Five questions with the head of U.S. Bank Home Experience Studio

With surging inflation and mortgage rates, we are at a pivotal time in the U.S. housing market. How are our digital tools positioned to help customers in this moment?

It's all about creating loan certainty as early in the process as possible. We know going out and looking for a home can be an emotional situation, whether you're a first-time homebuyer, trading up or buying a second home. Everyone handles those emotions differently and has different wants and needs throughout the process.

That's why combining our mortgage loan officer with our digital experience is so important. We want the customer to be able to self-serve for as much as they are comfortable with, but we also want to have a mortgage loan officer there at the ready to communicate with them. The loan officer can make sure they're moving forward in the right products and programs, talking to them about their financial goals and what mortgage offering really fits those goals.

As a customer you know you have a high degree of confidence in your loan certainty at U.S. Bank, and that really takes the pressure off the lending experience and allows the focus to be on finding a home.

We have over 1,500 mortgage officers who lend in all 50 states. Can you tell me more about their evolving role and why they are so important even as our digital tools become increasingly easy to use?

There's a wide variety of products in the market - fixed-rate products, adjustable-rate products, down payment assistance programs. It's hard for a consumer to really understand the benefits of all of those products and how they may help them meet their financial needs and goals. That's why the mortgage loan officer is so important in this equation. They help the customer sort through the different product offerings and understand what option may be the best one for them. Obviously, it is always the customer's choice. But we do want them to be armed with the right information at the right time in the process so they can make the most educated decision that best serves their homeownership and overall financial goals.

Technology is great and does a lot of things for us, but that interaction of asking the questions and really probing to find out what is best and most important for that customer is hard to replace with technology. You need that human interaction.

Your entire career has been in mortgage - how did you end up in this field?

I absolutely have no idea. I was fortunate early in my career to have two really good mentors, and one of those is still my mentor today, who really gave me the opportunity to try a lot of things in mortgage. My background is varied. I've run operations, I've been in secondary marketing, I've traded. But for me, I am most passionate about supporting our Retail Sales and Fulfillment partners in putting more customers in home. There's so much variety in what I do every day - I can be talking about technology one minute, customer satisfaction scores the next and then having an in-depth conversation with our legal and regulatory partners.

I love my team, and I love the business that I support. Ultimately, it's all about the customers. We talk so much about volume and loan units but at the end of the day, how many customers did we put into homes? That's what we're all here for every day.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.