Among the issues Sanjeev Malaney, CEO of collaborative document services provider Capsilon, sees as likely to come up during the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention this year is the continued evolution of MISMO standards.
MISMO's evolution continues to make it easier to adopt some of these industry technology standards, he said. As a result, “I think you will see more adoption,” said Malaney.
The MBA just recently said it would resume running the day-to-day operations of MISMO, which is an acronym for Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization and also is the Spanish word for “same.” Previous, Merscorp had been running the organization for the MBA.
Malaney said he has been involved with MISMO and its committee for some time on standardizing the automated industry taxonomy.
If a third-party originator sells a loan to an investor, for example, MISMO helps provide a sort of standardized form of communication so that the respective automation used by both entities recognize a document/its data as, say, a 1003 application.
“That's a very simplified example,” he said, but it represents the general concept, that MISMO seeks to “standardize the way you can exchange information without involving a human being.”
MISMO and the MBA have “been very effective, in my opinion,” in doing this, Malaney said, noting that MISMO brings together people “who are extremely effective in setting standards.”
But the process takes time, he noted.
“It takes many, many years to get consensus.”
MISMO, he said, has committee meetings throughout the year that individuals may attend over the telephone.
When asked if there is another particular issue Capsilon or Malaney have been involved with, in doing business with mortgage bankers, he said, “I think the only issue that we find is just, 'Can you scale?'”
Malaney said there tends to be some disbelief about the scalability of his system. “Over time, we have had to build proof points around that.”
The volume of people who look at an average loan file multiplied by the amount of pages in a loan file when investors acquire that file can be daunting, Malaney noted. He said there can be 3 million to 4 million pieces of paper or the equivalent involved in the transmission of loan files to investors, which can translate into 3 million to 4 million images. As a result, he said he gets a lot of questions about whether there is capacity to handle these and as to whether the processes used to do so have been audited.
He said the company has “no trouble serving banks going all the way up to the largest bank in the country.
“It's not a problem. We've continued to invest very heavily in making our systems more scalable.”
He said the history of his company has evolved from its initial goal to help smaller lenders in particular become more operationally efficient, to a second phase in which the company's technology helped lenders now collaborate with their branches.
The third phase, which he said the company will be discussing at MBA, involves, “How do we get the industry connect across organizational boundaries?”
— Austin Kilgore contributed to this report
