DS News - HSBC

» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 75 Exploring these questions of how to best communicate with the borrower is a crucial one for both lenders and servicers, and one that is becoming more important as more millennials and the younger generations age up into homebuying age. One of Bank of America's solutions was to create a streamlined online Digital Mortgage Experience. "It's super simple. It grabs all of your information, deposit information, loans, credit card data. You don't have to supply us your bank statemecause guess what? We already have it. So, it's data compilation but that still might not be the solution that the baby boomer generation is ready for," said Cummings. "We are evolving to serve the technology needs of the younger generations while keeping intact our services and capabilities clients have always been able to rely on us for, creating a high-tech, high-touch environment," Cummings continued. Along similar lines, LoanCare created an app designed to appeal to and address the needs of younger consumers. "Borrowers today don't want to make the phone call, they don't want the letter in the mail. ey want it live on their phones, able to make their payments, answer questions about escrow," Saab said. "Everybody talks about digital communication, but we invested in it." Saab says that app came about as a direct result of conversations with some of the company's new hires, who were asked how they would like to be communicated with as a potential homebuyer. ose perspectives wouldn't have been there to spark that innovation if LoanCare hadn't put a focus on attracting that fresh blood into the company. But Saab admits that learning how to recruit the younger generation didn't necessarily come easily. "We would hold job fairs, but we weren't going out and saying, 'How can we appeal to young people who are trying to decide on a career?' Many of them don't even know that this job exists," Saab said. It's also important that organizations look for partnership opportunities that can help support their D&I goals. According to Freddie Mac's Roemer, one way the GSE has attempted to recruit a more diverse workforce is through "targeted partnerships" with groups such as the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the urgood Marshall College Fund. "ose are underrepresented demographics, so we're reaching the students at a broad group of universities without having to visit 10 to 15 schools individually." LoanCare participates in a program known as the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP). "ere are 500,000 active military here in Virginia Beach," Saab said. An initiative of the Department of Defense, the MSEP works to partner human resources departments with military spouses looking for employment. "It's a pool of people to tap into who have varying and diverse backgrounds, and hiring from them helps the community as well." Saab also cited My Fairy God Boss (MFGB) as another program LoanCare has made use of when it comes to hiring. Created in 2015 by entrepreneurs Georgene Huang and Romy Newman, MFGB provides women jobseekers with job listings as well as "the inside scoop on pay, corporate culture, benefits, and work flexibility." INTERNAL CHANGES, EXTERNAL RESULTS Implementing D&I doesn't always come easy, especially given that D&I is, at its core, about bringing together different types of people, and that process will naturally be more alien to some than to others. "You have to approach it from the perspective that we're dealing with human beings," FHFA's Levine explained. "We're dealing with people who may not have had to deal with diverse individuals their entire life, and now all of a sudden they're being told, 'You have to promote diversity and you have to include these people and those people and whatever.' It's not that easy." "We're not here to blame anyone," Levine continued. "We're not here to excoriate anyone. We're here to try and work toward a common goal, taking into account that people need to be brought along. If we're going to be successful, we have to work with others so they can understand that including people who are diverse doesn't mean we're excluding other people." Making those efforts can create solid, measurable results within an organization, however, making any road bumps along the way well worth navigating. How do you measure those results, however? Mr. Cooper's Dana Dillard cited an internal survey focusing on employee engagement the company conducts every other year. "Our overall employee engagement score was 81 percent," Dillard said. "Eighty-one percent of our employees feel engaged with their work here. Seventy-eight percent of our employees felt like the workplace was better than it was 12 months before, and 93 percent of our employees said they supported the values we've laid out, including D&I." Of the 44 questions on the survey, Dillard said the percentage of positive responses improved on all 44. Explaining that Bank of America has a "top-down leadership approach to D&I," Kathy Cummings singled out one of the D&I initiatives Bank of America has created, called Courageous "When employed effectively, diversity and inclusion initiatives tend to allow you to make better decisions because you have a broader look at the world." —Michael Ruiz, Director of Supplier Diversity, Fannie Mae

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