Post Mortem Refinancing through E*TRADE 18 April 2002 Summary: What worked well: E*TRADE offered excellent rates and terms -- the best, in fact, and it offered them QUICKLY. E*TRADE demonstrated flexibility at crucial times to enable our closing to occur on time. What did not work well: E*TRADE was inattentive to important details of timing, title, closing location, property location, co-owner address, and responsibility for getting documents to the closing lawyer. Details that affected E*TRADE were always letter perfect. Details that affected the customer were not. Overall: The process was much more uncomfortable for me than it needed to be. I am VERY relieved to put it behind me, and have real questions about whether I would work with E*TRADE again because of the inattentiveness to details. ---- Detailed Positive (+) and Negative (-) experiences: + E*TRADE got in touch with us very quickly through Lending Tree. + E*TRADE made the best offer, and it was an extremely attractive one. - It was unclear until after I said "GO!" that I would have 48 hours to produce all the documentation to start the process officially. SUGGESTION: State clearly at the beginning that customer has 48 hours to send in the documentation so it better be all there before the official "GO" is given. - With the exception of Michael Andrew who was nearly ALWAYS easy to reach, getting hold of E*TRADE was a problem. We would almost always get voice mail instead of the person we needed to talk to. At crucial times, calls were not returned as quickly as we would have liked. SUGGESTION: Check the workload of your agents, and confirm they are able to answer the phone in person 75% - 95% of the time. Measure performance by that metric explicitly. Also make sure you are grading agents on number of customers who say good things about the E*TRADE experience, not just on how many loans close. - Hearing "E*TRADE, the next generation of financial " with every voicemail greeting gets to be really annoying. SUGGESTION: Recognize that customers are calling to conduct business, and do NOT want a sales pitch to get in the way. Quit making everyone have an ad in their outgoing voicemail greeting. - We were told, "E*TRADE has a closing agent in Watertown MA." I asked specifically to verify, "In Watertown?" and was told, "Yes!". After I got all our parties to commit to a day and time, I was told, "The closing agent is in Lexington", a 20 minute drive away from Watertown. Lexington, Medford, Dorchester, Back Bay, NONE of those offered places were the same as Watertown. SUGGESTION: Be explicit that the closing agent will be within a half hour drive of your property location. Say so up front. Do NOT make what seems to be an insignificant change at the last minute. It was VERY significant for us. - E*TRADE's closing agent in Lexington could only close at his office, and could not come to our Lawyer's office in Watertown. SUGGESTION: If E*TRADE does want to offer the service of closing in the town of the actual property, it must explicitly verify with its third parties that that service is offered. - I did the leg work of setting up the closing in a venue that the co-owners and our lawyer could get to. + E*TRADE was flexible and allowed our lawyer to act as E*TRADE's closing agent. If this had not happened, we might not have been able to close before I left town. - I learned of the amount I needed to bring to closing in certified funds the day before it was due. My financial institution had to do special work to comply with that short a time-frame. SUGGESTION: Get the closing amount to the customer AT LEAST 48 hours prior to closing. - The property address, and address of the other co-owner, on the new Quit Claim Deed was incorrect. - The address of the co-owner was STILL incorrect on the second Quit Claim Deed. - Although some alteration of wording between the old and new deed is permissible, the simplification made by E*TRADE in crafting the new deed was materially different and would have rendered our title problematic in the future. SUGGESTION: Insist that your third party title company get the customer's details as letter perfect as E*TRADE's. In this situation E*TRADE was made to look really bad. - E*TRADE boiler plate for the Quit Claim Deed included a renunciation of homesteading rights which was already in the mortgage, and had no place in the deed. + E*TRADE was flexible and accepted the wording of our lawyer verbatim. - We were told, "Your lawyer will have the documentation tomorrow." In fact, the ONLY set of documentation for our lawyer, acting as E*TRADE's closing agent, arrived at my house at 10 AM of the day of the closing. If I had gone to work before 10, the lawyer would have received nothing, and we would have believed that E*TRADE had screwed up and prevented our closing. "Customer receives and hand carries documentation to closing agent", is NOT the same as "Closing agent receives documentation". SUGGESTION: Be explicit about who exactly is responsible for delivery of documents. - No instructions for our lawyer, acting as E*TRADE's closing agent, were in the packet. He expected some. SUGGESTION: Recognizing this is a rare thing, still consider tossing in a cover letter that reminds the parties "Use the provided envelope to send all signed documentation to E*TRADE." Additionally, specifying whether E*TRADE does or does not need every single page initialed would be a useful further enhancement. - We had no instructions who to write the closing check to. I asked for both wire transfer, and certified check instructions. I only ever received Wire transfer instructions, in a TIFF file enclosure in email which is RATHER difficult to turn into something useful. Lacking instructions, we wrote it out Lisa Williams and had her sign it over to E*TRADE. The week after our closing, we received an overnight letter with the check and a one-sentence letter saying the check was in some way incorrect. We guessed ATM needed to be the recipient, and sent it back, and heard nothing further. SUGGESTION: Say who we need to write the check to! If there is something wrong with the check, say what we need to do to correct it. Since a call to our E*TRADE agent sometimes takes a day to turn-around, providing this information correctly the first time is valuable to E*TRADE. ---- Conclusion: It would be easy for a supervisor, having read through all this detailed description, to conclude that our primary contact, Dennis Ruiz did a poor job. That would be learning the WRONG thing from this experience. Dennis did an EXCELLENT job, but it was clear that the third parties used by E*TRADE, Dennis's work load, and an internal performance measurement system related to getting loans signed rather than giving customers a smooth process are at fault here. Since 1984, I have done most of my banking, stock trading, and other financial work through Fidelity. E*TRADE's initial responsiveness, and excellent terms caused me to be interested in investigating migration of some of my financial work from Fidelity to E*TRADE. But the inattentiveness to detail, and the discomfort I experienced through the rest of the refinancing process convinced me to stay away from E*TRADE. If I receive from E*TRADE some indication of process change to address my concerns, I might again, in future, consider trying out other services. I DO have a new Mortgage with excellent terms. Thank you for that. I hope my detailed feedback is helpful to you in making the way smoother for customers, and increasing E*TRADE profitability with repeat business. William D. Cattey