Written by Courtney Loquasto, SVP of Business Performance

As we look ahead in 2024, what can we glean from the lessons we’ve learned the last few years?

Above all else, pretty much anything can happen.

Fictional movies like “Contagion” and “Pandemic,” written to equally entertain and horrify us, proved prescient for the past few years, turning our collective world upside down.

Who would have even thought it was possible in our lifetime?

Follow horror movie with a worldwide supply shortage and then straight into a trailing economic downturn. Watching our retirement accounts *plink and then *plink down again was akin to having a root canal, only to have the same tooth pulled altogether shortly thereafter.

For those of us with school-aged kids, converting our children into mini call center employees with expert Zoom capabilities was enough of a challenge to begin with. Pile on trying to explain “polynomials and expressions with radicals” while working from home ourselves and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a white-hot ball of stress.

But there were positives too.

If anything, we learned what things we were doing previously that ended up protecting our families and businesses during turbulent times. What worked versus what didn’t work was in our face in a big way, wasn’t it?

Thankfully the last decade of process improvements and partnerships at OSC allowed us to continue to deliver predictable, consistent service, regardless of the variable surprises sent our way.

Our flexible internal ops teams and strategic global partnerships were able to load balance our volumes when certain regions were particularly hard hit by the pandemic. While we too, unfortunately, had various strains of the nefarious virus sweep through our families and communities, fortunately our servicing didn’t skip a beat.

We were able to thoughtfully focus on the most impactful, most important things in our business as the distraction of business commuting, travel, and even water cooler talk vanished overnight, and then only gradually returned by a fraction.

While we’re happy some of the face-to-face camaraderie is available to us again, we made the most of our isolated time to be still, think, and improve.

From a process and project perspective, we’re currently in an exciting stage where we’re harnessing our growth and scaling up. Because we put the work into enhancing our core processes and services, now we’re turning our focus to innovation and new product and service offerings.

A few examples:

• Our stable processes allowed us to expand conversations with our lending clients to focus on how we can make their borrower experience clearer, more positive, and more straightforward. We’re listening to what our clients and their borrowers want and how they want us to communicate with them. And we’re trying to take the least amount of their time when we do.
• We’ve reconstructed our borrower insurance portal – VerifyMyIns.com – so that it clearly explains why we’re contacting the borrower and what they need to do to quickly get their insurance into good standing.
• We’ve rolled out texting capability that allows us to contact the borrower directly. These friendly reminders notify clients before they receive any sort of regulatory notice in the mail.
• We can also now email the borrowers regulatory notices. This provides a quicker and more effective way to reach the borrower and lead them through the steps needed to correct any missing info on our records (thus saving them the future headache of having to unwind additional lender-placed insurance).

Additionally, our entry into the real estate investor insurance market over the last five years allows us to expand our reach and explore cutting edge technology that supports this unique market. We’ve made it easier for investors to securely insure their properties as they need it.

With interest rates (hopefully!) beginning their greatly anticipated descent this year, we should see an uptick in mortgage volume. Great news for potential first-time homebuyers as their hypothetical monthly mortgage payment enters a range they can afford! Families and individuals that might have been holding off on a move would be more likely to consider that option again, especially if the three forecasted rate cuts happen in 2024.

OSC is poised and volume-ready for this growth, and we’re looking forward to seeing our lender clients and their borrowers prosper.

Many renters will become buyers, thus allowing property managers and real estate investors the opportunity to update and renovate their properties.

Our RiskSecure investor insurance products are a natural fit for rehab and rental properties. We’re capturing the relevant data specific to each property so that we can assign the most accurate level of risk to it. Our goal is to offer the most competitive products possible while ensuring every property is thoroughly protected.

OSC is positioned to deliver like never before to our clients, borrowers, agents, and insureds. We’re excited about this new year and beyond.

Here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2024. And with any luck, only Zoom calls for the adults!

With our borrower communications’ winning trio – website, texts, and emails – OSC is ready and capable of delivering results for you and your clients like never before. Find out more about this beneficial combo by watching our latest video here. You don’t want to miss out!