Mortgage technology

NYLX, a Mt. Arlington, N.J.-based provider of mortgage technology, has announced the launch of LoanBook, which it calls the industry's first pricing engine specifically designed to help lenders achieve the highest profits on each loan they sell to secondary-market investors.LoanBook continually monitors loans in process, compares them against available loan programs, and automatically alerts the secondary manager of pricing improvements, the company said. "LoanBook is the first pricing engine that leads secondary managers to revenue that would otherwise be left on the table," said John Alexander, president of NYLX. "Lenders get higher profits without adding more volume, more staff, or increasing costs to the borrower." A Web-based subscription service, LoanBook searches its preloaded database of approved investor programs, locates the program with the optimal yield based on each loan's unique criteria, and notifies the secondary manager when loans reach a specific profit threshold based on dollar revenue or yield spread, the company said. NYLX can be found online at http://www.nylx.com.

Citing the subprime mortgage crisis, MortgageBrokers.com Holdings Inc., Toronto, has announced the suspension of plans to enter the U.S. mortgage market.The company said it would suspend the plans "until such time as the full economic effect of the current market turmoil is known." MortgageBrokers.com said the U.S. downturn will prevent it from reaching previous revenue projections for this year, and that the fallout from the crisis has affected the performance of its Canadian operations. The company reported that it had increased its national sales force of mortgage agents from 247 to 307 in the third quarter, but that the ramp-up of newly recruited agents "has been slower than expected." The mortgage brand and technology firm can be found online at http://www.mortgagebrokers.com.

ISGN Technologies Ltd., has acquired Inuva, an India-based provider of information processing, business process outsourcing, and application software consulting.ISGN, a provider of end-to-end technology systems and services to the mortgage industry, is part of the K.K. Birla Group, an Indian industrial group. The acquisition adds mortgage-specific knowledge process outsourcing capabilities and further supports ISGN's strategy of providing a full line of services and solutions for the U.S. mortgage industry. Based in Kolkata, India, Inuva offers KPO services such as loan production and post-closing, title closing and settlement, mortgage servicing, and secondary-market services. With more than 300 mortgage industry professionals, Inuva uses a hybrid onsite-offshore model with delivery centers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Miami, Fla. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.isgn.com and http://www.inuva.com.

Fast Home Auction, Tampa, Fla., has launched an auction website that enables real estate professionals to buy and sell defaulted and foreclosed properties across the country "with the ease of the familiar online merchandise auction concept."Fast Home Auction president James Case said asset managers of real estate owned have traditionally posted properties on their own websites, but most people don't know how to find them. "Online auctions present an efficient mechanism for buyers to acquire foreclosed property from the REO asset managers," Mr. Case said. FastHomeAuction.com uses e-mail notification to allow potential bidders to receive notices of forthcoming auctions in areas they specify. "The site makes it easy to list and bid on properties for sale using the online format we've become so familiar with over the years," Mr. Case said. The auction website can be found at http://www.fasthomeauction.com.

Citadel Investment Group -- which recently bought subprime lender ResMae -- has agreed to pump $2.5 billion in cash into E*Trade Financial, a company that has been struggling under the weight of huge mortgage writedowns.The New York-based E*Trade revealed the cash infusion plan Thursday morning, noting that its chief executive officer, Mitchell Caplan, had resigned from the company. A few weeks ago E*Trade's share price crumbled after a stock analyst said there was a 15% chance the online financial services firm would go bankrupt. (E*Trade denied the claim.) E*Trade, which has $12.8 billion in mortgage-backed bonds on its balance sheet, lost $58 million in the third quarter. The company can be found online at http://www.investor.etrade.com.

Responding to the "swift shift in investor appetites for conforming and government loans," Loan-Score Decisioning Systems LLC, Irvine, Calif., has announced the integration of its automated underwriting platform with Fannie Mae's Desktop Underwriter.The company said the integration offers instant and accurate determination of "product eligibility, pricing, and complex underwriting for all types of loan products." Particularly noteworthy, the company said, is that the DU integration also allows lenders to access the Federal Housing Administration's AU system, TOTAL Mortgage Scorecard for the underwriting of FHA loans. Because Loan-Score's AUS retrieves and stores the actual DU findings data, along with the unique Fannie Mae Casefile ID, Loan-Score said its clients are enabled to sell to Fannie Mae-approved seller-servicers. The system is offered as a stand-alone platform or as components. Loan-Score can be found online at http://www.loan-score.com.

CBC Cos., a provider of credit and risk management solutions based in Columbus, Ohio, has merged with DataVerify, a provider of mortgage risk assessment and fraud prevention systems based in Chesterfield, Mo.CBC said it will leverage DataVerify's fraud and data integrity analytics, rules, and scoring to help solve mortgage risk problems faced by financial markets and institutions. DataVerify's solutions automate most of the data validation steps in the lending process. According to CBC, the resulting benefits to DataVerify and CBC customers include: increased loan production and revenues; mitigation of financial and reputational risks; conformity with regulations; and lower operational costs. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.cbcinnovis.com and http://www.dataverify.com.

Compass Analytics LLC, San Francisco, has announced the acquisition of LION Inc.'s Tuttle Risk Management Services unit and related assets.The terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to the announcement, the combination creates "the largest outsourced risk management provider in the industry." A company spokesman said the two entities would continue to operate independently until a common platform is created. The products and services offered include outsourced hedge advisory and third-party valuation services as well as hosted and licensing options for pipeline risk management, servicing rights valuation, and whole-loan trading analytics serving mortgage banks, banks, thrifts, credit unions, servicers, investment banks, mortgage insurance companies, and agencies. Tuttle's LockPoint Xtra and LION's Web properties were not involved in the sale. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.compass-analytics.com and http://www.lioninc.com.

MortgageWire has learned that veteran e-mortgage expert Tim Anderson has been hired as president and chief executive of Houston-based SigniaDocs.Mr. Anderson will be charged with developing a platform based on mortgage investor guidelines that go beyond Fannie Mae electronic quality control guidelines to actually warrant compliance, leveraging Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization SMART Docs. He said he welcomes the opportunity to prove the value of electronic mortgages as a fundamental cure for flaws in the mortgage creation process revealed in the ongoing mortgage meltdown, which brought a cascade of buybacks related to compliance. Signia boasts of having built its system "from the ground up as three-tier, very secure, completely browser-based, backed by a wealth of experience" through a management team of mortgage industry veterans. Mr. Anderson was most recently employed by Stewart. SigniaDocs can be found online at http://www.signiadocs.com.

Origination vendor Mortgage Cadence Inc., Denver, has launched Mortgage Cadence Prelude, a point-of-sale tool designed for use by lenders moving into the growing reverse mortgage lending channel.With four of the top five reverse lenders in the country already using its Mortgage Cadence Orchestrator application, the company says there is a desperate need for reverse lending POS software that is easy to use and interfaces well with origination platforms at the nation's largest reverse mortgage lending firms. Mortgage Cadence Prelude will not be a preconfigured version of Mortgage Cadence Orchestrator and is not designed for lenders already using that application, the company said. Rather, it is point-of-sale software specifically written for the reverse mortgage market. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.mortgagecadence.com.

E*Trade Financial -- which on Friday admitted that it has $450 million in "exposure" on its asset-backed securities portfolio -- saw its stock price crumble 55% Monday morning after an analyst at Citigroup said there's a 15% chance the depository could go bankrupt.As of MortgageWire's deadline, E*Trade's shares were trading down $4.71, at $3.89. Its 52-week high is $26. In a recent public filing, the New York-based company said it has set aside $240 million to cover "deterioration" in its home equity portfolio. Its ABS portfolio totals $3 billion. Even though E*Trade could take more hits on the portfolio in the quarters ahead, the company said in a statement that it "expects to remain well capitalized based on regulatory standards." In September, E*Trade closed its residential wholesale division. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.etrade.com.

Loan-Score Decisioning Systems LLC, a provider of automated underwriting systems based in Irvine, Calif., has completed what it terms "a comprehensive integration" with PCLender, a Web-based software provider for mortgage bankers.The integration provides PCLender's clients with "seamless access" to Loan-Score's AUS directly from its loan enterprise lending platform, according to Loan-Score. "While there are many product and pricing engines available on the market today that purport to offer AU, the vast majority of them do not come close to returning the complex, layered-risk analysis required of a true automated underwriting solution," said Scott Burgess, president of Loan-Score. "The use of Loan-Score's AUS through PCLender ensures that loans unequivocally meet the many nuances of investor guidelines to find best-fit homes for loans, and that those loans are not later kicked back by highly discriminating investors on a trivial technicality." The companies can be found online at http://www.loan-score.com and http://www.pclender.com.

Clearwater, Fla.-based eMason Inc. has announced Bank of America's implementation of the eMason Clarifire enterprise-level application to automate workflow processes and communications with vendors and enable managing by exception.The company said that within 30 days of implementing Clarifire, 3,600 Bank of America internal and external users had reduced paper, phone calls, and e-mail by more than 90%; increased end-to-end process efficiency; and realized a 25% reduction in the cost of business. First implemented on the mortgage side to handle foreclosures, bankruptcies, and loss mitigation, Clarifire is now being implemented in the bank's consumer-lending division to automate handling of car loans and other consumer products. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.emason.biz and http://www.bankofamerica.com.

Cogent Road, a provider of Internet-based applications headquartered in San Diego, has launched Funding Suite, a redesigned database architecture underlying the credit report that allows new opportunities and products for brokers.Included in Funding Suite are the following features: Intelligent Credit Report with X-Ray technology; dynamic reimbursement; PaySaver loan officer billing option; automatic discounting; and universal credit file reissuing. The company said Intelligent Credit Report is a dynamic display of client credit data allowing faster, more accurate prequalifying assessment. In Funding Suite 3.0, all tradelines provide an interpretation of the payment history in easy-to-understand language, making even the most complex tradelines more easily understood, Cogent Road said. X-Ray technology conducts a deep analysis of the underlying credit data used to calculate the credit score to identify potential errors that may be harming the score along with the points gained by fixing such errors. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.cogentroad.com.

IAC, New York, has separated itself into five publicly traded companies, one of which is named after and includes LendingTree, an online mortgage lender and realty services exchange based in Charlotte, N.C."LendingTree, obviously under pressure from the macro real estate and mortgage environment, is nevertheless a valuable asset with a great brand and will be freed to participate fully with its own currency," IAC said. C.D. Davies will continue to serve as chief executive officer of the new LendingTree, a company that RealEstate.com, Domania, GetSmart, Home Loan Center, and iNest also will be part of. Bret Violette will continue to serve as president of RealEstate.com. IAC can be found on the Web at http://www.iac.com, and LendingTree can be found at http://www.lendingtree.com.

Xinnix, an Atlanta-based provider of sales training and leadership development programs for mortgage professionals, has announced the addition of a resource center to its website that provides industry news, research, training tips, and interactive tools.The Xinnix Resource Center offers news on the economy, equity and Treasury markets, and mortgage interest rates. Visitors can register for access to the resource center via the Xinnix website. Casey Cunningham, founder and president of Xinnix, said it will be "an important vehicle for reinforcing the principles and techniques" taught in the company's sales, leadership, and coaching programs. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.xinnix.com.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling, Silver Spring, Md., has announced the launch of a Spanish-language version of its recently unveiled Homeowner Crisis Resource Center website to assist borrowers who are not fluent in English.The Homeowner Crisis Resource Center provides direct access to certified housing counselors and homeowner information and financial tools. The center can be found at http://www.housinghelpnow.org, and the Spanish-language version can be found at http://www.nopierdastuhogar.org.

Foreclosure.com, Boca Raton, Fla., has announced the formation of a partnership with IndyMac Bank to market and facilitate the sale of thousands of real-estate-owned properties via the Internet.Foreclosure.com said it maintains a nationwide database of more than 1.2 million listings that includes foreclosures, preforeclosures, bankruptcies, for-sale-by-owner homes, and tax liens. Potential homeowners can view the REO listings and foreclosed properties owned by IndyMac Bank online and set appointments with listing agents/brokers to view the properties. "Our research indicates that only 17% of a traditional real estate marketing budget is spent online," said Brad Geisen, Foreclosure.com's founder, president, and chief executive officer. "That means sellers are spending 83% of their marketing dollars chasing only 20% of the buyers. Put simply, times are changing, and the practices of lenders and others involved in the sale of real estate need to change along with it." The companies can be found online at http://www.foreclosure.com and http://www.indymacbank.com.

Fidelity National Information Services Inc., a Jacksonville, Fla.-based provider of technology services to financial institutions, has announced a plan to spin off its Lender Processing Services division as a publicly traded company.The plan, recently approved by the company's board of directors, contemplates that FNIS will contribute the assets of the division to a newly formed subsidiary in exchange for 100% of the new company's common stock and approximately $1.6 billion of its debt securities. If approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission and favored with a tax-free ruling by the Internal Revenue Service, FNIS would distribute 100% of the new company's common stock to FNIS shareholders in a tax-free spinoff, the company said. William P. Foley II, executive chairman of FNIS, said the reason for the spinoff is that the company's Transaction Processing Services and Lender Processing Services divisions are "distinct and unique businesses that serve different customers, operate in different markets, and attract different investors." The company can be found online at http://www.fidelityinfoservices.com.

Stewart Lender Services Inc., Houston, has announced the introduction of the Pre-Foreclosure Report, which is designed to help attorneys and lenders determine the condition of a property title when the borrowers are in financial distress.The new report provides a quick "snapshot" of the subject residential property, including a two-owner search, vesting information, open liens, judgments, pending lawsuits, tax information, and other data, the company said. Stewart Lender Services, a subsidiary of Stewart Information Services Corp., can be found on the Web at http://www.stewart.com.