loanDepot delivers seamless lending journeys with Dynatrace

A focus on digital customer experience

loanDepot is one of the largest nonbank mortgage lenders in America, helping millions of customers to achieve their financial and homeownership goals.  Technology-driven transformation is at the heart of everything loanDepot does. This strategy has enabled the company to create a revolutionary digital-first approach that makes it easier, faster, and less stressful for customers to purchase or refinance a home.

A big part of loanDepot’s success is due to its customer-centric loans platform that enables the lender to digitally capture and validate applicant’s banking and asset documents and information. In many cases it removes the need for customers to speak to a loan officer, simplifying and speeding up the whole transaction. However, as loanDepot’s digital offerings grew, its infrastructure and operations became more complex. The company needed a way to move to a more scalable hybrid cloud technology stack, integrate core systems, and deliver new products faster, without affecting customer experience.

Maintaining a strong competitive advantage

loanDepot evaluated the market for an observability platform that could provide the insights needed to maintain its key differentiator by continually optimizing the customer experience. It identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs, based on its unified platform approach. After initial deployment, loanDepot quickly saw the advantage of extending Dynatrace into other areas of its business.

“Like most organizations, we had a myriad of performance assessment tools – some for infrastructure, some for applications, and some for availability,” said Michael Brown, Chief Information Security Officer, loanDepot. “Dynatrace was able to roll that all into one and it’s now native to everything we do at a customer experience level. We view Dynatrace as a single pane of glass that allows us to see our digital assets and understand the customer’s experience of interacting with them. Dynatrace has had such an impact that in the last two years, it’s been rolled out across most of the critical applications in our environment.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Differentiated customer experiences: With the ability to establish KPIs for customer journeys and intelligently process the implementation of its digital services, loanDepot can determine which features are slowing people down and automatically resolve those issues. Dynatrace also gives loanDepot’s teams insights into the business impact of critical customer touchpoints, for example, revealing whether optimizing a particular feature could affect conversion rates.
• More effective collaboration: Dynatrace’s unified platform approach has proven invaluable to supporting loanDepot’s ability to continue to serve the needs of its customers, by bringing its internal and external teams together on the same page. For example, Dynatrace provides the insights that enable operations teams to identify issues with third parties that need proactive intervention. This was vital when loanDepot launched its home equity line of credit (HELOC) business, which relied on integrations with seven different partners.
• Consolidation drives efficiency: Dynatrace enables loanDepot to bring together all essential observability data in a single platform. This eliminates the need for multiple solutions to monitor the performance of infrastructure, applications, and processes and provides the context needed to make more informed decisions. For example, Dynatrace enables developers to prioritize their efforts to optimize applications and resolve problems by forecasting the financial impact on the business.
• Getting cloud done right: With Dynatrace, loanDepot gets the precise answers it needs for a seamless move to the cloud. Real-time infrastructure monitoring ensures performance of critical applications, such as loanDepot’s core loan origination system, isn’t affected as services are migrated to its hybrid cloud platform. Because Dynatrace is cloud-agnostic, the infrastructure and operations team know they’ll get the same powerful insights regardless of the ecosystem they create.

“As we move our loan origination systems to the cloud and build our digital HELOC business, Dynatrace helps us extend the same level of observability we had on premises into our new environment,” added Brown. “Dynatrace enables us to look at not only systems availability, but the business metrics that drive conversions and profitability. It also helps us accelerate growth as our cloud footprint expands by showing when we’re not hitting the mark on our SLOs. We’re then able to drill into Dynatrace to investigate where we can optimize our processes to make the most of each customer we touch.”