We enabled payment-received and escrow-change texts through Twilio tied to Black Knight MSP in August and saw about a 20% drop in “what’s my status” calls, which let us focus on real problem resolution. If you’ve connected your servicing platform to your LO CRM (Encompass or Total Expert, for example), what moved the needle and what turned into noise. Not advice or a guarantee — just sharing our experience; please do your own due diligence before adopting any tool.
When DTI’s pushing 48–50, I pre-condition 3–6 months PITIA reserves and verify sourcing before appraisal so AUS re-runs don’t tip it over; if reserves are thin, we instead target a small revolving payoff to free a few points. @LenaP do you tie your reserve ask to DTI bands or keep it flat?
We wired MSP to Encompass and trigger a Total Expert SMS only at key milestones — like “Appraisal scheduled for 1/18, next step: conditions” — and saw status calls dip about 15%…
Biggest win was making the SMS two-way: we added “Reply STATUS for update” in the Twilio/MSP texts and pull next step from Total Expert; after our August go‑live, callbacks dropped another about 10%. @g_harrison22’s milestone pings are solid, but we also throttle to 1/day and enforce quiet hours or it turns into noise. Bonus: include a short link to the escrow analysis PDF in the escrow-change text and you’ll kill a lot of “what changed?” calls.
Shifting to a residual-income floor beat fiddling with DTI for us: we use a simple rule — “residual ≥ $1,200 (family of 3), else add 3 months reserves” — and exclude retirement funds from the calc.
We tie reserve add-ons to a simple 200 bps rate-jump on the new PITI plus a quick residual check: if the stressed payment still leaves >= $1,000 residual, no add-on; if not, we ask for a liquidity cushion equal to the gap. Caveat: we haircut securities to 70% and ignore retirement accounts to keep it belt-and-suspenders; @Guide, have you tried a rate-jump screen like this?
Quick example: tying Twilio to MSP helped, but the real win was adding a single ‘status’ link in each “payment received” and escrow texts that hits our Encompass portal so borrowers self-serve instead of calling. We also set quiet hours and a per-loan throttle (max 1 outbound every 6 hours) — after-hours pings were causing complaints, ; Twilio Messaging Services made the routing easy: Messaging Services | Twilio. Caveat: if your portal data lags by more than a few minutes, the link just creates new confusion, so watch latency.