Why We Built the SOLO Mobile App to Do the Whole Job
Most mortgage mobile apps are a window. You can look at the loan, maybe approve a task, and then you wait until you’re back at a desk to do the real work.
We built the SOLO mobile app differently, and on purpose. Today, a loan officer can do nearly everything on a phone that they can do on a desktop.
Simplifying lending is the job, wherever it happens
Tidalwave exists to simplify lending for everyone involved: the borrower, the loan officer, the processor, their whole team. That goal doesn’t come with a screen-size requirement.
A loan officer’s work doesn’t sit at a desk. It happens in a car between showings, at a realtor’s open house, at a kitchen table with a borrower, at a kid’s soccer game when the file needs one answer. If simplification only works on a laptop, it only works for part of the day, and the rest of the day goes back to waiting, forwarding, and “I’ll get to it when I’m back.”
The mobile app has a reputation problem, and we know it
Ask around and you’ll hear the same assumption about mobile apps in mortgage: they’re the lite version. A notification center. A place to check status, with the actual work reserved for desktop.
That assumption shapes how people work. If you believe the app is limited, you don’t reach for it, and the loan waits. We saw that as a problem worth solving rather than a norm worth accepting. The answer wasn’t a better companion app. It was an app with no second-class status.
What “comprehensive” means in practice
When we say the mobile app does the whole job, we mean it. The work a loan officer does on desktop is the work they can do from their phone, with the same findings, tasks, and borrower conversations in the same place.
There are two exceptions today: resizing documents and updating e-sign tasks. Everything else carries over. We would rather tell you where the line is than let “everything” turn into a promise we can’t keep.
An intentional decision
Building a full-featured mobile app is harder than building a trimmed one. It means more design work, more testing, and more discipline about not letting the desktop experience quietly pull ahead. We chose it anyway, because the point was never to have a mobile app. The point was to remove the reasons a loan sits still.
That choice fits how we think about the whole platform. If a step exists only because someone has to be at a particular machine, we want to ask whether the step should exist at all.
What customers tell us
Joy Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer of Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, had a lot to say about the mobile app when she sat down with our CEO, Diane Yu, and HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia earlier this month.
"You just have to have that mobility, and that's what these systems allow us to do," she said. "That's why people are not even using laptops. They're using tablets instead." She was referring to a moment at Fairway’s most recent sales rally when six loan officers got on stage to talk about their experiences using Tidalwave, and one of them only had a tablet. They don’t use a laptop anymore, period.
She went on to describe why Fairway sees the value in our mobile parity approach, in where the industry is headed, "Loans are not just coming to us. We have to go to them, and we have to find them. And the only way you do that is you get up from your desk," she said. "If an LO has to live in the LOS and it's connected to their desk, they're not getting up and having that conversation."
The more ways we provide a lender to reach their customers where they live, and not simply the “traditional” means of entry, the more time they can spend moving loans forward instead of chasing their next application.
What’s next
We’ll keep holding every new feature to the same test: does it work wherever the loan officer is?
If you’d like to see the mobile app work a real loan, DM us.
Or, book a call now and skip the wait.