Developing a New Breed of Mortgage Underwriter

The situation

A leading global financial services company wanted to reinvent its approach to staffing and developing mortgage underwriters to improve business performance and strengthen regulatory compliance.

Our client’s historical practice was to fill openings only with experienced mortgage underwriters from other financial institutions.  Their new strategy involved hiring recently minted university graduates with strong numeracy skills and an interest in a banking career into underwriter positions.

We were asked to build an accelerated, comprehensive learning program to develop these bright new hires into model mortgage underwriters.

What we did

Partnering closely with the organization’s learning department, we facilitated curriculum design sessions with business leaders and subject matter experts.  Focusing on the needs of the learner and the evolving external regulatory factors, we guided the transformation of existing topic-driven training content into a process-focused curriculum with the customer experience at the center.  We augmented the organization’s existing lecture-based content with experiential and blended learning elements to create an interactive and engaging learning experience.

Our deliverables were a comprehensive, six week training program design and training materials including presentations, participant and facilitator guides.

The impact

The program has served as a pathway into the firm for 300+ new mortgage underwriters to date.  Our client also incorporated learning content that we designed for this program into other functional training courses in the bank.