TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
Issue link: http://digital.themreport.com/i/125049
Department S e c on da r y M a r k e t a na ly t ic s se r v ic i ng or ig i nat ion ANALYTICS change in the mortgage industry, says Randy Gillis, SVP of technology related enterprises, information management for Lender Processing Services (LPS), Inc., in Jacksonville, Florida. Gillis is chairman of the Strategic Planning Committee for the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO), the leading standards development body for the residential and commercial real estate finance industries. As a result of new Consumer Protection Financial Bureau rules, any activity that touches the consumer, such as disclosure documentation, must be delivered in a timely manner, which can become an issue if there are changes in valuation (e.g., appraisal coming in lower than expected), Gillis says. On the servicing side, investors are seeking more granular and timelier information on loan activity in a single form, leading to the "expanding footprint of dramatic, uniform mortgage data," which means tighter controls are needed for loan-level reporting. As short sales and other loan workouts continue to advance, these deals also increasingly rely on accurate, detailed, near realtime loan-level reporting data, Gillis adds. LPS is helping lenders meet these needs through a framework of technologies, some developed by third parties and others that are proprietary and integrated to provide users with near real-time data and reporting details LPS Applied Analytics provides comprehensive data and analytic solutions, including lien alerts, property reports, and SiteX AVM, which uses proprietary algorithms to provide users with updated valuation information. LPS' proprietary technology also includes its loan servicing platform—MSP—which handles more than half of the mortgages in the U.S. by dollar volume. The platform enables mortgage bankers to automate all areas of loan servicing, including loan-level reporting, servicing setup and maintenance, customer service, cashiering, escrow 64 | The M Report administration, investor accounting, default management, and corporate accounting. A closely related technology is LPS Loan Quality Gateway, an open technology platform that provides the integrations, data management, decisioning, and workflow management required for current and emerging loan quality programs through a 24/7 data exchange connected to more than 15,000 of the mortgage industry's service and solution providers. Through this platform, lenders can now access new MI products through LPS to order rate quotes, eligibility and rate quote checks, as possible and to see when and who made any changes to the original electronic images, says Wayland T. Pond IV, VP of sales and marketing for Vienna, Virginia-based VirPack, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary of providing paperless loan solutions to the mortgage industry. "Our goal with retail is to generate loan applications and collect documentation and be able to submit it electronically through our Enterprise Center," Pond explained. VirPack's Enterprise Center 2.0 enables users to track when documents are received at the The expectation for end-to-end electronic documentation will only continue to grow as consumers become more adept and comfortable with electronic documentation. and MI certificates. The LPS Loan Quality Gateway is a strategic component of LPS' origination technology growth initiative. One of the issues in being able to provide accurate loanlevel reporting is the ability to provide clean, normalized data, Gillis adds. So LPS will continue to work closely with MISMO to further enhance transparency in loan-level reporting. Faster Digitization Means Faster Processing S takeholders also want to be able to have documents in an electronic format as quickly loan-level, to see who adds each document, and to record everyone who saves a different version of any document. Such tracking has always been important but is even more so today, Pond explains, due to the increased importance of quality control, compliance, and on the documentation on file. As a result, VirPack added new features and functionality to Enterprise Center in the last couple of years. The last version includes more loan-level checklists, streamlined documentation capabilities, and an indexing process. Now electronic documents can be submitted a variety of ways, including via a Web portal that the lender can brand, an email plug-in, and a virtual printer driver that enables the submitter (borrower, loan officer, or other party) to submit electronic documents directly, rather than going through the intermediate steps of printing and scanning. This is important because bank statements, W-2s, and other typical documentation are normally available in electronic format from the source, Pond explains. Enterprise Center 2.0 also includes TaskQ , a proprietary application that allows for customized workflow by tasking the loan through each step of the loan process. The loan can be tasked to an individual or a team, and the application provides task reporting and also manages task duration and performance. In mid-March, VirPack expanded its relationship with IDS, Inc., a provider of mortgage documents and compliance, to automate the document indexing process and secure transmission of the package to VirPack's Enterprise Center. By going to electronic documentation as early as possible in the process, VirPack enables its customers to handle greater loan volumes while continuing to meet the loan-level reporting needs of all parties, Pond says. One client, he notes, was able to double its loan volume with only two additional full-time employees by using Enterprise Center 2.0. The expectation for end-to-end electronic documentation will only continue to grow as consumers become more adept and comfortable with electronic documentation, according to Pond. "For those who are tech savvy, this is the easiest way to deal with lending," he said. "This will increase with more use of iPods and iPhones moving forward. When people receive things electronically, they want to submit it that way; they want to be more environmentally conscious." VirPack further recognizes the environmental impact of electronic (rather than paper) documentation though a partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation in which VirPack is planting one tree for every 10,000 pages imaged by its clients.