Technology

Third Federal Savings and Loan, Cleveland, has inked a deal to sell its online home equity business to Lightyear Capital, New York, for an undisclosed sum.Third Federal launched the business, called DeepGreen Bank, three years ago. A spokeswoman for the thrift declined to discuss DGB's profitability. Lightyear, a private equity firm that manages $2 billion in assets, will take control of all of DGB's servicing rights, its production platform, technology, infrastructure, management team, and employees. DGB, which gets leads from LendingTree, funded $1.2 billion last year and is on track to fund $1.4 billion this year, said a company spokesman. Third Federal has been buying loans from DGB and will continue to do so, the spokesman said. (See the Oct. 6 issue of National Mortgage News for more details.)

Fiserv Inc., Brookfield, Wis., has agreed to acquire General American Corp., a Pittsburgh-based provider of real estate settlement services to the lending industry, for an undisclosed amount.GAC is majority-owned by Mason Wells, a private equity investment firm based in Milwaukee. Fiserv said GAC operates in two divisions: GAC Direct, which offers online settlement services nationwide, and GATORSystems, which licenses technology and software to settlement service providers. Leslie M. Muma, Fiserv's president and chief executive officer, said GAC has achieved success by "making lives easier for lenders in every part of the country with its highly automated real estate settlement services." Fiserv said GAC services more than 4,000 customers and manages a network of more than 10,000 independent vendors. Fiserv can be found online at http://www.fiserv.com.

Fidelity National Information Solutions, Santa Barbara, Calif., has released TransactionPoint version 6.0 for SoftPro, which provides online transaction coordination and management services to closing agents and their customers.The integration of the software with the SoftPro title and escrow production system offers enhanced document management, automated routing, transaction coordination and management, and improved systemwide ease of use and reporting capabilities, FNIS said. The company said the integration will enable SoftPro to offer "true front-to-back data transfer capabilities," which it said will fill "one of the biggest voids of currently available title production systems." The companies can be found online at http://www.fnis.com and http://www.softprocorp.com.

Thomas H. Vetter has been named to the newly created position of senior vice president for the HomeBuilder.com business unit of Homestore Inc., Westlake Village, Calif.Mr. Vetter served most recently as senior vice president of sales and marketing for iBidCo, an online marketer of new homes. Before that he was president of the Accelerated Marketing and Special Event Division of The Ryness Co., where he was responsible for sales of single-family and multifamily communities. HomeBuilder.com is the official new-homes site of the National Association of Home Builders. Homestore can be found online at http://ir.homestore.com.

LenderTechnologies Corp., a subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, has announced the release of an Internet-based customer information security service for financial institutions.The service, ProtectInfo, was created in response to the information security requirements imposed on such institutions -- including mortgage bankers and brokers subject to regulation by the Federal Trade Commission -- by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and subsequent regulations, the MBA said. The ProtectInfo website features products and services designed to aid in developing such customer privacy programs. Among the services offered by ProtectInfo are an online Compliance Assessment Tool for measuring compliance with the FTC's Information Safeguards Rule; and SafeGuardian, Web-based software that will help companies develop a customer information security program. ProtectInfo can be found online at http://www.protectinfo.com.

Houston-based Encomia has announced the formation of the eMortgage Institute, an online resource offering educational workshops on electronic mortgages for mortgage executives.The institute is offering the first workshop, Introduction to eMortgages, at no charge. The two-hour basic workshop is designed to familiarize mortgage professionals with e-mortgages from a nontechnical, business perspective, Encomia said. The eMortgage Institute can be found online at http://www.emortgageinstitute.com.

A source at E*Trade Group Inc., Menlo Park, Calif., has confirmed that E*Trade Mortgage reduced its staff earlier this month by 163 full-time employees, but said the move was expected and that most of those laid off were employed by a temporary firm and had been working for E*Trade for less than 12 months.The move was related to a drop in volume the company has seen since rates have begun to edge upward. The company has begun releasing its numbers on a monthly basis. E*Trade originated $2.9 billion in retail mortgage loans during the second quarter. In July, the company reported $1.2 billion in direct mortgage originations, up from $1 billion in June. The August numbers have not yet been released.

TradeWeb LLC, an online fixed-income network based in New York, has launched a callable agency debt product.The product allows users to execute trades of any size with agency dealers that use the technology. TradeWeb can be found online at http://www.tradeweb.com.

Spending on automated mortgage collateral management systems will grow from $33 million this year to $193 million in 2008, according to an estimate by TowerGroup, Needham, Mass.The spending increase will cut the average time for a mortgage lender to complete a home appraisal from 6-10 days now to 4-7 days by 2008, the company said. "This is a critical shift for the mortgage lending industry, as it faces declining loan volumes following the record mortgage refinancing period experienced over the past two years," TowerGroup said. ".... Recent introductions of automated valuation models and automated collateral management systems hold promise for mortgage lenders to streamline traditional appraisals and collateral document management, which is the lengthiest and least automated of the loan processing tasks." The company said the forecast is based on research titled "The Next Mortgage Underwriting Revolution: Mortgage Collateral Assessment," by Craig Focardi, a senior analyst in TowerGroup's Consumer Credit practice. The company can be found online at http://www.towergroup.com.

One month to the day after IAC/InterActiveCorp (formerly known as USA Interactive) announced the completion of its acquisition of LendingTree Inc., RE/Max International filed a lawsuit against LendingTree alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition, and exploitation of its goodwill.The nine-count complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in Denver, further alleges that the Charlotte, N.C.-based LendingTree used its website to make misleading statements about its relationship with RE/Max brokers. RE/Max, the international real estate agent and broker network, said LendingTree's site was misleading in that it led consumers to believe that the company was working with the entire RE/Max network. Furthermore, the complaint alleges that LendingTree.com "creates the false impression that…RE/Max and other major real estate franchisors have somehow aligned themselves with each other to create an agent locator service operated by LendingTree." LendingTree.com does feature a real estate agent locator service on its homepage that purports to give consumers access to national companies such as Coldwell Banker, Century 21, GMAC, and RE/Max, as well as independent local Realtors. RE/Max alleges that LendingTree has "at times, referred consumers to non-RE/Max agents or brokers despite specific requests from consumers for a RE/Max agent." The companies can be found online at http://www.lendingtree.com and http://www.remax.com.