Mortgage technology

Fiserv Inc., Brookfield, Wis., has acquired Lenders Financial Services, Agoura Hills, Calif., a nationally recognized provider of default mortgage management products and services.The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Fiserv said it expects the acquisition to add about $8 million to 2003 revenues. LFS provides tools to value, maintain, and dispose of properties -- most of which are abandoned, in default, or classified as other real estate owned. Through a nationwide network of approximately 20,000 appraisers and real estate agents, LFS's 24 employees process about 7,000 appraisals and broker price opinions monthly. Fiserv is an independent, full-service provider of integrated data processing and information management systems to the financial industry. It can be found online at http://www.fiserv.com.

The electronic partnership platform technology under development by BCE Emergis for use on Freddie Mac's loanprospector.com website will use technology developed by General American Corp., Pittsburgh.After a two-year collaboration with Freddie Mac, GAC announced that Freddie will use a customized version of GAC’s Gators Web-enabled software package as a foundation for the mortgage services it provides through its portal. The platform offers mortgage processing and closing tools that use the Internet to provide cheaper, more efficient access to third-party services needed to process, close, and fund mortgage loans, GAC said. BCE Emergis, an e-commerce services company based in Quebec, Canada, acquired the online technology tools from Freddie Mac and will manage their development, implementation and operation. GAC can be found on the Web at http://www.gatorsystems.com.

Fidelity National Information Solutions Inc., Santa Barbara, Calif., has signed a multiyear outsourcing and software application services agreement with HomeServices of America Inc., a Minneapolis-based residential real estate brokerage firm that offers mortgage originations and title services.Under the agreement, FNIS said it will acquire HomeServices' proprietary TRIO software system and Web-based platform, which provides broker websites catering to consumers and Multiple Listing Services data aggregation, among other services. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.fnis.com and http://www.homeservices.com.

In a move that chief executive officer Joe Murin says will focus the company, Basis100 has agreed to sell certain assets of EFA Software Services Ltd. and EFA Cyprus Ltd. to Computershare Ltd., a global technology provider to the securities industry, for $6.25 million Canadian.The acquisition is expected to close by the end of January. The company had bought the capital markets trading platform with an eye toward serving a global marketplace. "With the economy in the U.S. collapsing in the last few years, it just didn't pan out to be the right business to be in," Mr. Murin said. The company maintains a trading platform it built in conjunction with a Canadian banking consortium. Basis100's website address is http://www.basis100.com.

New Century Financial Corp., Irvine, Calif., and its subsidiary, New Century Mortgage Corp., have introduced a proprietary Web-based loan underwriting engine designed to provide registered users with loan approvals in less than 12 seconds."We believe FastQual represents the fastest automated loan underwriting system in the nonprime market, and it's a tool which gives brokers a wide range of options to fully automate typically complex nonprime transactions," said Greg Schroeder, senior vice president of marketing at New Century Mortgage. Information from brokers' loan origination systems is automatically uploaded to FastQual with the click of a mouse, and the FastQual engine evaluates it and replies within 12 seconds with a list of all loan products the borrower qualifies for, the company said. The new version of the company's broker website enables brokers to prequalify borrowers, submit loans, pull credit at no cost, auto-underwrite, obtain pricing, and track loans. New Century Mortgage, including FastQual, can be found online at http://www.newcentury.com.

Gabe Minton has been promoted to vice president of industry technology by the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.Mr. Minton, whose previous title was senior director of industry technology, is responsible for overseeing the MBA’s leading role in establishing technology standards for the residential real estate finance industry. He manages the activities of the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization and the industry’s residential electronic mortgage standardization efforts. The MBA also announced the promotions of Laura Armstrong to vice president of public affairs and Elaine Howard to vice president of meetings and conferences. The association can be found online at http://www.mbaa.org.

Principal Residential Mortgage Inc., a multibillion-dollar national lender and servicer based in Des Moines, Iowa, has selected Fiserv unit Case Shiller Weiss, Cambridge, Mass., to implement a customized collateral risk assessment system.The system will be built around CSW's CASA automated valuation model and will be one of the first to see AVMs employed in the first-lien business. The lender will use the CASA scoring system in its prefunding stage to assess collateral valuation risks associated with first-lien mortgage loan applications. Terry Loebs, vice president of sales, marketing, and services for CSW, said the agreement is "a milestone" for the AVM business. The companies can be found online at http://www.principal.com/mortgage.htm and http://www.cswv.com.

Paul Ciarfello has been named vice president and chief credit officer at Home123 Loans Direct!, Ponte Verde Beach, Fla.Mr. Ciarfello, a 23-year veteran of the subprime mortgage industry, was most recently vice president and deputy chief credit officer for Alliance Funding. Home123 said Mr. Ciarfello's chief duties will include overseeing the company's underwriting operations, building investor relations through secondary marketing efforts, and managing appraisal review. The company can be found on the Web at http://www.home123.com.

There are ways that lenders can speed the adoption of Internet-based lending, widely viewed as the least expensive origination channel, according to Emmanuel Obiorah, Bank of America's online channel executive for consumer real estate.Mr. Obiorah made his statements at Thomson's fourth annual Mortgage EC Conference in Las Vegas. “To improve adoption you have to streamline the process,” he told the audience. The one-click refinance that BofA is working on is an example, he said. In addition, he urged lenders to get specialty products that appeal to ethnic borrowers online, make the transition from online to off-line operations smooth, and hire bilingual employees to complement foreign language websites.

Ken Beyer, chief technology officer of MortgageRamp, has been named chief executive officer of the company.The Atlanta-based MortgageRamp, which provides technology for the commercial real estate industry, said current CEO Mike Greco will continue to be involved with the company as a member of the MortgageRamp Investor Operating Committee. Mr. Beyer was chief technology officer of Cornerstone Concepts before joining MortgageRamp. The company can be found online at http://www.mortgageramp.com.

Speaking to attendees of the Fourth Annual Mortgage EC conference in Las Vegas, ABN Amro's Garth Graham said waiting for HUD to approve mortgage reforms may be unwise because once consumers learn they can get a one-fee mortgage they will demand it no matter how long the HUD reform takes.Mr. Graham said the one-fee mortgage that ABN Amro's Mortgage.com launched in January 2001 has chalked up 70,000 loans funded and "combined customer demand for simplicity with ABN's desire to make it simple." The Guaranteed Mortgage Package proposed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development will simply mandate what borrowers are already flocking to get. Mr. Graham said consumer adoption of the Internet has simply accelerated that process. One effect of that has been expanded use of pricing engines and closing cost engines that will enable consumers to know the all-in price at the point of sale.

GMAC Residential Funding Corp., Minneapolis, has announced that it has enabled 1st National Bank of Arizona to increase loan production by 50% after six months using a customized version of the GMAC-RFC Assetwise decision engine.Over that period 1st National, a leading alternative-A lender, used the customized system, dubbed Avenue in its private-label version, to increase its loan volume from $200 million to $300 million between March and August 2002. "Our monthly volume has climbed to $300 million, and we expect to exceed $400 million per month in 2003,” said 1st National president Jeff Walton. “Plus, our pull-through rate climbed from about 30% to nearly 48% in the past few months." GMAC-RFC reports similar results with the customized Assetwise system it developed for its wholly owned subsidiary Homecomings Financial, which used its Internet-based Assetwise Direct system to chalk up $5.4 billion in mortgages in the first half of 2002, an 80% increase over the same period in 2001. The company can be found online at http://www.gmacrfc.com.

CapitalThinking, a New York-based application software company, has inked a deal with Fannie Mae under which the latter will use the company's Deal Management Software as the core processing engine for its multibillion-dollar, low income housing equity investments.Fannie Mae is the largest purchaser of low-income housing tax credits in the country, typically through a nationwide network of approved syndicators. Fannie will use the platform to provide a seamless electronic flow of transactional data and documentation from syndicators through the Fannie Mae LIHTC acquisition approval chain. A Web-based software platform, DMS supports a wide range of financial asset underwriting and management activities. The development work required to support Fannie's $6.5 billion LIHTC equity program began last month. CapitalThinking says Phase I will be released in the second quarter of 2003. CapitalThinking can be found online at http://www.capitalthinking.com.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mitch Seabaugh has invited Dr. Vincent Terry, president of the National Minority Mortgage Bankers Association, to attend a meeting Dec. 5 with other mortgage industry participants to discuss the Georgia Fair Lending Act.The NMMBA has filed a lawsuit in the state supreme court against Georgia's Department of Banking and Finance and its commissioner, David. G. Sorrell, in an effort to overturn the legislation. The trade group is lobbying its members to file affidavits with the court showing that minority borrowers are being denied credit under the new state law in cases where credit would not have been denied before. The organization's website address is http://www.nmmbainc.org.

In a major strategic bid to offer one-stop shopping, Freddie Mac has announced the launch of LoanProspector.com.The site will enable mortgage lenders and brokers to use the same data submitted to LP to be used to order appraisals, flood determinations, title products, and property surveys. Having done that, mortgage lenders and brokers can use the LoanProspector.com site to check order status in real time and receive reports. As of Dec. 8, all customers using Loan Prospector on the Internet will automatically be directed to the new loanprospector.com website. Freddie Mac characterized the launch of the new site and the inclusion of vendor services as a major strategic commitment to electronic mortgages, not merely a technology upgrade. Over the next two years, Freddie said the website will offer online pricing, electronic closing, and access to secondary market funding services and to the Loan Prospector suite of tools. Freddie Mac can be found online at http://www.freddiemac.com.

NetUpdate, Redmond, Wash., has integrated technology from Sollen Technologies, Dallas, into its newly released Originator Pro Product Eligibility and Pricing Engine, an add-on module for its origination platform.The module passes product and pricing information from a lending institution's secondary marketing department to the point-of-sale, which NetUpdate says will increase profitability and decrease costs. By entering a small set of a borrower's loan information into Originator Pro, a loan officer can immediately access a list of programs from which the borrower is eligible or ineligible based on the entered search criteria. The companies can be found online at http://www.netupdate.com and http://www.sollen.com.

American Home Mortgage Holdings Inc., New York, has signed an exclusive agreement with Forbes.com to launch a co-branded online mortgage channel via American Home?s MortgageSelect.com online lending subsidiary.Under the agreement, MortgageSelect.com will be integrated into Forbes.com?s Mortgage Center, on the site?s Personal Finance channel, and provide a full online mortgage lending service, American Home said. MortgageSelect.com will be the exclusive residential mortgage provider on Forbes.com. This is the latest in a series of strategic partnerships formed by MortgageSelect.com. The companies can be found on the Web at http://www.americanhm.com and http://www.forbes.com.

RealEC Technologies, Santa Ana, Calif., and Myers Internet Inc., San Francisco, have announced an agreement that offers seamless integration for Myers' Internet-connected customers to more than 5,000 service providers who have integrated with the RealEC network platform.Myers' OriginatorNetwork is a back-office portal that offers more than 8,000 mortgage originators website management tools, access to marketing, small business services, and the ability to order settlement services electronically. RealEC is designed to facilitate the origination, servicing, and closing of real estate transactions and to enable real estate practitioners to enhance their businesses. Myers, a provider of Internet infrastructure to the mortgage industry, can be found on the Web at http://www.myersinternet.com, and RealEC can be found at http://www.realec.com.

LandSafe, the Plano, Texas-based technology subsidiary of Countrywide Financial Corp., is combining its ValueFinder and Frauditor products into a single report that it will make available at the same price previously charged for one of the products."As AVMs become increasingly important to the lending community for pre-qualifying, HELOCs, second mortgages, and portfolio valuation, LandSafe is keeping pace with the demand for more complete information delivered at the highest possible speed," said Michael Faine, LandSafe's managing director, president, and chief operating officer. The new product will return the value, the uncertainty factor, and public record information on the property and comparable properties provided by ValueFinder, as well as Frauditor red flags for possible inflated value, property-type mismatch, or seller mismatch. The product is available through the LandSafe website or via direct XML integration with the customer's loan origination system. LandSafe's website address is http://www.landsafe.com.

Veros Software, a provider of predictive technology and advanced analytics based in Irvine, Calif., has released the latest version of its VeroValue automated property valuation system.VeroValue 1.6 provides mortgage lenders with new tools such as home value forecasting, online account management, property fitness scoring, and wireless access, the company said. Home value forecasting is provided through analysis of key economic indicators and residential real estate trends, while property fitness scoring combines analysis of the subject property, neighborhood, market conditions, and both micro- and macro-economic conditions, Veros said. In addition, the new version offers a Correlated Confidence Score based on the accuracy of the valuation estimate, scaled from 1 to 100 for ease of integration into automated underwriting systems, the company said. Veros can be found online at http://www.verovalue.com.