Loandepot’s Frank Martell On Building Lifelong Consumer Relationships Through Technology

In this week’s episode of the Power House podcast, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez sits down for a tantalizing conversation with Frank Martell, the president and CEO of loanDepot, to discuss the company’s profitability in the third quarter of 2024 and its Project North Star growth plan for 2025.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. To start, Sanchez and Martell explore key factors behind loanDepot’s profitability in Q3 2024.

Diego Sanchez: Congratulations on loanDepot returning to profitability in Q3. How did you achieve this?

Frank Martell: We have 4,500 people working their tails off in an incredibly difficult market, really focusing on delivering the best value for our customers. It really was a combination of better market volume in the third quarter, which touched a lot of the participants in the market. Our efficiency and focus on Vision 2025, which we had in place since 2022, is about resetting the company for the current market environment, becoming more efficient and really focusing on the customer. Those all combined to pop us up to profitability.

Sanchez: Are you seeing that profitability continuing in the fourth quarter and into 2025?

Martell: We saw a downshift in the externally available forecast for market activity. And so, that’s part and parcel of being in this market. You need the best information to guide the company according to market factors. Clearly, the market’s a little tougher than we’d hoped. But I think the team has rallied to deliver the best possible outcome.

Sanchez: Project North Star jumped out at me in your last quarterly update. Why was it important for you to replace Vision 2025 with another strategic plan? 

Martell: The most important hallmark of Project North Star is around looking at the customer differently. We want to move from a transactional relationship to being a partner for the lifelong homeownership journey. 

A lot of people have credit card debt and liquidity challenges, which are employment or life related. But people have a lot of home equity, and we have products and services to help them use that for their needs. We want to be the natural selection because they know us, they trust us.

Also, you have to enable it through repeatable and high-quality technology and solutions. But we can do better with technology, customer relationship management and low-touch, no-touch underwriting.

To close the conversation, Martell explores key elements of Project North Star and how they benefit mortgage professionals and consumers. 

Sanchez: Could you talk through some of the elements of Project North Star that you’re most excited about?

Martell: One is the customer platform. We want to build a platform that goes beyond the traditional Salesforce.com and the CRMs into an engagement tool where we can have every customer and plot them along a life cycle of their homeownership. 

The second area is on the underwriting side. One of the biggest challenges in underwriting is income verification. We need to establish better ways to eliminate those pain points from the cycle. We want to find where we can automate, standardize and make sure that the accuracy is built in upfront versus trying to clean up in the back.