A centralized hub for over $60B in mortgage loan applications

When most people think of home mortgage loans, they don’t necessarily think of efficiency. Due to increasing government regulation, the time and expense to execute a mortgage has gone up by 80% over the last eight years. As loan officers gather information and signatures from prospective homeowners, a typical loan file can surpass 500 pages and take nearly 50 days to complete.

John Paasonen and his partners at Maxwell Financial Labs experienced this red-tape-laden process when they bought their own homes. They envisioned a better way — one that would streamline the loan experience for both mortgage loan officers and their customers. As Paasonen recalls, their vision was “free from paper, free from old technologies like email and fax machines — a centralized hub where all of the stakeholders in the mortgage can come together to collaborate and move through the process.”

The first step: find a centralized content platform to simplify all their content.

Comprehensive compliance within a streamlined experience

The mortgage industry is highly federally regulated. Laws are strict, sensitive personal information is at stake, and financial institutions gather an overabundance of information at every turn rather than risk missing one single piece of data.

To challenge the industry’s status quo, Maxwell’s founders needed a technology platform that would:

• Keep content secure, with airtight permissions
• Enable eSignatures
• Be user-friendly for the average prospective homebuyer

Box fit the bill, and in addition, certifications like ISO 27001, FINRA, SOC 1, SOC 2 Type II, and SOC 3 compliance were already in place. “That’s helped us get to market faster as well as meet the regulatory requirements,” says Maxwell co-founder Rutul Davè. “And the more content we add, the platform automatically scales to meet that requirement.”

Maxwell’s application now integrates with thousands of financial institutions to electronically capture the documents that borrowers supply to loan officers: W-2s, paystubs, bank statements, tax returns, and more. Box simplifies the workflows between loan officers, homebuyers, and real estate professionals, keeping the focus on the people, not the paperwork.

"Box provided the platform that allowed us to store and transfer content securely and give permissions to the right people to access that content,” Paasonen says.

Box compliance has helped us get to market faster as well as meet the regulatory requirements.

Ease of use built on cloud-native security

The ability to customize the interface while building on Box gave Maxwell’s application UI very specific to the needs of the industry and its stakeholders.

“As we were building Maxwell,” says Davè, “We let Box Platform take care of the storage, redundancy, and permissions for all the content. That way, we could focus resources on the application and user experience rather than the content layer.”

The strong permission model built into Box means only the lending team and homebuyer have access to the documents. Through a secure web interface, users can index and preview content right within the application without any risky downloads.  

Happy loan officers — who are two-thirds more efficient

One of Maxwell’s first customers was John Barry, a Mortgage Loan Officer at Houz Mortgage. Barry remarks: “It was very easy to use, and very easy to request documents from our borrowers. We were able to really integrate it into our experience.”

So far, Maxwell has used Box Platform to:

• Power collaboration for over $60 billion in loan transactions
• Close loans 45% faster than the national average
• Increase loan-officer efficiency by a good two-thirds

“We’re actually pulling in other loan officers,” Barry says, “because clients are so impressed.”

And on that note, Maxwell will continue to build on Box to bring a traditional and highly regulated industry into the 21st century while getting back to the old-school value of personalized customer service.