Technology

David Barkley of Freddie Mac has been re-elected to chair the Governance Committee of the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, and Adam Hall of IndyMac Bank and Lisa Bolelli of First American Real Estate Information Services have been re-elected vice-chairs.The committee also elected Chip Register of NetBank Inc. to membership on the panel, and re-elected the following members: Dave Bodi of Midland Loan Services, Joanne Denver of Babson Capital Management, Paul Wills of Equifax Information Services, Todd Luhtanen of Dynatek, Craig Foote of Fidelity Information Services, and Tim Anderson of Dexma. The Governance Committee consists of 20 MISMO subscriber organizations that serve two-year terms, with half the seats up for election each year. MISMO, which was established by the Mortgage Bankers Association, develops electronic commerce standards for the mortgage industry. Its Governance Committee provides oversight for the organization's administration and policy development. The organization can be found online at http://www.mismo.org.

Minneapolis-based Prime Alliance Solutions Inc., a partnership between technology vendor Dexma and Boeing Employees' Credit Union, has reported handling over 140,000 loans (about $25 billion in loan volume) last year, a 34% increase from the previous year's level.The Prime Alliance technology system now extends to more than 1,300 credit unions that are part of the Prime Alliance consortium. According to the Fannie Mae Mortgage Focus 2005 study, the average cost per closed loan among low-cost/high-productivity credit unions within Prime Alliance stood at $469 -- nearly one-third the average origination cost ($1,206) in other retail credit unions and less than one-fifth of the average cost ($2,703) in the typical retail lender. Dexma can be found on the Web at http://www.dexma.com.

Empire Equity Group Inc., Montvale, N.J., has embraced Web-based technology by licensing Dublin, Calif.-based Ellie Mae's Encompass Anywhere product for its origination needs.When the deployment is complete by the end of the first quarter, all Empire branches will have switched to Encompass Anywhere from their current loan origination systems, the company said. The Web-enabled mortgage automation system allows Empire branches to view, manage, and distribute loan data electronically via any Internet connection. The company is seeking to simplify compliance oversight with the product as well. Ellie Mae can be found on the Web at http://www.elliemae.com.

LoanCity, San Jose, Calif., has announced that it took just 48 hours to deploy the Xactly Incent sales compensation management system for its nationwide network of 200 sales professionals.San Jose, Calif.-based Xactly Corp. offers the Web-based on-demand system as a tool for motivating a sales force to increase sales because its real-time visibility offers them a transparent way of seeing how their efforts directly correlate with compensation. LoanCity, founded in 1987, was a Web pioneer for the mortgage industry. Offering independent mortgage brokers the full spectrum of loan programs through 15 regional processing centers, with all pricing and underwriting done through its proprietary automated underwriting system, LoanCity funded $7 billion in 2005. The companies can be found online at http://www.loancity.com and http://www.xactlycorp.com.

Countrywide Financial Corp. has chosen San Diego-based Akonix Systems Inc. to provide automated reporting and industry and corporate compliance for the instant messaging system it uses for real-time communications between its employees.The selection was prompted by various government and lending institution mandates. Akonix L7 Enterprise IM management gateway offers detailed, flexible usage polices, provides active filtering for inappropriate content and confidential information, and offers advanced logging, reporting, and compliance monitoring capabilities. Akonix touts L7 Enterprise as the first real-time security system for public and enterprise IM systems. The company offers a security center to provide real-time information about worms, viruses, and other vulnerabilities that target IM and P2P networks. Countrywide, based in Calabasas, Calif., uses the IBM Lotus Sametime IM system. The companies can be found online at http://www.akonix.com and http://www.countrywide.com.

LoanPerformance, a subsidiary of First American Real Estate Solutions, has announced the release of a new high-speed version of TrueStandings Securities Web-based service, which offers access to its mortgage- and asset-backed securities databases.The company said "dramatic improvements" have been made to the system's processing times and performance by implementing the Sybase IQ analytics server, which it said is designed to deliver "ultra-high-speed" business intelligence and reporting. The new version of TrueStandings Securities runs analyses and reports up to 100 times faster than previous versions, the company said. "This isn't just a case of a few show-stopping improvements," said Dan Feshbach, chief executive officer of LoanPerformance. "This is an across-the-board upgrade that provides a whole new, entirely different experience for users -- especially power users." The company can be found online at http://www.loanperformance.com.

Visionet Systems, Cranbury, N.J., has announced the opening of a new business process outsourcing center in Bangalore, India.The new BPO center focuses on loan review, underwriting verifications, lien release, default management, and investor accounting to mortgage lending and servicing organizations. "With seven of the top 10 banks using our solutions to drive outsourcing, Visionet Systems is focused on delivering mortgage-specific technology products that bring visibility to the outsourcing process," said Arshad Masood, president of Visionet Systems. Visionet also owns and operates BPO centers in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan.

RealEC Technologies, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based provider of supply chain technology to the mortgage industry, has announced the release of a new software system designed to manage mortgage insurance ordering.The software includes a set of Provider Qualification Tools that enable lenders to designate which mortgage insurance company provides the optimal coverage (for the specific loan program or loan criteria) and ensures them that they will have access to mortgage insurance products even if one MI company is unavailable. RealEC said the automated tools can automatically re-route orders to ensure maximum availability. In addition, the company's Opportunity Cost Allocation Models allow the lender to further designate the allocation of MI orders based on the opportunity to receive an order instead of the acceptance of an order. "RealEC's newest set of decision tools provides a higher degree of automation, efficiency, and accuracy in the mortgage insurance process than is possible with other solutions," said Jason Nadeau, president of RealEC Technologies. The company can be found online at http://www.realec.com.

Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Des Moines, Iowa, has announced the sale of an electronic mortgage to Freddie Mac that represents the first time a third-party custodian has been involved in an e-mortgage transaction on the MERS eRegistry.Wells Fargo said it was the first of several e-mortgages that it will process over the next several months with the aid of Greenlight Financial Services, Irvine, Calif., and a group of technology companies. The process began Dec. 14 with Greenlight's electronic origination of a single-family mortgage using Freddie's Loan Prospector.com, Wells Fargo said. Veri-docs.com, the settlement agent, used Fiserv Lending Solutions' e-lending platform to close the mortgage using the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization's SMART Doc category 1 electronic note (developed by VMP Mortgage Solutions). Fiserv Lending Solutions, the electronic vault vendor, provided the connection to the MERS eRegistry, and Wells Fargo Document Custody is the custodian of record, Wells Fargo reported.

When hurricanes and downturns in real estate prices raise risk-management issues for banks, the feedback will come much quicker now with the universal adoption of a new Bank Call Reporting System hailed by federal regulators.Members of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council attending a Jan. 18 meeting in San Jose, Calif., gave high marks to the new system, now in use by 100% of the 7,200 regulated financial institutions that make quarterly reports to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Thanks to eXtensible Business Reporting Language, the FDIC is expecting to enjoy an estimated 70% savings in time spent handling information in quarterly reports from regulated lenders, according to Martin Henning, associate director of the FDIC's statistics branch. Before XBRL, Mr. Henning told MortgageWire, there was often a three-week lag in the time it took reported data to be made available to regulatory analysts. Now there is instant data validation. With XBRL tagging, data used for multiple purposes and analysis in different software formats no longer has to be rekeyed.