Mortgage industry compliance and risk management are expected to become “quite substantial in the next five years,” according to one of the co-founders of Digital Risk, a company planning to add 1,000 full-time professional positions in this area during 2012 alone.
Positions the company plans to fill include experienced underwriters, attorneys, processors, compliance experts and appraisers. By year-end 2012, the Orlando, Fla.-based company will nearly double its headcount to 2,300.
“I wish the government [would] help us and finish all the regulations,” said Peter Kassabov, one of Digital Risk's three co-founders and its president. “Dodd-Frank is not completed yet and there are a lot of moving pieces on the state level of regulation. This makes everybody's jobs-not only ours in trying to help with compliance and risk management, but also our clients' jobs-very difficult.”
Jeffrey C. Taylor, managing director and one of the other co-founders of Digital Risk, said he agrees with Kassabov’s viewpoint for regulation matters to get resolved. “With all the different regulating bodies trying to fit into a box what the mortgage industry looks like for the next cycle, it's creating a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
“The one thing that everybody is certain of, if they are going to be in the residential mortgage space right now, is that they need to be ultra-careful, to make sure that they are compliant,” he said.
Digital Risk, which conducts analysis on over $8 billion in performing and nonperforming loans each month and anticipates doubling this figure by the end of 2012, expects to either expand existing operations in Texas, Colorado or California, or open new facilities in Florida as soon as March to handle the anticipated growth.
“We are using our default analytics to preemptively identify at-risk borrowers so loan modification efforts can begin earlier, keeping more people in their homes,” Kassabov said. “We estimate that these analytics will trigger an incremental 300,000 loan modifications over the coming year.”
