Best Loan Software

Encompass is the mortgage origination platform from ICE Mortgage Technology, part of Intercontinental Exchange, and it sits alongside servicing products and a developer portal and marketplace within that group. Ownership by an exchange operator is the fact that shapes its position.

ICE runs financial exchanges, and mortgages are ultimately instruments that get packaged and traded. Owning the origination platform, the data and the route to the secondary market puts one company across the whole path a loan travels, which is a considerable structural advantage and a concentration worth noticing.

The marketplace and developer portal matter more than they sound. A lender's origination system has to connect to credit bureaux, verification services, appraisal management, title, insurance and investors, and a platform with an established integration marketplace saves each lender building those connections itself.

Encompass is effectively the default in United States mortgage origination, which is both its principal strength and the reason to evaluate carefully. Ubiquity means every service provider integrates with it and every processor has used it, while it also means limited leverage in a negotiation and limited pressure on the vendor to compete on price. No pricing is published.

Calyx Software provides loan origination systems sized for every scale of mortgage lender, from Point and PointCentral for brokers and small lenders through to Path, a fully configurable end-to-end system for banks and financial institutions.

Offering genuinely different products by lender size rather than tiers of one product is the sensible approach in mortgage, and Calyx is explicit about it. A two-person brokerage and a regional bank do not want the same system: the broker needs something pre-configured that works on day one, while the bank needs a system it can shape to its own workflows and approval hierarchies. Path is offered in both forms for that reason, pre-configured and out of the box for small lenders and brokers, and fully configurable to mirror an organisation's workflows and setups for banks.

Point remains the long-established desktop product and PointCentral extends its features and functionality for shared use, which matters because Point has an installed base of brokers who have worked in it for years and should not be forced onto something unfamiliar. Zenly is the cloud-based lead management and point of sale platform covering the front of the process, before an application becomes a loan file.

Business types addressed are mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers, financial institutions and the wholesale marketplace, with Calyx Industry Connect linking participants. Training is substantial and product-specific, with Point and Zenly knowledge libraries, webinars, and live orientation sessions for Zenly and Zip. Pricing is not published.