Technology

Del Mar Database, San Diego, has released its Hosted Solution Suite, providing application service provider access to its entire product line.The Hosted Solutions are designed for lenders that require centralized data access for remote users, have limited information technology resources, prefer lower upfront costs, and seek rapid implementation. Del Mar announced the new offering at the Mortgage Bankers Association's National Secondary Marketing Conference in San Francisco.

Cogent Economics has used its annual symposium, held recently at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco, to sound a "clarion call" for enterprise-wide quality-control systems.Keynote speaker James Robinson discussed the three pillars of the Basel II capital adequacy II framework -- minimum capital requirements, the supervisory review process, and market discipline requirements -- as a mandate for enterprise QC rather than the relegation of QC to "a small department in the basement." Though the Basel Accords will primarily affect larger institutions, he said smaller banks and mortgage lenders will have incentives to adopt advanced approaches to risk assessment to pass regulatory muster and enjoy increased investor confidence in their loan originations. Symposium attendees also were briefed on plans to migrate the entire code base of CogentQC from FoxPro to C# (a language for Microsoft's .net platform) and to ease connectivity to SQL databases by the fourth quarter of this year. Cogent can be found online at http://www.cogentqc.com.

Wachovia Mortgage, the fourth-largest bank holding company in the United States, has launched Palisades Technology Partners' Impact Mortgage Services Suite, a fully automated, Web-based loan origination system."Palisades' Impact Loan Processing System delivers a robust lending platform that we integrated tightly into our infrastructure," said Laurie Smith, director of lending technology for Wachovia. "We are particularly excited about the potential for extending our use of Impact's components for loan pricing, fee calculations, and compliance as Web services." The company said the project required the development and implementation of interfaces to many downstream systems, including Wachovia's in-house point-of-sale system, using a MISMO-like Interface Manager and standard messages over an IBM MQ protocol. (MISMO is the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization.) The implementation will also facilitate the electronic delivery of documents leveraging Wachovia's Electronic Forms and Image Archive infrastructure.

Ellie Mae, Dublin, Calif., has acquired Michigan-based Lasso Technologies, a developer of Web-enabled applications, to be able to offer its Encompass point-of-sale software as an application service provider.The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Lasso used to offer Encompass on an ASP basis as a third-party service, which is why the acquisition was such a good fit, said Jonathan Corr, senior vice president for products at Ellie Mae. As a result, Ellie Mae is launching Encompass Anywhere, a new Web-hosted solution of its flagship loan origination and management system. Lasso management will be absorbed into Ellie Mae, the company said. Ellie Mae can be found on the Web at http://www.elliemae.com.

HomesByOwner.com, Memphis, has announced an alliance with RealBird Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of online maps and GIS tools for the real estate industry.HomesByOwner.com offers for-sale-by-owner businesses national exposure and a customizable website to serve the local FSBO market. RealBird's online mapping service features street, aerial, and topographical maps with interactive hotspots linked to photos, websites, or virtual tours, as well as driving directions. "With RealBird Maps we have raised the perceived value of our service, and will attract more homebuyers and sellers because they have now a better way to sell or buy a home," said Wayne Strobel, president of HomesByOwner.com. "RealBird is the only affordable, fully customizable online mapping service that was also very easy to integrate with our website and database of listings." The companies can be found online at http://www.homesbyowner.com and http://www.realbird.com.

Dynatek Inc., Livonia, Mich., has completed a system-to-system plug-in for Freddie Mac's Loan Prospector.com automated underwriting system within its MORvision offering.Dynatek used the latest technology specifications available from Freddie Mac to design a plug-in that would eliminate duplicate data entry, offer increased flexibility, and allow the transfer of loans from the online version of Loan Prospector to MORvision. The improvements ultimately provide faster, more accurate underwriting responses for MORvision users, according to Freddie Mac. Dynatek can be found on the Web at http://www.dynatek.com.

The MLS Systems and Solutions group of Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions, Jacksonville, Fla., has announced an agreement with ShowingTime to provide access to the latter's Web-based property-showing management system.Under the arrangement, Fidelity's multiple-listing service customers can enable their broker and agent users to gain direct access to the property-showing system, ShowingAssist. "In our experience, we've found MLSs receptive to adding showing technology to their sites," said Scott Woodard, ShowingTime's chief executive officer. "ShowingAssist expands the toolkit they can offer to members and becomes an important timesaver in the showing appointment process." For showing agents, access to ShowingAssist through their MLS system enables them to view available showing times for listed properties and submit showing requests 24 hours a day, Fidelity said. The companies can be found online at http://www.fidelityinfoservices.com and http://www.showingtime.com.

GHR Systems Inc., Wayne, Pa., has announced the introduction of the Enterprise Reporting System, which is designed to create instant reports with research capabilities and graphical analysis.ERS also provides historical and real-time views into a lender's organizational, branch, and loan officer pipelines. GHR Systems said users can obtain quantifiable feedback with ERS, linking strategy, performance, and management decisions. The ERS works with any GHR product and can also integrate data from any non-GHR system. Specifically, GHR's ERS system allows users to access, manipulate, and change the layout of information in real time, providing an engine capable of detailed analysis and reporting, the company said. As an online analytical processing system, ERS can also gather information from one or more source systems and provide enterprise reporting. GHR can be found on the Web at http://www.ghrsystems.com.

In order to round out its mortgage platform, Bear Stearns has started a wholesale division called Bear Stearns Residential Mortgage Corp. and on April 18 plans to roll out a technology interface called BearDirect.net that will provide an online underwriting decision engine for mortgage brokers.The move is part of a larger effort to expand the company's mortgage franchise by capturing origination volume, fixed-income president and co-chief executive officer Warren Spector said in a recent webcast investor presentation. Also adding to Bear's volumes recently has been an expansion of its product guidelines in the conduit area, according to people familiar with Bear's strategy. (For more information, see the April 18 issue of National Mortgage News.)

PCi Corp., a Boston-based provider of lending compliance systems, has released suggested guidelines on how to handle the reporting of new pricing data under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.For the first time, financial institutions were required under HMDA to report rate spreads for approved mortgage loans, along with corresponding data such as lien status, PCi noted. "The new HMDA pricing information is creating significant uncertainty among lenders," said PCi president Raffi Festekjian. "Because so many lenders are coming to us seeking guidance, we want to share the basics of a practical strategy to best conduct HMDA pricing analysis in a manner that works for each lender." The company recommends a number of steps, including breaking down the data geographically and by business lines; refining analysis in areas with a high risk profile; and providing context for pricing patterns by citing factors such as credit, collateral quality, ability to pay, and debt load. PCi can be found online at http://www.pciwiz.com