Ginnie Mae will soon be in the cloud

Ginnie Mae's securitization platform is currently offline, and will be for the next couple of days. When the platform reemerges on October 25, it will be fully on the cloud.

The migration of Ginnie's platform aims to "enable more efficient operations with business partners and provide agility and speed in current and future planned operations," said Barbara Cooper-Jones, senior vice president of the Office of Enterprise Data and Technology Solutions at Ginnie Mae, in a written statement. 

The "planned business outage" happening this week and next, is part of Ginnie Mae's ongoing modernization initiative to make its systems quicker and more agile for its stakeholders.

This migration has been in the works for five years. So far, the government guarantor has moved its financial and accounting operations, and website and web services to the cloud.

There are also future plans to "migrate the back-end securitization platform from one public cloud to another along with other applications and services," Cooper-Jones said. 

Ginnie Mae's operations are currently stored in two data centers, one is in a FedRAMP public cloud, while the other data center is in a private cloud. 

"As Ginnie Mae reimagines its platform, cloud will also provide flexibility and more secure interoperable operations," Cooper-Jones said. "Product flexibility is one of the major benefits of cloud adoption and it will drive more efficiency, enable rapid development, and meet ever changing market demands."

There are "many new business opportunities and capabilities" that will be able to happen due to the migration "that will be transformational and allow for advancing homeownership for borrowers," she added. 

In September, Ginnie Mae's President Alanna McCargo gave a sneak peek of what these new business opportunities could be.

McCargo noted the cloud migration will pave the way for Ginnie to provide more transparency in its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data disclosures, which provide MBS investors with information to support sustainable investing decisions. 

"In the context of ESG, [the cloud migration] will enable so many things and especially on the data front that we need to give transparency to investors and strengthen the value proposition of Ginnie Mae overall," McCargo said.

Apart from the migration, Ginnie Mae has also pushed forward with its digital collateral program.

In late spring, Ginnie Mae opened the door to new participants, after being in a pilot phase for close to two years with a limited number of approved participants.

The agency also hinted that its team is working to allow the commingling of eNotes and paper notes. Currently the digital collateral program allows for digital-only pools. But if the agency moves to allow commingling, then eNotes and paper notes can be bundled in the same pool.

Lynne Chandler, director of the digital collateral program at Ginnie Mae, said during a webinar that the agency "wants to make these things happen" and that enhancements are in the works.

"We'll see that first leg of being able to offer commingling," she said. "Our programmers are busily coding."