HousingWireHousingWire
In a Wednesday afternoon LinkedIn post by chief technology officer Jason Bressler, United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) announced that it’s partnering with Sphere LOS to provide its first direct integration with the broker community.
Bressler’s post offered reasons for the partnership. He noted that Sphere has an “all in one” workflow of the most-used products in a mortgage broker’s process, including a loan origination system (LOS), customer relationship management (CRM) system, point of sale (POS) system, and a product pricing engine (PPE).
Bressler wrote that “with the UWM integration, our brokers can now have a one-button ‘push’ through the LOS directly into UWM’s dashboard, EASE, have all updates on the file from UWM directly and immediately sent to Sphere and get all conditions delivered instantaneously to Sphere.”
“It takes a lot from a product to really impress us and deliver everything UWM would in the same user experience we expect, and Sphere has done that,” he added. “Most importantly, Sphere is offering the entire platform FREE for 2 YEARS to anyone who signs up, to ensure adoption and migration.”
In an interview with HousingWire, Bressler confirmed that the partnership was announced during the company’s weekly sales meeting and that Sphere LOS is not a UWM-only product. Bressler also confirmed that UWM brokers have a choice of whether or not to use the system.
“We’ve never, in the history of UWM — and for sure, in my time as the chief technology officer — directly integrated with any loan origination systems,” he said. “And we’ve done it for the most part because brokers use disparate systems.
“There’s no one system that fits the same overall platform and customer service, user experience, all of those things that we’ve ever wanted to integrate with,” he added. “For Sphere LOS, what differentiates it is that it has the four main components that no other LOS has.”
Bressler said that UWM is currently at a “technology precipice” in which the company’s IT team is rewriting almost every product it has through in-house artificial intelligence (AI).
“And so, as we go through the experience of the rewrite and the products and everything that we have built — and then are now rebuilding all this back-end work — [Sphere LOS] was an opportunity that presented itself to us with everything built into one,” he said.
“A very big selling point for me and UWM was that Sphere LOS wanted to get adoption, and adoption is the hardest thing to do in software delivery. They decided to offer the platform for free for two years so that everybody can take their time and see the benefit of it, and maybe migrate from any of the other LOSs or CRMs and the point of sale systems that they use.”
