For mortgage originators, the push to become a “one-stop shop” and build lasting client relationships has taken on new urgency in light of current market pressures.

“We really want to be able to meet the clients where they’re at,” Heather Lovier, chief operating officer at Rocket said during a panel discussion at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Secondary & Capital Markets Conference on Tuesday. In line with that, she mentioned Rocket’s recent acquisitions, including pending deals for Mr. Cooper and Redfin.

“What we’re trying to really bring together is just that home ownership journey and having all of the pieces of the puzzle there,” Lovier said. “So the client wants to go from one step to the next to the next, we have that available.”

Rocket tried to do some of those things on its own, but realized other companies might be better suited for the task, so it made those deals, Lovier said.

It is doing so while still supporting the broker channel “because we want them to have choice,” she said.

Rocket is building the capabilities for this end-to-end journey. “How you interact with that is completely up to you, but we’re here to provide those tools to make it easier for the client and for the broker and then any of our partners that we’re interacting with,” Lovier said.

Putting together Rocket’s strategic plan for 2026 and beyond “is going to be going to be quite amazing, because we’ll have so many different levers that we’ll be able to make sure that our clients are taken care of at the end of the day.”

Discussing the one-stop-shop concept from the lender perspective, loan officers want to be the consumer’s advisor for the life of the mortgage, said Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG Financial.

When CMG examined this, “we were looking at setting up technology, building engineering, it’s really looking at the customer experience” and providing a unified encounter, he explained.

The panel moderator, Julian Hebron, CEO of the Basis Point, asked whether the transformation at CMG was motivated by the desire to improve the LO and customer experience or if it was the result of industry circumstances.

“It happens when you have a certain level of maturity and scale,” Akinmade said. “Being that we’ve been in a position where you’re able to capture the low hanging fruit, we’ve got some additional scale that allows additional opportunities,” and that is through a consumer direct channel, he added.

Furthermore, this particular channel at CMG does not do purchase mortgages in order to avoid conflict with its distributed retail loan officers.

“They’re no longer threatened, and it opens up, and they exchange their refinances, and there’s a different annuity that distributed retail people can take advantage of,” Akinmade said.

When competing against Rocket, Akinmade would use their strengths against them, noting that because of the big acquisitions, the Detroit-based lender is not likely to be able to be nimble for the next couple of years.

Furthermore, Rocket is centralized, while CMG has a decentralized structure. But enough of a market exists to go around, he added.

How CMG and Rocket are deploying AI

When it comes to technology and artificial intelligence, CMG has “jumped in pretty deep in certain areas, and it’s kind of evolving based on risk,” Akinmade said.

For example, a current use case is on purchase advice from investors.

“We now have automated agents that go in and pull that and/or receive it and start doing investment conditions,” he said. “So that not only reduces the staff headache on that, it shortens your duration time for being able to clear them.”

The goal is to make the life of the loan officer and the processor much easier, he continued.

Lovier added that a personal mission of hers is to use technology to scale as much as possible, to avoid the hiring and firing cycles that happen when volume moves up and down.

The goal is to free up Rocket team members to do what they do best, which is interact with clients.

“Because of the systems and the processes that we built to create efficiency, we can now serve the agents how they want to be served, versus how we’re capable of doing it from a scale perspective,” Lovier said. “The sky’s the limit, obviously AI is going to make things faster and cheaper, but I want to be able to eliminate the task completely as much as we possibly can.”