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Last week it was announced that LoanLogics’ director of digital document operations, Davida Stanley, was a recipient this year’s HousingWire Insiders Award. The award recognizes operational all-stars whose contributions have been critical to an organization’s success, yet their ‘insider’ role is often one of an unsung hero.
As an “Insider,” Davida was recognized for her role in supporting LoanLogics IDEA™ Services for all clients and managing as many as 1450 offshore resources to ensure document files are processed according to service level agreements. She successfully managed the pandemic-driven transition to work from home for all offshore teams and she worked with IT and product development teams to implement new workflows for processing loans even faster.
It couldn’t be more fitting that she won this industry distinction on the heels of a company promotion last year.
Like the detailed Q&A we did with our 2021 HousingWire Woman of Influence award winner, we wanted you to get to know Davida Stanley a bit more and how her operational talents and expertise makes her a standout.
Below we share responses from a candid Q&A with this latest LoanLogics industry-recognized leader.
Tell us a bit about your journey in the mortgage industry. How has it prepared you for your current role and for managing the circumstance for which you were just recognized?
I can’t believe it when I say I’ve been in the mortgage industry for 20 years. Every role and organization have had obstacles to overcome. Each experience has prepared me for facing the challenges of today.
I began my mortgage career working for a large originator/servicer as foreclosure specialist and later a document execution team lead. My role quickly transitioned once the robo signing fallout hit the industry. From that point on, I was focused on demonstrating to several state attorney generals what steps my company was taking to proactively prevent any missteps in the future.
My experience also includes time spent at a large servicer as a Default Manager and later as a Senior Contract Manager where I managed the foreclosure department. While there, my responsibilities also included managing a team of 70+ associates responsible for reviewing and executing documents required to complete milestones within the mortgage default process for various states. From all these experiences, I really understand the mortgage process end to end.
Now with 4 ½ years on LoanLogics’ technology team, my role is a bit different but is still aligned with my experiences fixing controls and taking preventative measures to avoid organizational disruption.
What skills have you found are important to help lead when things don’t go as planned?
Patience is number one. It’s important to be patient with yourself and others knowing tensions are high and in the case of the pandemic, an unfamiliar situation is evolving as quickly as your response. Number two is probably collaboration. More often than not, you will need to engage different groups across the organization to solve complex issues. Broadening the response team will help drive effective outcomes. From there, it’s all about communication. We were successful managing doc processing operations last year by setting daily meetings with top executives to discuss current challenges, ideas, and celebrating what we had accomplished. All of that then trickled down as tangible tasks to the operational teams on the ground.
Your role touches both the human and automation aspects of doc processing. How do the two work together?
As it says on LoanLogics’ website, we recommend and practice an ‘Automate First’ strategy. We believe that technology can improve any workflow and can enable the more strategic use of humans across the mortgage process.
Therefore, the value LoanLogics delivers to our document processing clients starts with our automation. LoanLogics IDEA technology is only getting better as the continuous training our machine-learning receives helps to improve the speed and accuracy of document recognition. Automation can handle the bulk of the workflow and be trusted for most classification and data extraction tasks.
That being said, there are some clients of ours and across the industry who require the utmost data accuracy for their specific applicational use case. It is here where the addition of human operator workflow can deliver those purified results.
Remote work, particularly full-time, is new for a lot of folks in the industry. It’s clear you’ve been successful at it both personally and transitioning others to it. What advice would you give those still getting comfortable?
Plenty of good sleep. In my role I have unique hours, so hitting the pillow on my Sleep Number bed helps me recharge. Truth be told my husband would say that I’m a workaholic, but I love what I do. Now that my home is my office, I do make it a point to schedule breaks, take time to eat lunch, move because my watch beeped, step outside and get some fresh air or say hi to the neighbors also working from home, and water plants.
I also make sure I nurture the personal and professional relationships I have with my colleagues through frequent and timely communication. When the job gets stressful, these interactions foster the trust and understanding needed to manage the situation at hand.
