Podcast: One-On-One With Jane Mason, Founder Of Workflow Automation Company Clarifire

The founder of Clarifire in St. Petersburg, Florida, says automation continues to modernize the mortgage servicing industry.

Jane Mason is the founder and CEO of the privately held, women-owned corporation that uses a Software-as-a-Service model to reduce manual processes and increase efficiencies.

In January, leaders at Clarifire announced that Towne Mortgage Company, a full-service mortgage lender and servicer based in Troy, Michigan, started using their workflow application.

Towne Mortgage Company services loans in 47 states.

Mason recently sat down with The Mortgage Note’s Scott Kimbler to talk about Clarifire and her vision for the company.

Mason was running a large law firm when she came up with the idea of using automation to help clients.

“I was thinking, and my epiphany was ‘a process is a process’. It doesn’t matter if it’s a legal process, a litigation process, a servicing process, right? Our larger customers at the law firm were large banks and servicers. What we tried to do with them is provide them automated access to legal services that they needed,” Mason said.

Mason began thinking about ways to better serve the financial services industry with workflow automation.

“When I got my first opportunity to start my own company and create Clarifire, I created an agnostic, innovative product that could handle any process.”

Clarifire went live in 2007 with Bank of America as its first official client. Truist Financial has been a client since 2009, Mason said.

“We’re a small company with under 100 employees and our clients are under 10, but some of them are extremely large and provide us with ongoing volumes of business,” she explained.

Mason said companies can convert to Clarifire software in a relatively short period of time. If they can provide data from their legacy systems, it usually takes 60 to 90 days.

Mason highlighted how technology can help servicers who have borrowers impacted by natural disasters.

Old school legacy systems are hard-coded, and users in call centers have to go through multiple steps to get borrowers the information they need in times of crisis, Mason said.

With Clarifire, users can ask questions and click on buttons to prompt the next question or response. If the borrower is impacted by the disaster, an automated form for forbearance relief can be issued.

“I think that is an example of how the automation works, and it’s smart. If you ask one question or they click one radio button, the technology is smart enough to go down a different path based on that click,” Mason said.

When asked what drives her daily, Mason said it is making a difference in the lives of clients and their customers.

“I believe in our team, and I believe in building good, long-lasting relationships, and I’m making a difference. It might be small in some people’s eyes, but I’m making a difference. And our customers can depend on us and know that we are here, we have integrity, and we are going to deliver and do what we say we’re going to do,” Mason said.

Looking ahead, Mason said they are continuing to invest in the product.

“It’s a continual evolution of modernization and implementation of different aspects of the latest technologies,” she said. “We’re trying to lead the industry into the future, and we’re going to continue to stay here because we enjoy what we do and we have passion about the successes that we’re getting.”

#automation #mortgageservicing #mortgagenews