Home Point Financial Disrupts Its Market with Snowflake and Informatica

Let me ask you a question. Can you disrupt a market with a legacy architecture?

Of course not! To that point, Home Point Financial is disrupting its residential mortgage market, where the company aspires to become a leading provider. Home Point Financial realized that data is its most strategic asset and key to market dominance. Last week, at Snowflake Summit (#LetItSnow19), we shared Home Point Financial’s success story and how it turned to disruptive technologies to disrupt its own market.

Home Point Financial realized that to grow its business and become more competitive, it needed to become data-driven. However, technology got in the way. Old tools and processes were holding it back from achieving its business goals. The company’s legacy infrastructure was not built for scale, agility, and modernization. Just as important, rudimentary data management practices were preventing a data culture. And homegrown, slow, manual ETL mappings created performance, productivity, and data quality issues. Finally, Home Point Financial’s lack of a comprehensive data management architecture could not support future modernization requirements.

Home Point Financial’s analytics modernization requirements

The team at Home Point Financial had specific expectations when it came to their modern analytics solution stack. Let’s look at these requirements as they pertain to their new data warehouse and new data management solution.

Data Warehouse: The new data warehouse would need to house large historical data volumes, integrated from enterprise data sources, and support large volumes of batch loading as well as high concurrency queries on the data warehouse. The team was looking for elastic scalability of both compute and storage as well as broad connectivity for leading BI tools and robust ANSI SQL Support.

Data Management: Evaluation of data management solutions, called for diverse connectivity to both SaaS and on-premises data sources and integration of multiple data systems while supporting high-volume workloads. The team also wanted to improve data quality with standardized cleansing and enrichment and schedule and orchestrate for multiple source dependencies. Last but not least, as the Home Point Financial team was keeping their sights on their long-term data-driven transformation journey, they desired a data management platform they could grow with, seamlessly adding future capabilities like data cataloging and data governance.

Home Point Financial’s modern analytics solution After much due diligence, Home Point Financial selected a new analytics architecture, consisting of disruptive technologies, including Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse running on Microsoft Azure, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for its modern AI-driven data management solution, and Tableau for its visualization and analytics layer. The new solution has already delivered many benefits for Home Point Financial, including improved data quality, reduction in staffing costs, high-performance data processing and accelerated data delivery, ease of use, enterprise-grade support, and future-proofing the investment in its new architecture.

What’s next?

Speaking of future-proofing, as we mentioned in the beginning, Home Point Financial has lofty goals for achieving market dominance. Towards that end, the new architecture discussed so far, was just the first step in the company’s data modernization journey. It was important for the team to select a solution they could grow with and protect their investment.

So what else does the team have in store to support their business goals?

• On the loan origination side of the business, Home Point Financial is looking to support new use cases with Snowflake and Informatica by bringing in data from Ellie Mae/Encompass and delivering integrated data to customer portals to evaluate data aggregators and ML opportunities. With their new architecture in place, the team is expecting to seamlessly add to these capabilities.
• After putting in the new solution, the team realized that they needed to consolidate two disparate CRM systems (due to acquisitions) and migrate it all to Salesforce CRM. Guess what? With the Informatica solution already in place, the team is ideally situated to support the migration to Salesforce!
• Home Point Financial is also investigating the joint Snowflake/Informatica solution to support governed data sharing.
• And finally, the team is already evaluating new ways to augment and evolve their modern analytics solution by leveraging capabilities offered by the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, including AI-driven data cataloging for data discovery and lineage insights, as well as master data management.

It was exciting to be part of the Snowflake Summit, Snowflake’s first-ever user conference. It was a great event! We always enjoy talking with organizations looking to modernize their analytics architecture and we were especially thrilled to share the Snowflake and Informatica success story from Home Point Financial.

If you would like to learn how you too can gain benefits from the Snowflake and Informatica solution, you can view this in-depth ‘Meet the Experts’ webinar we recently delivered with Snowflake. You can always learn more about our joint solution at here.

Hope to see you all next year at Snowflake Summit!