Mortgage technology

Framework, a Tarrytown, N.Y.-based technology company, was acquired last year by Bank of America, but now BoA has decided to cut its losses and shut the company down by the end of this year.A spokeswoman for BoA confirmed in an interview with Mortgage Wire that the lending institution has decided to close down the technology company. Framework provided an e-business platform in the form of its configurable enterprise software, called LendWare. With LendWare Workflow 3.0, Framework upgraded its Web-based software service component to enable the sharing of configuration and run-time information between different workflow engines. Earlier in the year the company announced plans to release an out-of-the-box version for smaller lenders because larger lenders were reluctant to buy bank-owned technology. (For more details, see the Nov. 8 issue of National Mortgage News.)

IndyMac Bancorp Inc., Pasadena, Calif., the holding company for IndyMac Bank, has reported pro forma net earnings of $56.4 million ($0.88 per share) for the third quarter, compared with net earnings of $49.7 million ($0.87 per share) a year earlier.The company said earnings were reported on a pro forma basis rather than under generally accepted accounting principles in order to provide comparability with its earnings reports in previous quarters. (The difference between GAAP and pro forma earnings in the third quarter stems from the implementation of SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 105 and purchase accounting adjustments related to IndyMac's acquisition of Financial Freedom Holdings Inc., the company said.) IndyMac produced a record $10.3 billion of mortgage loans in the third quarter, up 21% from the level of a year earlier, the company said. "The results this quarter were very strong due to solid execution on our two key strategies: to use our thrift portfolio capabilities to generate increased earnings and to increase market share as the mortgage industry transitions to a more normal post-refinance boom level," said Michael W. Perry. IndyMac's chairman and chief executive officer. IndyMac can be found online at http://www.indymacbank.com.

Fitch Risk, an affiliate of Fitch Ratings that provides risk technologies and services, has announced an agreement under which Freddie Mac will license Fitch Risk's OpVar software.The company said Freddie Mac will use the software's operational risk data collection, analysis, and reporting to improve Freddie's risk management capabilities. Fitch Risk said OpVantage, its operational risk division, is the first company to market operational risk software. The company can be found online at http://www.fitchrisk.com.

Fidelity Information Systems, Jacksonville, Fla., is investing millions of dollars to enhance its home equity line of credit servicing functionality.Fidelity said about half of its Mortgage Servicing Package customers currently have the HELOC functionality installed in their organizations. MSP is used to service some 30 million mortgage loans. As part of the enhancements, Fidelity said it intends to provide MSP users with credit card interfacing for HELOC loans. Fidelity said Dovenmuehle Mortgage, EMC Mortgage, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Aurora Loan Services are among the firms capitalizing on the HELOC benefits.

GatorSystems, a Pittsburgh-based unit of Fiserv Lending Solutions, has announced the introduction of GatorSearch, a Web-based abstracting platform designed to streamline the title examination process.The company said the system, developed in collaboration with New York-based Realty Data Corp., enables users to execute self-service title searches, thereby reducing the turnaround time associated with traditional abstracting. Those who don't choose to run reports from their own computers can use the system's Examination Network, a team of professional abstractors able to return a comprehensive report within eight hours of receiving the order, according to GatorSystems. "GatorSearch fundamentally changes the way title companies and vendor management companies can do business," said Christopher Behning, senior vice president and chief technology officer at General American Corp., of which GatorSystems is a division. Fiserv and GAC can be found online at http://www.fiserv.com and http://www.gac.com.

PaperClip, Hackensack, N.J., has launched an integrated document management and loan processing system called VirtualLoanFolder.com, the company announced at the Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Convention in San Francisco.The product offers borrowers, originators, service providers and lenders a paperless processing solution that has conditions clearing, document management, workflow and secure document delivery functionality. In addition, the application is Web-based and linked directly to a user's loan origination software. PaperClip can be found on the Web at http://www.paperclip.com.

Oklahoma City-based a la mode has announced that it will offer electronic signature capability to all its real estate agent, broker, inspector, loan officer, and appraiser customers through the company's XSites Network.Specifically, a la mode signed an agreement to use Wave's eSign Transaction Management Suite, which allows users of XSites (formerly called the Mercury Network) to manage business processes and transactions online and create, sign, store, access, and manage the lifecycle of electronic records within a loan folder. The announcement was made at the Mortgage Bankers Association's Annual Convention in San Francisco. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.alamode.com.

Costs can be lowered as much as $249 per loan by adopting standards developed by the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, according to a study released by the Mortgage Bankers Association at its annual convention in San Francisco.The study, the first-ever MISMO time-and-motion study to quantify the return on investment of adopting MISMO standards, found that 75% of the lowered costs directly benefit the lender, the MBA reported. Execution costs can be improved by 15.38 basis points, a 25% to 50% pickup in lending margins, or $450 for the average loan. As for time savings, lender respondents reported that it was possible to process a loan 16% faster when using MISMO standards. Only 40% of lenders say they are using MISMO, but 40% to 50% say they plan to use the standards in the near future. The survey was sent to all MISMO participants and Campus MBA and MBA NewsLink recipients. It was also posted on the MBA and MISMO websites. In total, 45 lenders/servicers and 80 vendors/suppliers responded. The MBA can be found online at http://www.mortgagebankers.org.

Tom Litke, executive vice president of marketing and product management of Woodstock, Ga.-based WellFound Decade, has told Mortgage Wire that the membership of the eMortgage Alliance is expected to hit 30 by the spring of 2005.The prediction was spurred by the announcement at the Mortgage Bankers Association convention in San Francisco that Bankers Systems Inc. and U.S. Recordings had joined the organization. Initially the eMortgage Alliance was designed to be an assemblage of technology companies that could combine their solutions to form a complete electronic mortgage. Now, the organization has changed its focus to support all companies that are compliant with standards developed by the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization in the hope that the adoption of MISMO standards will spur more interest in attaining an e-mortgage. The Alliance can be found online at its new website at http://www.emortgagealliance.us.

Fair Isaac and Fidelity picked the Mortgage Bankers Association convention in San Francisco to announce an enterprise-wide licensing agreement to deploy Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor as the core of Fidelity's rules-layered architecture, spanning Fidelity's entire suite of product offerings.The result is expected to be that Fidelity will enjoy reduced costs in managing all its systems and will increase its speed to market with new products. The Fidelity announcement noted that business rules are playing an increasing role in streamlining complex enterprise systems. Fidelity said it chose Blaze Advisor because it offered comprehensive implementation support.

Fidelity National Default Solutions, Jacksonville, Fla., has announced a strategic partnership between its NewInvoice division and Santa Ana, Calif.-based RealEC Technologies, an e-commerce exchange for real estate transactions that is majority-owned by Fidelity's parent company.The partnership will provide a single point of access for automated ordering, tracking, reconciliation, electronic invoicing, and payment of products and services for the origination and default markets, Fidelity said. The company said mortgage originators will now have access to electronic invoice management, and mortgage servicers will have access to the RealEC-connected service providers. Fidelity's parent company, Fidelity National Financial Inc., can be found online at http://www.fnf.com, and RealEC can be found at http://www.realec.com.

ComplianceEase, San Francisco, is touting product enhancements that it says will provide the industry's most comprehensive regulatory compliance system.The company says ComplianceAnalyzer will bring together automated loan-level anti-predatory-lending audits, secondary-market investor criteria, and consumer credit compliance in one convenient service. An additional product, ComplianceAnalyzer Plus, offers financial institutions loan-level insurance coverage up to the conforming loan limit, ComplianceEase announced at the Mortgage Bankers Association convention in San Francisco. ComplianceAnalyzer replaces the company's current anti-predatory-lending compliance system, PredatorAnalyzer. The company can be found online at http://www.complianceease.com.

LoanPerformance, San Francisco, has announced the introduction of PreTell, a prepayment scoring platform developed with the aid of originators, servicers, traders, investors, and guarantors to form an industry standard.PreTell provides a numeric score on an index of zero to 1,000 designed to predict the likelihood that an individual loan will prepay within a six-month forecast window. Scoring is currently available for 30-year fixed-rate, jumbo 30-year fixed-rate, 30-year alternative-A, subprime 2/28 hybrid adjustable-rate, and subprime 3/27 hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages. The announcement was made at the Mortgage Bankers Association convention in San Francisco. LoanPerformance can be found online at http://www.loanperformance.com.

Fiserv Lending Solutions, Brookfield, Wis., has launched Electronic Partner Connection, which it says will act as a central point for the user to order bundled services.In its announcement at the Mortgage Bankers Association convention in San Francisco, Fiserv said it expects to deliver Electronic Partner Connection in the first quarter of 2005. EPC offers lenders the ability to order one service or multiple services, depending on need, and to review and monitor the services. Fiserv can be found on the Web at http://www.fiserv.com.

Wayne, Pa.-based GHR Systems has announced that both Washtenaw Mortgage and DeepGreen Financial have joined the company's multilender transaction portal, BrokerOneSource.BOS currently has over 5,000 brokers using the site as a point-of-sale tool and over 25 lenders, as well as various third-party service providers, according to GHR Systems. The addition of the two lenders will further diversify the services offered, as Washtenaw is a wholesale mortgage bank and DeepGreen is a business-to-business home equity lender. The announcement came at the Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Convention in San Francisco. GHR's BOS can be found on the Web at http://www.brokeronesource.

Livonia, Mich.-based Dynatek has announced an update to its MORvision product to support the demand for home equity lines of credit at the Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Convention in San Francisco.According to the MBA Midyear Survey, HELOC originations increased 76.8% in the second quarter of this year. As a result, Dynatek added special data fields, screens, calculations, forms, and report modifications at no additional charge to users. Dynatek said all updates meet government regulations, as MORvision provides field-level security, filtering, and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting. Dynatek can be found on the Web at http://www.dynatek.com.

Master Financial Inc., Orange, Calif., has announced the addition of a tool to its Web-based loan origination system that allows access to loan information through wireless devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants.The tool, 30Second Desk Mobile, is available through any cell phone or PDA with wireless Web browser capability that is HTML 3.2-compliant, the company said. "Whether sitting before their borrowers at a coffee shop or an open house, brokers can price and quote without the burden of bulky equipment or scrambling to find Internet access," Master Financial said.

Stewart Title Co., Houston, and Silanis Technology Inc., St. Laurent, Quebec, have announced the launch of eClosingRoom, which they say is the first electronic closing platform that is fully integrated into an existing online transaction management system.The companies said the platform enables lenders to expedite the document preparation and delivery process while allowing consumers to review and sign many of their loan and other documents electronically before the closing meeting. "Lenders can deliver loan portfolios to the secondary market faster, reduce their paper-based costs, and pass on those cost savings to consumers," said Darren Ross, director of e-commerce at Stewart. Users access eClosingRoom through Stewart's SureClose transaction management system via a secure, password-protected website, Stewart said. The platform was unveiled at the Mortgage Bankers Association's annual convention in San Francisco. Stewart, a subsidiary of Stewart Information Services Corp., can be found online at http://www.stewart.com, and Silanis can be found at http://www.silanis.com.

Fiserv, Brookfield, Wis., has reported net income of $95.4 million ($0.47 per share) for the third quarter, up from $80.4 million ($0.42 per share) a year earlier.Fiserv's processing and services revenues came in at $866.3 million for the quarter, a 23% increase from $702 million in the third quarter of 2003. Fiserv president and CEO Leslie M. Muma called the results "a milestone." He attributed the strong results in part to three acquisitions made by the company in the third quarter, including Results International Systems Inc., a provider of outsourced systems for the property and casualty insurance industry; Pharmacy Fulfillment Inc.; and CheckAgain LC, a company that converts checks to electronic format within its mortgage servicing offering. Fiserv can be found on the Web at http://www.fiserv.com.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based Hansen Quality, a division of Fidelity National Financial, has launched PRO Value, a service that analyzes overvaluation risk on residential appraisal reports and provides an independent, AVM-derived collateral value that is reviewed and certified by an expert appraiser.The service is designed to be used in the origination phase as a substitute for desk reviews or in the due diligence process for whole loan purchases, according to the company. PRO Value assigns an overvaluation risk score after evaluating factors associated with an appraisal report, such as unique property attributes, below average condition, negative external influences, and inappropriate comparables. From there, a review appraiser chooses an accurate automated valuation model value from a selection of three or four AVM models, including an appraiser-assisted model. The company said the final PRO Value report includes the overvaluation risk score, the reviewed AVM value, and commentary summarizing the review appraiser's analysis. The FNF family of companies can be found online at http://www.fnf.com and http://www.fidelityinfoservices.com.