TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
Issue link: http://digital.themreport.com/i/211920
"When our reputation is at stake, we call Superior Home Services." Feature BPO provider; establish three pre-underwriting and two pre-closing quality-assurance checks; and require tighter upper and lower control limits for component activities (with incentives for achieving thresholds). A BPO provider leveraging a company's existing loan origination software or LOS technology offers a much quicker integration, reduced IT costs, use of current reporting metrics, and fewer risks related to information sharing and protection. "Another best practice includes the ability for the provider to offer a blended or integrated on- and offshore or right-sourced solution," Baker said. "This model allows for some components of the process to remain onshore while maximizing the offshore cost benefits in other areas." Consider tools that not only bring transparency and audit triggers to workflows behind mortgage transaction processing, but also ones that provide another layer of mitigation by offering secure portals to access, view, and perform required actions on documents. "Additional costs are driven out and the time to funding and margin for error input is further reduced," Haralampoudis said. The size of banks' compliance issues, as well as cost-savings and capacity management needs, seem to be constantly growing, but the biggest solution might not be the best in one regard. "Mid-tier BPOs provide a significant advantage, as they are lean and eager to engage as a true partner," Ariyur said. "They are more flexible and not hierarchical in nature. It is easier to engage with senior management and influence them to customize and modify operations in tune with the customer requirements. Without a doubt, they also have far stronger escalation frameworks and stronger accountability." Innovations in BPO M obility and analytics will be the two biggest drivers of ROI in BPO in the coming year, Santos asserted. "The ability to run outsourcing factories based on real-time analytics will allow tasks to be matched with capacity and skill levels, eliminating latent hold times and corrections of defects," he said. "Mobility devices will allow work to be produced remotely, any time of day or night, and incorporate suppliers, customers, and clients into the process. Increased self-service will result in mass customization opportunities." Analytics will change the way work gets prioritized and will be able to forecast bottlenecks, allowing BPO organizations to add variable capacity ahead of loan logjams, thereby reducing delays in the pipeline. "The ability to predict, based on loan attributes, which loans will close the fastest, which will require the most documentation, which will least likely fall out during the process, and which customers have the greatest needs, will allow for continuous re-distribution of work to allow for optimized throughput," Santos added. "Analytics will drive work prioritization routines, which will allow low-risk, highly organized customers to have a more optimal experience than higher-risk, less cooperative and committed customers." BPO will only get faster, easier, and more collaborative, whether it's third parties using smart data integration to team up on a loan file or depository institutions, title firms, appraisers, surveyors, and settlement agents requesting and submitting data through an online exchange "where information autopopulates systems without humans having to review, decipher, and enter data," Santos said. From transaction processing and account maintenance to loan modification and default management, Xerox offers scalable resources in the form of portals and dashboards, new automated classification tools and techniques, and, to Santos' point, advanced, predictive analytics that aggregate and model data to help the client gain a better understanding of customers, accounts, and transactions. Things like segmentation and clustering analytics applications improve operational performance and business activity monitoring. "Another analytics application includes detecting patterns or anomalies that would identify future at-risk borrowers or troubled loans so that proactive measures can be taken to prevent delinquency and default," Haralampoudis said. Baker added, "Beyond the development of a 'right-sourced' model BPO, a provider in the current environment should be able to offer a detailed transactional fee structure. By offering this innovative customized transactional approach, [the service provider] is able to offer highly competitive pricing for both on- and offshore delivery." Ariyur says the evolution of the BPO space is from mere process replication to process improvement, from cost arbitrage to continuous transformation of mortgage efficiencies, and from outsourcing to investing in a common culture and innovation plan. Who do you rely upon? THE LEADER IN HAZARD INSURANCE RECOVERY & PROPERTY REPAIR MANAGEMENT 800.548.2858 www.supersvcs.com 15279 N. Scottsdale Rd. Suite 400 Scottsdale, AZ 85254 The M Report | 23