Culture, style, capability and flexibility all are important aspects for lenders when choosing a firm to be an outsource partner in the document preparation field.
Docu Prep Inc. president Scott Buchanan said not all companies in his business handle their work in the same fashion. His company’s technology architecture delivers the product either server to server or a feeder application to server.
There is a lot to creating a match between provider and client, he said. “Style, perspective about the business and how you approach it,” among other things, are some of the considerations.
Compliance is one area that is a common focus for these providers. Ann Savage, Docu Prep’s chief legal counsel and compliance officer, noted clients are concerned about compliance, and the fact that it is more complicated than in the past has just added another layer of urgency into the mix.
Smaller clients, who might not have the resources to keep up with the myriad of changes on their own, are relying on Docu Prep more for that kind of assistance.
The company does a loan analysis at each stage of the loan, starting at initial disclosure, and again at redisclosure and closing. For example, this analysis looks at whether for compliance purposes the loan is acceptable for the government-sponsored enterprises. It also looks at whether the loan might violate state or federal high-cost loan tests.
Lenders get to know whether they have a good loan or need to make changes before closing, Savage said.
Buchanan added the company’s executives in discussing this type of service offering said the idea was not to put a loan into the pipeline if it out of step compliance-wise. It helps the clients from having to clean up something after the fact, but rather on the front where it is easy to correct.
Ed Wallace, chief integration officer, added Docu Prep looked at this from a lender perspective because that was the background everybody came from. Back-room mistakes can be devastating to a company. So it looks to catch things up front, so the customer does not face that devastation.
Savage added that the lender’s own compliance teams are getting more involved in the integration process and taking a lot more control.
Lenders get a warning that something needs to be fixed or they can’t get documents.
Indecomm Global Services Mortgage Services Division has expanded in the last couple of years because of two acquisitions: Mortgage Dynamics Inc., a consulting and outsourcing firm, which is now the lending solutions group, and U.S. Recording, which provides title settlement solutions, now known as the document management group, said Dana Vinzant, senior vice president of U.S. mortgage operations, mortgage services division.
That latter group is responsible for all of the solutions provided to Indecomm’s clients in final docs situations and post-closing situations.
Indecomm has an application called ViewPoint for final document management. It lets lenders “fine-tune and get a handle on what their final docs look like, what needs to be followed up.
“That’s been a long time coming in our industry. Final docs was kind of an afterthought,” Vinzant said. In the past lenders might have had little concern about items missing from those docs after closing. Now it’s become a big problem in the industry, especially in today’s markets.
If a loan does happen to go for securitization, “every single piece of paper has to be there, it has to be recorded properly, it has to be in the right lien position,” she said, adding that is the expertise of the document management group’s staff.
Indecomm does not create or maintain mortgage documents, she explained. The company, in the document area, is being an “invisible extension to who they already are.
“The majority of our lenders are working with some type of doc prep company for those types of forms to be utilized through their origination process.”
Indecomm is opening a new mortgage lending and servicing solutions outsourcing facility in Charlotte, N.C. The company promotes outsourcing as a way for lenders to convert fixed costs into variable ones, pointing out if they have hire permanent staff to meet a short-term need, they will incur costs which in the long run will be prohibitive.
When working with lenders on closing documents, Indecomm provides all of the figures, make sure it passes the testing for tolerances and work directly with the closing agent on behalf of the lender to make sure the right documents get closed, Vinzant explained.
The company recently hired 160 people to handle the expansion of services that it is offering. By the end of year, the lending solutions group will have added 500 people, she said.
With firms becoming even more cost conscious, Indecomm is seeing companies that want to thin down their expense structure engaging its services.
