TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
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M R EP O RT | 5 MTECH Evaluating Assets and Mitigating Risk INCENTER ACQUIRES EDGEMAC I ncenter LLC has announced the addition of Edgemac to its family of companies. Founded in 2006, Edgemac helps investors, originators, and other industry participants evaluate loan quality when buying, selling, or securitiz- ing mortgages. "In an industry that is always balancing the competing needs for agility and risk management, Edgemac's services are a welcome addition to Incenter's offerings," said Bruno Pasceri, President of Incenter. "The company is well- positioned to help institutions capitalize on the active MSR trad- ing, securitization, and purchase markets, separately and with our other Incenter firms." Edgemac also offers loan file due diligence and related document management services to support the closing, purchase, sale, and securitization of residential and business-purpose mortgage loans. "This is an exciting time for Edgemac to join Incenter, and complement sister companies in the capital markets, title under- writing, appraisal management, and additional segments," said Robin Auerbach, President, CEO and Founder of Edgemac. "I'm thrilled to collaborate with likeminded leaders who share a strong commitment to advancing the mortgage industry." Educating Home Buyers Nationwide TRANSUNION AND UMORTGAGE PARTNER WITH FINLOCKER ON CONSUMER EDUCATION U Mortgage has partnered with TransUnion and Fin- Locker to provide consum- ers with the USafe app, making financial literacy and personal financial management more ac- cessible. Powered by FinLocker, the app provides users with: Personalized journeys to monitor and im- prove their credit health through TransUnion; tools to manage their finances, establish savings goals, project cash flow, and budget to pay down debt and save for a down payment; and educational resources on how to manage credit and credit cards, pay for college, prepare for the mortgage process; and more. "Credit is fundamental to homeownership and it's important that consumers—especially those within underserved communi- ties—have access to tools that provide financial literacy on how they may build credit to become successful homeowners," said Joe Mellman, SVP of Mortgage at TransUnion. "When consumers have a better understanding of their individual mortgage readi- ness and the various financing options available, there's a far greater chance they will success- fully complete the home buying process." Easing the Application Process NEW TECH FROM STAIRCASE REDUCES WAIT AND CLOSING TIMES S taircase has launched new click-to-deploy technology that enables lenders to access a wider number of third-party service providers in waterfall fash- ion through their loan origination system (LOS). The new technol- ogy removes the process of inte- grating new services and elimi- nates wait times when accessing automated borrower verifications, and document classification, and data extraction services. Currently, lenders often must verify a borrower's information manually when their chosen partner cannot fully complete the process. Many lenders also do not have access to machine learning- based document classification and data extraction technologies within their LOS that can pull data from scanned images and PDFs and use it to populate the loan application. This means they must pull information from vari- ous partners, email the borrower for more information, or type in information by hand, creating extra manual work that can add a week to the loan process. Staircase's new technology provides an automated, integrated loan processing workflow that starts with a lender's preferred service partner for borrower veri- fications, document classification and data extraction. If there are no results or incomplete results, Staircase automatically goes to other partners in waterfall fashion until the process is complete. The result is an average reduction of 20 minutes of loan processing time, and a reduction of four to six days in application-to-closing time. "Countless lenders have loans ready to close that have been sitting in their pipelines for up to two weeks because they don't have automation to determine the optimal service for each borrower scenario," said Adam Kalamchi, Founder and CEO of Staircase. "Staircase gives lenders the ability to create sophisticated workflows for every unique loan file, so their teams can focus on delivering the absolute best customer service instead of wasting valuable time on manual tasks." Through Staircase, lenders can configure their own waterfall of services based on their preferred partners or based on loans or loan statuses. Information that needs to be reverified for any reason—such as a closing date change—can be automatically reverified and up- dated without the lender having to do anything. Staircase provides verifications in the form of a PDF and directly through their LOS. All required data is also automati- cally extracted and updated in the loan file. "Credit is fundamental to homeownership and it's important that consumers— especially those within underserved communities—have access to tools that provide financial literacy on how they may build credit to become successful homeowners." —Joe Mellman, SVP of Mortgage, TransUnion