Rocket Mortgage loans now offered to a community bank's customers

Nashville, Tennessee-based Fourth Capital Bank integrated Rocket Mortgage's digital loan application process onto its digital banking platform, the companies announced Tuesday.

The collaboration is made possible through Rocket's partnership with Q2 Holdings, a Texas-based fintech that offers third-party products to community banks and credit unions. A variety of technology products are housed in Q2's marketplace platform, which the company describes as an "app store-like experience" allowing "financial institutions [to] evaluate, select and deploy applications from a catalog of pre-integrated third-party products with no up-front investment."

Fourth Capital Bank is the first depository to incorporate Rocket Mortgage onto its banking platform from Q2's marketplace. In this collaboration, customers of Fourth Capital will have access to Rocket Mortgage and the Michigan-based lender will take "care of everything related to the loan and servicing."

"Rather than trying to build a mortgage lending service ourselves from scratch, we launched the award-winning Rocket Mortgage solution through Q2's Innovation Studio Marketplace," said Brian Heinrichs, CEO of Fourth Capital Bank, in a written statement.

The partnership between Q2 and Rocket Mortgage was unveiled in mid-August, at the same time that Santander Bank announced that its customers could get home loans through a separate arrangement with Rocket. 

Rocket's partnership with Q2 creates another avenue for the Michigan-based lender to beef up its origination business and possibly attract new customers to its other services and products, which include auto loans, rooftop solar systems and personal loans.

The lender has also touted its Rocket Money application, formerly known as TrueBill, as being key to making contact with future first-time homebuyers. The lender's application includes millions of members who don't have mortgages with the lender. 

"That could literally be a game changer for how a mortgage company does business on the purchase side," said Brian Brown, chief financial officer at Rocket Companies, during a webinar hosted by Fitch Ratings in January. "So that diversification is a big deal."