as a different brand’s system!) can seem like moving mountains.
As we’ve said repeatedly, bots can take mundane, repetitive tasks away from employees (freeing them to do more productive and complex things) and perform them faster and more efficiently. Plus, bots can be customized for any number of tasks, and at a fraction of the investment it takes to implement enterprise or global systems that just so happen to have the function one is seeking to automate.
If you’ve been part of the aftermath of an M&A transaction, you know well that there are dozens (if not hundreds) of small, repetitive tasks that come with integrating multiple offices into the same operation.
Wouldn’t the use of bots in these situations make perfect sense?
