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. . . An innovative new service from Quicken Loans reinforces Detroit's image as a kind of Cape Canaveral for tech launches, a place where digital developers open new frontiers.
While residential lending isn't rocket science, Dan Gilbert's company brands its latest service -- Rocket Mortgage -- with that image to suggest speed and power.
Rather than pioneering space travel the way NASA scientists and engineers did did last century, Quicken Labs computer scientists and product engineers developed a warp-speed online loan process that it calls "a monumental leap forward" in an announcement Tuesday. No asset and income documents have to be submitted. No office meeting is needed.
Quicken's release reaches for the stars, lifting off with this first sentence:
In the eight minutes it takes a space shuttle to reach orbit, Americans will now be able to receive a full mortgage approval online with Rocket Mortgage.
Corporate communicators at the Quicken Qube on Woodward aren't the only ones using lofty language. "This could be the mortgage industry's iPhone moment" says the headline on a detailed description by Matt Burns, a senior editor at TechCrunch, an AOL-owned blog network in San Francisco. He adds:
Quicken Loans is putting a $100 million ad campaign behind Rocket Mortgage. This is a major product from the company. It was built by an engineering team of 450 and over 1,000 people have touched it throughout its development. Parts have been tested by clients for the past year. . . .
Quicken Loans sees Rocket Mortgage as the turning point in home financing. . . . Like TurboTax, the service repackages complicated applications into a simple online form.
But it’s important to note Rocket Mortgage is more than just an online application. The service also verifies information, then provides a conditional approval as valid as something a loan officer would issue. . . .
A person can be approved for a mortgage without waiting around for hours or days for a loan officer to get back to them with a stack of paperwork that has to be turned in.
In the company's release, chief information officer Linglong He says: "This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in financial technology history, born and built in downtown Detroit."
Burns, the California blogger, was a Quicken mortgage banker in 2007-08. His coverage has comments from founder Dan Gilbert, president Jay Farner and product lead Regis Hadiaris.
The zippy online application complies with regulations in all states and counties, Burns marvels.
This could be Rocket Mortgage’s secret sauce, really, and why Quicken Loans thinks competitors will be unable to match the product’s offering for a long time.. . .
“There’s so much to this," Gilbert said. "I’m sure competitors will react, but by that time, we’ll have the brand. It’s not just one of those things that you can match.”
Still, the former Quicken employee isn't entirely positive, noting at TechCrunch:
The product design is underwhelming. Rocket Mortgage offers significant advantages over competitors’ products, yet it looks and acts in a similar fashion to standard mortgage applications. . . .
The flipside of using Rocket Mortgage is that a person might lose out on a smarter option. Through Rocket Mortgage, a person can lock in a new interest rate and mortgage term in minutes. Most often, there are several different mortgage programs a person qualifies for, but sometimes, one makes more sense than another. . . .
Is this the mortgage world’s iPhone moment like Dan Gilbert says? That remains to be seen, until the rest of the banking industry decides to clone the product.
