It was like coming home. “The first moment Iwalked into this building, I knew it was the right place for our company,” Dominic “Don” Iannitti says.
Iannitti is president and CEOof DocMagic, the largest loan document production company in the U.S., and the building he’s speaking of is an impressive, 25,000-square-foot state-of the art technology center in Torrance, California. Within the mostly curved walls of this modern office space, more than 100 employees dedicate themselves to providing unparalleled service for their clients, some of which are the nation’s top lenders.
Iannitti founded DocMagic back in 1988, and as he explains the open-office concept of the building to us, he can’t help but reminisce over the company’s humble beginnings— three employees (including Iannitti) in a 1,000-square-foot office. The company’s first sales person joined the team as a part-time employee after successfully selling the company its first fax machine, a critical component in those early days of taking orders.
But while the company’s start may have been unassuming, its vision was always clear.
“The core of what I found interesting when forming DocMagic was taking data in and leveraging it to produce documentation that would otherwise take hours to type out,” Iannitti says. “It was amazing to me that we could now leverage a data point across many forms and reduce errors because there wasn’t any re-typing going on. Of course all this grew into much more.”
A source of great pride for Iannitti is the fact that a high percentage of the company’s 100+ employees have been with the company for the long haul. This not only includes his COO Alan Brisbane, who has been with DocMagic since day one, but many of the support staff as well. “
DocMagic as a whole understands the immense value of itsmost important resource—the people that make this place run,” Iannitti says. “A lot of companies get to the point of where they are patting themselves on the back for their own ingenuity, when the reality is it’s the people that make up the organization that make it happen. We take a lot of steps to make sure our employees are comfortable.”
When you look at the design of DocMagic’s headquarters, the high-esteem employees are held in is obvious. The open-office layout encourages workers to wander away from their desks, often convening together in one of the office’s many lounges. While each employee has their own individual workspace with big, dual monitors on their desk, anyone can grab a notebook computer and log in from another location in the building. It’s a type of collaborative design that’s borrowed from forward-thinking companies like Google, which pride themselves on breaking the mold in office design and employee culture.
Dramatic art, inspired by previous ad campaigns, adorns the walls,chronicling different periods in thecompany’s exponential growth. In between the art are large, dramatic windows that look out on the scenic greenery of the campus. Not just for gazing at, employees are encouraged to take advantage of all the amenities the building has to offer, including its outdoor space.
“We enforce breaks,” Iannitti confidently proclaims. “You can come and sit at your desk for the next eight hours and never move at another company, but that’s not the way it works here. The company is positioned specifically so that our employees can go outside and relax, walk around, and get anything they may need within one block of the office. We also have an on-site gym. We try to promote good, healthy behavior in the sense that we make sure you’re eating, taking breaks, and going out and walking. There are plenty of areas for play, such as our Ping-Pong table, where we have tournaments.”
It is this dedication to playing hard that Iannitti believes makeshis employees dedicated to working hard, too. And at a time when adoption of e-lending solutions is up and TILA-RESPA is on the horizon, this steadfast work ethic is crucial.
For DocMagic, the move to the paperless loan is nothing new, and as an early adopter of e-sign technology, they have made it their mission to promote it not only within the industry but among the general public as well. One way in which they have done this is to open up their e-sign tool for free, for anyone who wants to upload a document and use it.
“You can come to our website today, and within a couple minutes, upload your documents and send them to whoever you need to with your signature included,” Iannitti says. “The whole process is completely automatic and absolutely free of charge. This initiative demonstrates the fact that we are a technology companyand want to do everything we possibly can to help our clients and potential clients leverage the technology we create and do a better job extending their service to their clients.”
The company is currently gearing up for the adoption of TILA-RESPA on Aug. 1.
“It’s one thing to prepare from a technical perspective, but we have a lot of training sessions going on because, of course, our support people have to answer every question that will come in,” Iannitti says. “So already everyone is being trained to understand exactly how everything works and how to answer questions correctly. It’s a major undertaking but it’s exciting at the time—these things shake the industry up. For companies like us, we enjoy change, so we thrive in this type of atmosphere.”
In addition to helping clients ensure they are compliant with TILA-RESPA, DocMagic helps their clients adjust to changing MISMO, standards as well.
“Today’s clients needs are much more extensive. All of our integrations are based on the latest, greatest versions of MISMO.” Iannitti says. “Our clients have never dealt with this before, and it is radically different than the previous version, so having the ability to have a professional services arm has been critical to us to be able to help these clients with those types of needs.”
As demonstrated by the needs created by such regulatory changes, one of the greatest areas of growth for the company in recent years has been in the call center. With a magnifying glass on all the changes the industry is experiencing, Iannitti explains that there has been a substantial uptick in questions, calls, concerns, tweets and requests.
“From our call center perspective, we are now putting on a mid- and late-evening shift, so we are almost around-the clock,” he says. “There’s a lot of growth in this area, but that’s what is necessary to give our clients the quality of service that they expect from DocMagic.”
Despite these changes, Iannitti is quick to remind us that, at its core, DocMagic is and always has been a technology company.
“In every aspect of what we do we’ve leveraged technology to such an extent that it’s what allows us to be on the cutting, even arguably, bleeding edge of just about everything we do.”
