At a recent employee offsite I asked how many people have originated a loan, closed a loan, or sat across from a borrower…and a lot of hands went up. It turns out that a large percentage of our Sales, Account Management and Product teams have lived a day as a loan officer. They know what it feels like when a borrower goes quiet halfway through an application, when a document lands in the wrong place, when a disclosure disappears after signing and nobody can find it. That experience is the reason our point of sale (POS) looks and works the way it does.
For the last several months we have been working alongside our clients to modernize the point of sale in Empower, guided by a simple idea: the borrower and loan officer experience is not the front porch of the loan, it is the loan. What happens in those first interactions sets the tone for everything that follows, and when the experience is clean, everything downstream moves better.
So we started with the experience itself. A modern, uncluttered interface for both the borrower and the loan officer, designed so the next step is always clear and nothing gets in the way of momentum. Fewer places to get stuck and fewer reasons for a borrower to call and ask what to do next. This is built on the experience of people who have been in those situations before.
But so what…lots of people within mortgage have at one point been an LO. What makes us different?
Our point of sale is built into Empower (our LOS). It is not a separate product bolted on through an integration. Because it lives on top of the same data layer that runs the rest of the loan, borrower information flows directly between the point of sale and Empower with no seams to maintain and no handoffs to break. When a borrower enters something, it is already part of the pipeline. The loan officer is working from the same live picture, not a copy that has to be synced.
That massive difference is the lightbulb moment for lenders when they see our POS in action. A borrower who needs to upload more than one document at a time. A signed disclosure a borrower wants to go back and read a week later. These are small things until they become the reason a borrower loses confidence (no one wants that). An embedded POS doesn’t carry the gaps between vendors where those failures usually live.
Ok, so we have a modern interface, we built the POS based on 30 years of internal experience, we embedded the POS into our LOS…what about automation and intelligence?
Good news – intelligence is part of the experience too! Aiva intelligence works inside the point of sale today, handling the document, income, and asset review that used to slow borrowers and loan officers down. This is also where we are headed next. In the coming weeks we are bringing agentic AI to the borrower experience in our point of sale, so the assistant does more than surface information and starts helping move the loan forward. Stay tuned. It comes native, not stitched on afterward.
We did not set out to build a point of sale that checks a box on a feature list. We set out to build the one we wanted when we were the ones doing the work. Modern where it should be modern, intelligent where intelligence helps, and connected all the way through because it was built inside Empower from the start.