Private Lender Link’s CEO, Rocky Butani, interviewed Shaye Wali to learn more about Baseline Software’s features and experience for private mortgage lenders (aka hard money lenders). Watch the video or read the transcript below.
ROCKY BUTANI:
A lot of lenders out there are looking to provide an amazing experience to their borrowers and brokers. How does Baseline help with that in terms of technology?
SHAYE WALI:
A lot of private lenders will tell you that they don’t compete on price, that they compete on service. Service is a very important element of the experience that a private lender offers. What we’ve found is that borrowers are increasingly expecting a digital experience from their lenders. They’re used to it with some of the national lenders, they’re used to it with their banking, they’re used to it with their trading accounts, and Baseline helps small, local private lenders offer a very similar digital experience through the borrower portal that they expect from banks or large lenders.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So a lot of private lending companies need to integrate their loan origination software or
servicing software with other apps that they use to run their business. Does Baseline offer integrations and an API to accomplish that?
SHAYE WALI:
Yeah, so we’ve really designed the system in a way that does not require a lot of integrations. Some lenders, they need integrations with e-Signature provider. Well, we already have that built in, so we can just consolidate that and you won’t need that integration. But we are also working on certain integrations such as background checks or credit checks that are on our roadmap and you’ll be able to access those reports directly from our product. We have payment processing that’s already integrated into our system, so lenders can do ACH pulls from borrowers on a monthly basis. Lastly, we have an open API, which is both push and pull. We’ve worked with a few customers who’ve looked at our API and have been very impressed in how easy it is to use. And our goal is to make it very easy for any lender, not just the ones who have big IT teams.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So if I have my CRM as Salesforce or HubSpot or Zoho or any of those CRM software, I can easily have baseline talk to those apps, right?
SHAYE WALI:
Yeah, and all the ones that you named, those should be no problem. But it really depends on the other application as well. If they have an API also that would connect with ours.
ROCKY BUTANI:
But all the major CRMs out there, they all also have open API.
SHAYE WALI:
Exactly.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So you just need someone who has knowledge of connecting the two and you’re all set.
SHAYE WALI:
Exactly. But really, yeah, that is the case, but our goal is to also make that so seamless that you don’t actually need an API, that just small to mid-sized lenders who don’t have those resources, they can just integrate without needing to work with our API.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So a lot of private lending companies don’t want to service their own loans in-house, so they use a third-party servicer. Does Baseline have a system where you can easily work with those third-party servicers?
SHAYE WALI:
We’re talking to a few servicers that we can integrate with, particularly for lenders who prefer to outsource that function. The way that we envision that working is as a lender you will be able to originate your loan, send it to your servicing, and then send that file to your third-party servicer. But you’re gonna stay within our system because that servicer is going to send in all the data and you’ll be able to see that data in real time while staying within our system and that’s going to feed into your investor reporting, your tax forms, all the other reporting documents. So you’ll still be able to stay within our system and have access and visibility to what’s happening within your loan but someone else is going to be performing the functions of servicing like making calls or modifying or whatever you may, but you’ll still be able to do that within our system. So our system will still be very valuable. Even the servicing module will be very valuable for your own reporting, even if you’re outsourcing that function.
ROCKY BUTANI:
A lot of private lending shops, when they send out quotes or term sheets to borrowers, The pricing is not as formulated, but there’s some lending shops out there that they have a formula and they have a pricing matrix and the pricing’s always going to be set based on some of those numbers, whether it be credit score or experience or whatnot. Does Baseline have a system to make it easier to quote deals just based on a pricing matrix or a loan sizer?
SHAYE WALI:
We have a way for lenders to upload their own pricing so they can create product templates. So if you’re doing a short-term bridge loan or fix and flip loan and you have your pricing criteria, you can create a sizer and upload it into a product template within Baseline. And so whenever you run a quote, it pulls from that sizer. So that sizer runs underneath. That’s what produces the pricing. And you can use that to create a term sheet. You can then convert that into a loan. You can use that to revise pricing on a loan. So everything is being powered by the sizer, your sizer that you upload into Baseline.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So that just saves a lot of time where I’m not having to manually say, okay, what’s the pricing for this loan? It just looks at the data that’s already in the sizer, pulls those numbers and throws them.
SHAYE WALI:
The software does all the calculations, so you just upload your sizer into it once. You set up the loan product. It’s a one-time thing, unless you want to make any changes.
ROCKY BUTANI:
And there’s obviously a confirmation, right, where I see the quote before it actually does get sent out to the borrower broker. I just have to confirm and say, okay, that’s what the pricing is, and then I can adjust it manually if needed.
SHAYE WALI:
You can send it to the borrower. You can publish it to their borrower portal. You can just talk to them on the phone and verbally convey that and then convert it into a loan. So you have multiple options on how you can handle once that quote has been generated.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So a lot of private lending shops, whether they run a fund or they use individual investors, they’re always looking for more investors, always raising capital. Does Baseline have a solution to help me raise capital and just make that process easier?
SHAYE WALI:
What we found through our investor portal, it allows lenders to highlight their track record which instills credibility, trust amongst new investors. So if I’m a lender talking to a prospective investor, one of the things you can do as a lender is instead of saying, I’ll send you some marketing material or I’ll follow up with you, you can just invite them to the investor portal and allow them to see all the deals that you’ve done in the past. The investor portal that Baseline offers, which is under the lender’s branding, that can be a huge asset for lenders to use to raise new capital.
ROCKY BUTANI:
So if I’m a lender, I have an investor that I want to pitch, if you will, I can just give them access, they log in to Baseline, see the investor portal, and they could see the history of all the deals that have been done.
SHAYE WALI:
That’s right. And then you can add them to the list where they get access to new investment opportunities and you’d be surprised how many investors then maybe sit on
the sidelines for a few months and then once they’ve seen lenders put out new deals and they’re watching them and then eventually they convert into investors. So having that being run on autopilot almost, is a big benefit that lenders get from using Baseline and leveraging its investor portal.
ROCKY BUTANI:
Let’s say a lender out there manages a fund and they’ve got all these investors that they have to manage, they have to print out reports, you know, K-1’s or whatever they’re called for reporting. Does your system accommodate mortgage funds?
SHAYE WALI:
Yeah. So we recently launched a fund management module. And again, I say module, but it’s all the same system. You can create a fund, you can invite investors, you can market that fund. When investors invest in it, they log into their investor portal, they access their dashboard and see the details of that fund. And then monthly reporting is automatically generated. So investors can just log in each month, they see detailed reporting on all their investments, including the fund. That can all be done within our system. We are designed in a way that allows lenders to either self-manage their fund and enter their own data, or get a report from their fund admin, upload it, populate that data, and then report it back to investors. So typically, the fund administrator might offer an investor portal. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but with ours, if they have an investor who’s invested in different types of offerings, if you will, whether they’re invested in individual loans, or they’re invested in a fractional loan, or in a fractional capacity, or they’re invested in a fund. All of their reporting can be done in the same place through the Baselines Investor Portal.
View the first part of the interview to learn more about Baseline