Sales and capital markets don’t always pull in the same direction. One side is built to grow volume, the other to manage risk and execution. At Citizens Financial Group, these dynamics blend seamlessly with a team that is aligned to leverage the strengths of the organization to support mutually beneficial relationships with correspondent lenders across the country.
MCT recently sat down with Blake Duncan, Vice President of Capital Markets and Brett Elrod, Assistant Vice President of Capital Markets, to discuss the Citizens Correspondent Lending business, which began as Franklin American Mortgage in 2001 and is one of the longest-running correspondent channels in the industry.
Last year, Citizens decided to move its bid management to MCT and put AutoBid®, AutoAOT®, and Investor Analytics to work across its buy-side workflow. Since the transition, Citizens has scaled its assignment of trade (AOT) channel and sharpened its bid execution.
Monthly AOT channel loan acquisitions are up ~750% and the number of lenders actively executing via AOT has more than tripled from 11 to 39 with 100% retention of prior AOT clients.
Additionally, the time to price and return a bid tape has dropped from 10 minutes down to 1 to 2 minutes. Over the same period, Citizens’ confirm rate climbed 81% from 13% to 24%.
Blake Duncan
Vice President, Capital Markets, Citizens Financial Group
Blake Duncan leads pricing and margin management for Citizens Financial Group, where he has spent the past 13 years driving growth, operational excellence, and strategic initiatives across mortgage pricing.
Throughout his tenure, he has held leadership roles spanning pipeline management, lock desk operations, secondary marketing, and pricing strategy. Blake is responsible for optimizing mortgage execution, managing pricing strategies, and leading process improvements that enhance profitability, risk management, and customer outcomes.
Brett Elrod
Assistant Vice President, Capital Markets, Citizens Financial Group
Brett Elrod is a Senior Mandatory Buyer and Assistant Vice President of Capital Markets at Citizens Financial Group.
He began working with Franklin American in 2002 in college before joining full time in 2007 on the lock desk, and subsequently managing the mandatory trade desk since 2010. Brett brings 17 years of capital markets experience, including 16 years running the mandatory channel.
Summary of Citizens’ Top Takeaways
After evaluating its options and moving bid management to MCT, Citizens has seen measurable gains across its correspondent investing operation.
By pairing MCT’s intuitive, highly configurable pricing platform with automated AOT execution and daily loan-level analytics, Citizens processes bids faster, prices more competitively, and has significantly scaled a delivery channel.
The results show up in both efficiency and growth with a faster bid turnaround, a higher confirm rate, larger average bid sizes, and a rapidly expanding base of lenders executing AOTs.
“We launched the AOT option prior to joining MCT, but we didn’t see the results we were hoping for. Fast forward to our new relationship with MCT, and it really was like flipping the switch. We immediately noticed improved utilization of the AOT feature as soon as we rolled it out.”
%
Increase in Monthly AOT Acquisitions
“We’re updating MSR values, spec pay-ups, and base margins easily on a daily basis with MCT, and in some systems that could be a very cumbersome task. That really keeps us sharp to the market and to the street, and it helps us on the P&L side.”
%
Confirm Rate Improvement
“Being able to live in MCT Marketplace and facilitate all of the bids through the site is a huge time savings from our side. With a click of a couple of buttons, we’re able to process a bid and return it to the seller.”
%
Time Savings on Bidding (10 Min down to 2 Min per Bid)
From a Legacy Platform to a Configurable, Intuitive System
Citizens’ correspondent channel is one of the longest-running in the industry, with 25 years of uninterrupted operation, sales coverage in 49 states, and roughly 650 lender partners across the country.
Its foundation is agency business, including conventional and conforming, FHA, VA, and USDA loans, and the team is expanding its product set as it completes a transition to the Encompass loan origination system.
When Citizens evaluated bid management platforms, configurability and ease of use rose to the top of the list.
“What we found with MCT Marketplace was how user-friendly it is and how easy it is to adjust configurations on the fly, whether that’s margins, spec pay-ups, or pricing holdbacks. Those controls are readily available within the platform, and that was a big part of our decision-making process. The downstream impact is the ability to train colleagues in a timely and efficient manner. It’s very intuitive.”
– Brett Elrod, Citizens Financial Group
- AutoBid® – MCT’s next-generation bid tape pricer. AutoBid automates the pricing of bid tapes and the acceptance of commitments, replacing spreadsheets and email with agency API connections, granular margin and restriction functionality, and full support for spec pay-ups, MSR values, and CRA identification.
- AutoAOT® – Automates bid tape AOT pricing, loan sale delivery, and the tri-party agreement required between lenders, investors, and broker-dealers. AutoAOT removes the calculation, paperwork, and back-office processing that once made the AOT channel difficult to offer at scale.
- Investor Analytics – Mortgage pipeline and loan sale data providing business intelligence for mortgage competitive analysis.
- MCT Marketplace® – The world’s first truly open mortgage loan exchange, where buyers can bid regardless of approval status, and sellers receive automated live pricing from every buyer on the platform. MCT Marketplace connects buyers and sellers in a unique, digital auction regardless of counterparty approval status. Through patented technology, sellers have access to the most robust set of take-outs, while buyers are seamlessly connected to the largest community of sellers in the U.S.
Accuracy and reliable processing mattered just as much as configurations and ease of use. Citizens needed to move bid tapes quickly without the rejections and manual workarounds it had encountered elsewhere, and it needed confidence that pricing was right the first time.
The relationship carried weight in the decision, too. Hunter credits Justin Grant, Paige Woodall, Manny Reyes, Luke Chang, and the broader MCT team for remaining engaged, responsive, and supportive throughout the partnership.
“The personal relationship and engagement with MCT is unlike what we’ve felt with others we’ve worked with or talked with, and that makes a big difference.”
– Blake Duncan, Citizens Financial Group
Faster Bids and Sharper, Same-Day Pricing
Roughly half of Citizens’ seller clients already transact on MCT Marketplace, so consolidating bid management on the platform removed steps and shortened turnaround.
Because MCT handles client mapping, onboarding a new MCT seller is close to instantaneous, and Citizens can begin bidding on that seller’s loans immediately.
“We can turn a tape around within one to two minutes, depending on tape size. Comparatively, it would take up to 10 minutes to process a bid on the old platform, and that’s before accounting for extra steps like emailing files to ourselves. All of our pricing is now embedded in MCT, so it’s easier for the client to ingest our pricing and get a true mark on where we are relative to competitors.”
– Brett Elrod, Citizens Financial Group
With MCT, Citizens also gained:
- Pricing agility, enabling daily updates to MSR values, spec pay-ups, and base margins to stay aligned with the market, reducing P&L exposure, and increasing its confirm rate from 13.5% to 24.4%.
- Built-in pricing safeguards, helping ensure pricing updates are applied accurately while minimizing human error through automated validation and system guardrails.
- Stronger bid performance, increasing its tape win rate to nearly 30% year-to-date while growing its average bid size by 21%, from $6.4 million to $7.7 million, as larger lenders returned and new sellers joined.
Turning On the AOT Channel with AutoAOT
Citizens first launched an AOT delivery option in the spring of 2024, before moving its bid management to MCT. The early results fell short of expectations.
Moving the channel onto MCT changed the trajectory almost immediately. Since the transition, monthly AOT trades are running roughly 8.5 times higher, from 4.9 to 42.0 per month, total monthly AOT volume has grown more than tenfold, and Citizens reached 95 AOT trades in June 2026.
The number of lenders actively executing AOTs more than tripled, from 11 to 39, with 100% retention of prior AOT clients and 28 new clients added.
“MCT built out a seamless process to accommodate AOTs from the seller standpoint. From an aggregator standpoint, all we have to do is click a couple of buttons to process the AOT. MCT’s relationship with Agile helps on the processing side, because the tri-party letters go directly to the broker-dealer. Having all of that set up for us has prevented human error on our end.”
– Brett Elrod, Citizens Financial Group
Even for sellers who are not on MCT Marketplace, a separate process lets Citizens apply the AOT price adjustment quickly, saving roughly 10 minutes per trade on a desk that can process up to 15 AOTs in a single day.
AOT delivery also offers sellers a meaningful bid-ask spread savings, anywhere from 1 to 6 ticks in normal markets, and MCT automatically factors those savings into best execution pricing, making Citizens’ AOT bids more competitive without requiring margin compression.
For the sales team, the ability to offer AOTs has become a door-opener.
“Just being able to say yes to the question of AOT availability is very valuable. We sell it, but it kind of sells itself. It’s given our sales team a lot of confidence to go into the market, answer yes to that question, and know they have the infrastructure behind them to deliver. It’s a great tool in the box, and it’s helped us deepen relationships and open doors to new opportunities.”
– Blake Duncan, Citizens Financial Group
Analytics That Drive Daily Pricing Decisions
Citizens’ capital markets team leans on MCT’s Investor Analytics every day to understand where it is winning and losing business and how to price accordingly.
“The variety of analytics MCT provides gives us deep insight into loan-level details and client behaviors, and that helps us decide how we should price for the day.
Whether we want a high-level overview or want to drill down into client-specific metrics, it’s a big piece of how we operate and strategize. It helps us identify where our volume growth has gone stale, understand why we’re falling short in certain areas, and then attack those areas. We’ve seen noticeable improvements in our win rates and competitiveness across the entire landscape.”
– Brett Elrod, Citizens Financial Group
That level of comparative, loan-level visibility is a step change from what Citizens had before, when the team often had to reach out to clients directly to gather the same intel.
Full Interview: Citizens Financial Group
What MCT Investor solutions is Citizens Financial Group currently using?
We’re using MCT’s bid pricing tool, AutoBid, to price our bid tapes, AutoAOT to automate our AOT delivery channel, and Investor Analytics to guide our daily pricing strategy.
Describe Citizens Financial Group’s role as a correspondent investor and what your capital markets operation looked like before MCT.
By virtue of the Franklin American Mortgage entity, which was acquired by Citizens, we’re one of the elder statesmen of correspondent lending. There aren’t many platforms that have been in existence for 25 years uninterrupted, and we have.
We have sales coverage in 49 states, every state except Hawaii, and a broad distribution of roughly 650 lender partners across the country. We’ve always been an agency investor at our core: conventional and conforming, FHA, VA, and USDA.
One of the things we’re excited about our transition to Encompass is leaving behind the limitations of our legacy platform and being able to lean into new product opportunities. Agency will always be our foundation, but we don’t anticipate remaining a 100% agency investor.
What were Citizens Financial Group’s primary objectives when evaluating investor solutions, and how did MCT’s bid pricing tool and AOT differentiate?
Step one was being able to process bid tapes quickly and efficiently, without running into issues where the system rejects a tape. The mapping process MCT built out more than meets our needs.
Accuracy is a big piece, and we haven’t found any pricing issues; there are a lot of guardrails and email alerts that protect us. Reporting and analytics were also important, being able to pull ad hoc reports and answer questions on the fly, which we couldn’t do easily with our previous vendor.
On top of the technology, we’ve known Justin Grant and several of the MCT traders for at least a decade, so we knew who we were dealing with. The personal relationship and engagement with MCT is unlike what we’ve felt with others we’ve worked with or talked with, and that makes a big difference.
Citizens Financial Group’s median bid response time improved from 28 minutes to 24 minutes, and the share of bids returned within 30 minutes rose from 53% to over 62%. What’s driving that operationally, and what does that speed mean for your seller relationships?
A big piece is that MCT owns a large share of the clients we’ve signed up, approaching 50% of the sellers we partner with. Being able to live in MCT Marketplace and facilitate all of the bids through the site is a huge time savings from our side. With a click of a couple of buttons, we’re able to process a bid and return it to the seller.
MCT also handles all of the client mapping for us, so when a new MCT customer comes on board, it’s a seamless transition for us to begin bidding on their loans immediately.
We can turn a tape around within one to two minutes, depending on tape size. Comparatively, it would take up to 10 minutes to process a bid on the old platform, and that’s before accounting for extra steps like emailing files to ourselves. All of our pricing is now embedded in MCT, so it’s easier for the client to ingest our pricing and get a true mark on where we are relative to competitors.
We’ve seen increased win rates and positive feedback, particularly from MCT clients, but from non-MCT clients as well.
Citizens Financial Group’s confirm rate rose from 13.5% to 24.4%, an 81% improvement. What do you attribute that to?
A lot of it comes down to pricing strategies we’ve implemented. We improved our MSR pricing considerably in 2026, and that, coupled with a CRA strategy targeting volume in the bank’s footprint, has really driven win rates.
MCT was able to get our MSR adjustments in place, and we’re updating MSR values, spec pay-ups, and base margins easily on a daily basis with MCT, and in some systems that could be a very cumbersome task. That really keeps us sharp to the market and to the street, and it helps us on the P&L side.
Not every system has the guardrails to validate that you’re updating the right things, but the MCT system, at this point, is foolproof.
How did AutoAOT change Citizens Financial Group’s ability to offer, manage, and scale the AOT channel?
We launched the AOT option in the spring of 2024, prior to joining MCT, but we didn’t see the results we were hoping for. Fast forward to our new relationship with MCT, and it really was like flipping the switch. We immediately noticed improved utilization of the AOT feature as soon as we rolled it out.
A lot of the improved utilization came from MCT clients, which proves MCT built a seamless process from the seller standpoint. From an aggregator standpoint, all we have to do is click a couple of buttons to process the AOT. MCT’s relationship with Agile helps on the processing side, because the tri-party letters go directly to the broker-dealer. Having all of that set up for us has prevented human error on our end.
Even for non-MCT clients, a separate process lets us enter data into an Excel file, upload it, and let the system do the work. It saves about 10 minutes per AOT, and there are days we do 15 AOTs. It’s material volume and material growth.
How does Citizens Financial Group position AOT availability as part of your correspondent value proposition?
Just being able to say yes to the question of AOT availability is very valuable. We sell it, but in a lot of ways it sells itself. Some of the capital markets teams we work with don’t need us to educate them, they just need the options.
It’s given our sales team a lot of confidence to go into the market and know they have the infrastructure behind them to deliver. It’s been most notable with mutual MCT clients, but we’re seeing success across the board. It’s a great tool in the box, and it’s helped us deepen relationships and open doors to new opportunities.
Citizens Financial Group’s average bid size increased from $6.4 million to $7.7 million, a 21% increase. What’s behind that?
As our efficiency and capabilities have improved, so have our win rates. We’re pushing a 30% tape win rate year to date, and that’s given our sales team more confidence to engage larger-scale lenders we weren’t pursuing before, including some that had been dormant and are now re-engaged.
The more success you have, the more opportunity you have with existing and new lender partners. Brett’s capital markets team can also leverage the tools in the platform to get more granular and prescriptive, whether it’s a loan attribute, a geo pay-up, or something specific with a coupon, and that’s helped us be more competitive than we were before.
How has Investor Analytics informed your pricing strategy and visibility into performance?
We look at it daily. The variety of analytics MCT provides gives us deep insight into loan-level details and client behaviors, and that helps us decide how we should price for the day.
Whether we want a high-level overview or want to drill down into client-specific metrics, it’s a big piece of how we operate and strategize.
It helps us identify where volume growth has gone stale, understand why we may be falling short, and attack those areas. We’ve seen noticeable improvements in our win rates and competitiveness across the entire landscape.
We look at loan-level color and commitment breakdowns daily to see where we’re doing well and where we’re lacking, so we can close uncompetitive gaps. With our prior vendor we had a little reporting, but nothing comparative; we were usually reaching out to clients ourselves to get intel rather than having it readily available.
How has MCT’s Investor Solutions team supported your adoption and ongoing use of MCT Marketplace?
It goes back to the personal relationship and engagement, which fits the culture of how we want to treat our lenders and customers. That earned a lot of trust on the front end.
Moving off a partner we’d been with for a long time was daunting, but we didn’t miss a beat after onboarding. Justin Grant, Paige Woodall, Manny Reyes, Luke Chang, and the rest of the team were supportive throughout, and everyone has stayed engaged and responsive to anything we bring up. That’s been the biggest thing we wanted to recognize, and it’s made a difference.
If you were told you could no longer use these tools, what would that mean for your team?
We wouldn’t be excited about pivoting elsewhere. We turned over a lot of rocks to find the best partner, and we feel like we selected the best one, so going elsewhere would feel like a step back.
Conclusion: Efficiency, Automation, and a Partnership That Scales
By moving bid management to MCT, Citizens gained a configurable, accurate pricing platform, an automated AOT channel that grew from a stalled experiment into a material source of volume, and daily analytics that sharpen its pricing decisions.
The combination of AutoBid, AutoAOT, and Investor Analytics, backed by hands-on support from the MCT team, has helped Citizens process bids faster, win more business, and give its sales organization the confidence to pursue lenders it had not engaged before.
Ready to achieve similar results? Schedule a demo to see how MCT’s investor solutions can help your organization price bid tapes faster, automate AOT delivery, and scale your correspondent channel.
Learn More:
