loanDepot enables rapid growth with Workday financial solutions

To support rapid growth and continue to scale, loanDepot, one of the largest mortgage lenders in the U.S., turned to Huron for help implementing Workday’s robust suite of financial solutions

Since its founding in 2010, loanDepot experienced significant growth. With new shareholders in mind, its leaders determined they needed the right tools and systems in place to handle steadily increasing volumes of data and support regulatory reporting.

“In 2018 and 2019, we were funding maybe 8,000 loans a month,” says Nicole Carrillo, executive vice president and chief accounting officer of loanDepot. “By 2020 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic and during a period of rock bottom interest rates, we were doing at least 30,000. Our legacy Excel files could not keep up. Workday was our saving grace because our legacy Excel files were hanging on by a thread, trying to process four times the amount of data they had in the past. It just wasn’t scalable.”

So the organization’s leaders began looking for a unified operating system that would streamline and automate current accounting operations to support both strategic management level reporting and external financial reporting requirements.

loanDepot was already using Workday for human capital management (HCM), and after reaching out to Huron for guidance and conducting a thorough product evaluation, the business decided to implement the platform’s financial solutions as well. Leaders hoped the platform would help to future-proof the rapidly expanding business by enabling more efficiency, scalability, and agility across the enterprise.

Throughout the duration of the 15-month engagement, Huron helped the team implement and optimize Workday Financials, Accounting Center, and Prism and automate the integration of Workday with more than 40 other systems. Strategic collaboration between the company, Huron, and Workday helped to ensure a successful outcome.

The engagement encompassed the following principles:

Scalable Solution That Will Enable Future Growth

Industry-leading practices and Workday business processes were leveraged to identify opportunities for automated, standardized, and scalable business processes. This resulted in streamlined solutions across all aspects of financial operations that not only optimized current operations, but also led to a more scalable and agile solution to support continued growth. The solution:

• Optimized the financial close process by implementing a centralized financial close checklist, defaulting account characteristics on transactions, automating a rule-driven approval process for journal entries, and providing multilevel reporting.
• Improved the procurement process by implementing procurement “punch out” capabilities to automate procurement with the business’s largest vendors, empowering users to submit requisitions and automating a rule-driven approval workflow.
• Replaced manual bank reconciliation with an automated process for eight banks and more than 300 bank accounts.
• Maximized asset management and depreciation by establishing depreciation calculation methods and automating general ledger postings.
• Reduced manual activities within payables with the automation of invoice processing and an automated matching process.
• Implemented a standardized rule-driven approval workflow process across all financial operations.

Modernized Financial Reporting and Analytics to Support Business Decisions

A modernized financial reporting and analytics solution was key to the organization’s success. This modernization began with redesigning its operating structure and cost center hierarchy to enable multidimensional reporting across the company, such as reporting at the channel, divisional, regional, departmental, branch, and loan level. Security was defined and standardized across the operating structure to ensure the right people had access to the right data.

Furthermore, Workday Accounting Center was implemented to streamline loan data from various systems into one source of truth for all of the business’s loan data reporting. This resulted in high-performance, reliable, and auditable financial statements built for statutory, operational, and regulatory reporting and analytics.

Data accuracy and enhanced reporting at the organizational level empowered leaders to make more informed business decisions to drive growth and gave end users access to reporting dashboards, which were not available prior to the implementation.

Single Strategic and Operational Platform

With this transformation, the company is leveraging Workday for both financials and human capital management, which brings the benefits of one solution for operations, business processes, data, security, and employee experience. With Huron’s help, it replaced over 40 manual processes to ensure Workday is seamlessly integrated with other third-party systems, including a new cloud-based treasury management system. The newly developed integrations promote efficiency and data accuracy across the company’s technical architecture.

Organizational Readiness

The company’s leaders realized this transformation to financial operations would be a significant shift for their internal team as well as their end users, necessitating a robust change management strategy. Huron’s team shaped this strategy and created a communications plan to help employees navigate the transformation. The team developed and supported multiple communication channels, including a hub that provided up-to-date information throughout the engagement.