Technology

The Mortgage Bankers Association of America and a group of 15 major mortgage industry firms have announced that they are creating an office to test the mortgage industry's readiness for the year 2000.The testing program will allow mortgage industry companies meeting certain eligibility requirements to test their systems for year-2000 readiness with their trading partners. The companies estimate that they will spend upwards of $500 million in the testing effort, said Joe McCartin, chairman of the MBA committee on the year-2000 issue and an official with G.E. Capital Mortgage Services. Startup costs for the program will be provided by the MBA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The announcement was made at the MBA's Servicing Conference in San Francisco.

Wells Fargo online is now offering home equity credit decision-making in real time.Unlike some online or telephone services that take days to process a response, this new service will enable consumers to receive an answer within seconds of submitting a loan application, according to the San Francisco-based Wells Fargo. "People usually have big plans for their loan, such as education, home improvement, or debt consolidation," said Colin Walsh, vice president of U.S. Equity at Wells Fargo. "We want to help our customers reach their goals as quickly as possible."

A just-released collection module for Interlinq's MortgageWare Loan Servicing version 2.0 has been shown at the 12th annual MortgageWare Users' Group conference in Bellevue, Wash. The module enables lenders to track delinquent borrowers and bring servicing in-house at a per-loan annual cost of less than $4.The Kirkland, Wash.-based Interlinq has also developed an interface to Fannie Mae's MortgageLinks that will allow users to connect to their choice of credit bureaus, order credit reports, and autopopulate the liabilities into an application. Another Interlinq product, MortgageWare InvestorLinq, works with MortgageWare MarketLinq to help manage secondary marketing risk.