Technology

Lender Processing Services Inc., Jacksonville, Fla., earned $80 million in the second quarter, a 7% increase from the same period last year.

To enhance its loan origination process, Carnegie Mortgage LLC, a subsidiary of Grand Bank NA of Hamilton, N.J., is relying on a new partnership that has helped bring up to date its mortgage lending and document management technology platform.

The partnership brings together the private and consumer centric banking environment of Carnegie Mortgage with state-of-the-art platforms and service offerings of Mortgage Cadence that helps reduce manual processes, enforces compliant business policies, decreases risk and "allows for the relocation of employees to areas within the business that require a personal touch," says Michael Detwiler, CEO of Mortgage Cadence.

Carnegie Mortgage originates approximately $200 million in mortgages on a monthly basis through both its retail and wholesale channels, Ovation Home Loans and Icon Residential Lenders.

Every servicer and lender has an in-house servicing platform that measures major compliance milestones. But in today's environment that's not enough to tackle the ever-changing legislation that is constantly coming their way, according to Chris Saitta, president of Equator.

"It's really that granularity of the day-to-day decisions and day-to-day process bifurcated by which portfolio the property is in and which investor and which [mortgage insurance] company. It's a very complex decision process so you need a technology that can get into the granularity of automation."

Equator is an infrastructure Software as a Service provider based in Los Angeles. Currently, the company has 60 servicers on its technology platform, including seven of the top 10.

Regulatory changes continue to be what largely drives automation for those on the production side, especially when it comes to the documentation necessary, according to executives at DocMagic Inc., Carson, Calif., which does business as Document Systems Inc.

The StoneHill Group Inc. is seeing a downtick in errors under the new RESPA rules although the company still has some clients who are struggling with the total implementation of these regulations, which have been in effect since the beginning of January.

The Atlanta-based quality control provider has helped lenders who suffered procedural problems go back and implement changes in the way they process information for proper disclosure with the Good Faith Estimate.

"That has been a help as we begin to audit these loans and report the findings to our clients," said Doug Parker, quality assurance manager.

As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac look to standardize the mortgage process at the request of their regulator, it has brought about new appraisal and data delivery standards requiring lenders to lean on technology vendors to ensure they are compliant at a time when vendors are already strained.

Elizabeth Green, chair of the property and valuation services workgroup within MISMO, says this move by the GSEs will enable the industry to achieve, among other benefits, high-definition comparables. "We as an industry will have access to granular appraisal data. We have the ability to name a data source on a per-data point basis. This gives both the appraiser and his client a clear view of every bit of information that went into the appraisal and where the appraiser got that information.

"If you think about it, most lawsuits today come from invalid information or a lack of information reported on the appraisal. This new approach-given that the GSEs have chosen to standardize around MISMO Version 3.0-makes it clear from the appraiser's perspective how to delineate factual information from their own analysis. Today that is all mish-mashed together. We've moved beyond that. We need more. We need more verification sources. The appraiser needs to feel confident delineating his data from his analysis. That allows us to further support the goal of getting to a credible valuation report."

Mortgage vendor CoreLogic, Santa Ana, Calif., on Wednesday unveiled its WillCap product, a decisioning system that can predict a distressed borrower's willingness and capacity to make mortgage payments.

FIS, Jacksonville, Fla., has closed on a private offering of $1.1 billion of unsecured notes.

In total, 82% of respondents to this publication believe that e-disclosures can keep a lender more compliant. While no one technology can solve all of the problems that lenders face, electronic upfront disclosures does have its benefits.

What are the best options available to lenders to deal with today's ever-changing loan volumes while maintaining loan performance?