Overview
In early 2022 inflation was upon us, and mortgage interest rates were rising at record speed. On a positive note, the equity in homes was at an all-time high. National homeowner equity rose by 32% from Q1 of 2021 to 2022.
For consumers, home equity products were offering the greatest borrowing capacity and the lowest rates.
Historically tapping into home equity has been confusing for consumers, and the process of origination was expensive for lenders, leading to underutilizing.
At Blend our goal was to make home equity loans more easily available, reaching more people and ultimately driving higher revenue for lenders at a reduced cost. We replaced physical documents with digital data, processing inputs in real time, and instantly delivering digitally underwritten offers.
Role & Responsibilities
Head of Design leading Blend’s Product Design, Brand Design, User Research, and Content Design teams.
Aligned the teams across product (Consumer Banking and Builder Platform), and function (engineering, product, and design) to deliver a V1 product in record speed.
Partnered with the CEO on the customer roadshow across the country leading to an alpha launch with Huntington Bank and MACU.
Creatively directed the promotional video introducing Instant Home Equity powered by Blend Builder.
Responsible for the CEO’s keynote address at Blend’s industry executive conference, Forum August 2022.
Responsible for the content and creative for the go-to-market campaign for the product launch at Blend’s virtual event, Forum Live October 2022.
Home equity represents a significant opportunity for lenders, but unlocking that opportunity is far from straightforward. It can feel like a complex maze for everyone involved.
For lenders, it’s an expensive process, involves a complex collection of information, and emphasizes laborious manual steps. A typical home equity loan flow involves more than 30 steps from application to funding, and time to close can be more than 45 days. Our Instant Home Equity solution cuts through this process, shrinking the time from application to funding to under 5 days and significantly reducing origination cost for lenders
For consumers, it’s a confusing process with a slew of necessary verifications involving back-and-forth communication with lenders. In many cases, consumers get lost in this process, and many don't even know how to get started. The consumer experience with Blend is entirely different. Not only is it simple and easy, there is very little that the consumer needs to do at all. If eligible, we present tailored equity offers proactively to qualified borrowers.
Design partnered closely with engineering and product to create a flow diagram of the ideal experience. We leveraged APIs and 3rd party integrations to verify data instantly for core experiences like identity verification, income verification, credit pulls, property value, home owners insurance, title insurance, and flood insurance. We designed and built each of these experiences as reusable “Blend Blocks” in our low-code platform, Blend Builder for use in our growing product suite.
Note: Blend Close, Blend Remote Signing Room, and Blend Decision Engine were products built ahead of this initiative, and subsequently adapted to work on Blend Builder alongside Instant Home Equity.
Designing the offers screen posed a complex challenge. Our goal was to minimize steps to offer, but also ensure a high quality, accurate, and compelling offer. If the offer was made on stale data and was too conservative we risked losing consumers early in the process. Conversely, if the offer was too optimistic, we ended up with disappointed consumers and risked losing their trust.
Through multiple iterations and validation with our alpha partners, we arrived at a solution providing accurate and compelling offers, along with the opportunity to provide even more favorable terms by asking the consumer to update or add additional information (for example, a co-borrower).
Having too many Home Equity Lines of Credit produced a unique risk to lenders: too much capital tied up in lines of credit that may not be withdrawn. Instant Home Equity presents the consumer with debt consolidation options immediately after generating an offer, providing debt consolidation opportunities with a single click, and ensuring utilization of the Home Equity Lines of Credit from day one.
Customer Partnerships: Smaller Volume = Increased Speed to Market
Our Alpha partner was a very large financial institution, one of the top 5 Home Equity Lenders (by loan volume). While it posed a significant financial opportunity, they were more resistant to change, requesting extensive customizations, and as a result the V1 product that consumers received was not reflective of our ideal product experience.
Customer Partnerships: Leverage Data to Create Standardization
Our second customer was smaller by loan volume. We were able to deploy the product at a faster pace, maintaining our original mission. Because the product was built on our low-code platform, we were able to iterate quickly and A/B test some conversion funnels before settling on our GA out-of-the box Home Equity template. We used this customer as a successful case study to inspire subsequent new customer to adhere to the out-of-the-box template, and gain maximum value.
Pricing Strategy: $450 per funded loan (fully automated) vs $48 per funded loan (for Blend’s legacy product)
Through the alpa program, our calculated operational savings were so significant that we were able to increase our per-funded loan fees by 10x, from $48 to to $450.
While Blend was well established in the Mortgage industry, the promotional event was meant to launch Blend into the Consumer Banking space. This promotional video was used to launch the event, Forum Live, and in post-event campaigns for 12+ months.
The three messages we wanted to emphasize were:
Blend has made a huge leap for home equity origination by providing instant verification (income, identity, property value etc), and real time decisioning, allowing loan teams to focus on relationships and new business acquisition instead of paperwork.
Our products are built with a consumer first mindset; personalized, proactive, and automated.
Blend Builder is a powerful and flexible low-code platform that allows us to delivery the latest and greatest products at record speed.
Mood Board and Brand Inspiration
The brand design team created the mood board for inspiration. This was the first time using our brand guidelines at scale after completing our Brand Refresh.
Creating the Style-frame
The in-house brand team partnered closely with Heist on the style-frames. This was our first video campaign after our Brand refresh, and we aimed to reflect a new, evolved identity.
Storyboard
Led the in-house content team to write the copy, provided guidance for the supporting visuals, and selected the voice actor and the music.
Forum Live was the virtual event where we launched the Instant Home Equity Product. The goal for the event was to create a healthy sales funnel for attracting new customers, and cross-sell to existing customers. The event surpassed the goals for registration and attendees.
457 Registrations (Goal: 350)
184 Attendees (Goal: 120)
224 Unique Accounts (Goal: 220)
56% Key Accounts (Goal: 50%)
ex. TD Bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, Huntington Bank, BMO, PNC, Truist, and Flagstar
My creative team was responsible for all the brand assets including but not limited to creation of the event style guide, design and development of the event microsite and the product landing page, designing the nurture email campaign, organic and paid social assets and blog assets, ebooks, webinar, production of the keynote, virtual stage, and product prototype. Below is a snapshot of the assets created.
Pre-event landing page, event paid and organic social, and nurture email campaign
Post-event landing page, product web page, e-book and infographic, promotional video, email campaign, paid and organic social, and webinar.