Project Experience:
Irwin Home Equity

Project Experience for Galatia Clients
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Irwin Home Equity

Client description: Part of Irwin Financial Corporation, the fast-growing Irwin Home Equity (IHE) provides a variety of mortgage loan products on the WWW that allow homeowners to utilize home equity to meet a wide variety of needs.

The challenge: Integrate e-business in a "bricks and mortar" company.

The solution: IHE chose an comprehensive approach that builds on existing strengths while opening new channels for customer contact based on an interactive website.

Irwin Home Equity, headquartered in San Ramon, California, has rapidly built a successful business promoting second mortgage sales to homeowners who want to tap into the equity as collateral for loans. Based on powerful target marketing combined with efficient conversion of prospects into customers, they relied on potential customers calling in to IHE staff to apply for loans by telephone.

IHE recognized the value of the Internet as an efficient medium for prospects to provide loan application information, and they embarked on a phased approach to create an attractive, powerful presence on the WWW. Using this approach, and selecting Galatia to design, develop and implement their web presence, they planned to start small and incrementally increase the functionality of their site on an aggressive schedule. At each step they evaluated results, decided on additional functions to be implemented and accurately forecast the ROI for the next iteration.

The plan called for an initial implementation providing information only about IHE's products. This step would provide first-hand experience with design choices and provide rudimentary information about volumes of visitors.

Building on the design and implementation of the first step, subsequent enhancements provided increasingly interactive experiences for the visitor. Prior to the most current iteration, visitors may submit application information on line while each field is evaluated real time against a number of criteria.

The latest enhancement allows IHE to comprehensively evaluate credit worthiness of the application and reply to the applicant during the on line session. During this process, only transactions falling outside predefined parameters are routed to IHE personnel for handling.

The website has the potential to significantly improve operations efficiency and to powerfully project IHE into web-based commerce. The company intends to build on its Internet experience and leverage their presence through increasingly attractive services.

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