I had a pretty cool experience yesterday. A few years ago, I spent about 1000 hours helping to build the Best Practices for MSR transfers for Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie for the Mortgage Bankers Association. That was a rough project. Going through all that detail, the servicing guides, MERS QA, and custodial requirements to ensure a quality transfer of loan files from one servicer into another servicer's environment - well, that was a notable professional event. My husband was really unenthusiastic about my obsession with tracking down every loose string.
My previous experience in mortgage servicing transfers was slogging through the data and documents of hundreds of thousands of loans with a hatchet. Not because people want to do a bad job - it's because our historical document management stinks, and each loan represents hundreds of documents, dozens of duplicates, CYA, and misfiled information. I was thrilled when we got SFTP and encrypted hard drives; because before that, it was big banker boxes filled with ACCO-fastened files loaded with loose papers, keys, license plates, baby pictures, and PB&J sandwiches. And my team sifted through them for weeks on the conference room floor just to get to a point where we could begin to audit.
Yesterday, I saw an option to provide a significantly superior experience for high-quality transfers of data and documents without months of on-shore and off-shore wrestling. And not just on a tiny sampling ... on the entire pool of loans. Yesterday I saw a solution that can actually live up to the name intelligent loan boarding. And it wasn't the vaporware I've seen over and over... it was an operationally sound solution.
De-blob the files? Check. De-dup the files? Check. (huge time and storage saving by safely getting rid of the dozens of duplicates we keep in files "just in case.") Document indexing? Check. Simple and effective exception review process? Check. Seriously good OCR on the subset of documents that matter? Check. Reporting? Check. I mean - it made me smile. I've heard a lot of hype over the years ... with very little actual progress. Demos where I ask them to show me real-time, and I get to hear a lot about roadmaps and "send me a sample, and we can show you next week" - I can do it by hand in that amount of time.
Ingestion, analysis, validation, mapping, reporting? I was really surprised at how far this tech had come. And I saw it in real-time. Sure, it requires oversight and implementation - because what important thing we do in our industry does not? But if you are looking for a great solution to taking in hundreds or hundreds of thousands of loans and want it done quickly (as in days), not weeks or months - give me a ring. A couple of weeks in implementation, and I can facilitate delivering clean files with clean data into your servicing platform for a fraction of the cost and brain damage.
Ruth Lee, CMB
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