Mortgage Technology Advances

Bank technology activity included Huntington National Bank’s offering of health savings account services to individual and business customers through Fiserv Inc., a press release indicated. The outsourced healthcare banking solution derives its functionality from the products and services of a vast array of healthcare, banking and payment assets.

Independent Community Bankers of America has signed an agreement in which it will exclusively recommend Fidelity National Information Services Inc.’s core processing and item processing solutions to its members. Fidelity currently provides processing services to more than 1,000 ICBA Bancard member banks and ICBA has a relationship with nearly 5,000 community banks.

Wells Fargo & Co. said it has become the first major U.S. financial services company to offer mobile services for businesses. Late last month, it made available its CEO Mobile service to a small number of business customers to deliver key treasury reports through a secure browser session. Functions Wells plans to add later this year include wire approvals, image positive pay exceptions, and administrative tools such as password resets.

In credit technology, through a partnership with CreditXpert Inc., mortgage origination customers of merged credit report provider First American CREDCO now have access to CreditXpert What-If Simulator, CreditXpert Essentials and CreditXpert Detective. The credit optimization and simulation software solutions can empower up to 30 percent of declined applicants to gain approval and up to 50 percent of applicants to earn a better rate, according to a press release.

National Fidelity Mortgage selected Baltimore Technology Park to protect its critical enterprise business systems because it is “new, state-of-the-art and its pricing is very competitive,” according to a press release. Prior to the selection, the residential and commercial lender housed all servers on-site, but moving its information technology with Baltimore increases bandwidth and triples Internet connection speed, and ensures its systems are secure and running at all times.

Compass Analytics LLC and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services announced they integrated Standard & Poor’s LEVELS credit model and SPIRE cashflow model into mortgage analytics solution CompassPoint.

“Compass’s loan-level integration of LEVELS and SPIRE is a substantial enhancement to Compass’s mortgage valuation and trading analytics, designed to seamlessly integrate the valuation process from mapping of loan data through structured cash flow valuations,” a Compass managing partner said in the announcement.

In evaluating performance on over 2 million loan application records from its database, Interthinx said it analyzed and confirmed the precision of its loan scoring system to predict non-performing mortgages. Loan performance was analyzed while scores were compared with previous scores.

“We believe fraud has been the under-reported story and significant component in the subprime mortgage market collapse,” said Interthinx President Kevin Coop in the announcement. “Our team of analytics experts vigorously worked on this data analysis to ultimately provide investors and lenders the first and only scoring system predictive of true risk and loan performance.”

India-based ISGN acquired Dynatek, a U.S.-based provider of mortgage automation software for retail and wholesale lenders, a press release indicated. The merger expands ISGN’s lender client base to over 400, “achieving considerable penetration into the industry’s mid-market, and has added another significant asset in-line with its overall strategy of becoming the industry’s technology and service leader,” according to an announcement. The merger adds to ISGN’s Pennsylvania-based MortgageHub.

Through a partnership, Overture Technologies’ Mozart Product Suite of pre-configured, automated pricing, product selection, and underwriting tools was combined with MortgageHub’s professional consulting services. The arrangement reportedly enables mid-sized lenders to a system that enables fast and accurate automation, customizable decisioning, diverse product handling and faster approval processes, previously available only to large lenders with larger budgets, according to another announcement.

To further expand its differentiating ability to provide borrowers with sound advice in the loan process, First Horizon Home Loans selected Tavant Technologies’ POS Platform as its universal home financing sales support system for its direct home lending channels and products. The platform supports “a needs-driven, advisory-focused loan sales process,” and will reportedly allow the company further growth in home financing and significantly improve efficiencies.

In servicing, Financial Industry Computer Systems Inc. announced Campus Federal Credit Union has successfully implemented its Commercial Servicer after initially purchasing the commercial mortgage servicing system in July 2006, when the credit union entered the commercial lending arena.

“We have found the software to be comprehensive and able to handle loan data, variable payment definitions, a wide array of loan structures, and all of the relevant collateral and security information,” a Campus executive was quoted as saying in an announcement.

Remend Inc. added to its Remend OnDemand mortgage servicing solution for default management with the release of Remend OnDemand Analytics and a Spring 2007 version of its Remend OnDemand REO solution. The analytics product provides real-time operational dashboards and standard reporting at the loan and asset level for operational, financial and compliance analysis, which also gives insight to proactively manage default functions and vendors throughout the loss mitigation, foreclosure, bankruptcy, REO and collateral valuation processes. The REO solution automates the entire REO process using configurable business rules and workflows, and allows managers to streamline their operations by using Web services to consolidate their date from multiple sources.

Technological innovations in mortgage closings included an announcement from SigniaDocs Inc., a mortgage document preparation solutions provider, that its partnership with Brooks Systems enables it to deliver rapid online response for Truth-In-Lending calculations and High-Cost Loan Analysis. The partnership factors Brooks’ high-cost loan calculations and APR figures directly into the SigniaDocs system at a pre-determined rate and also carries an errors and omissions policy to guarantee compliance accuracy of all calculations. SigniaDocs noted Brooks was selected as a major contributing part of a renewed alliance between Freddie Mac and the American Bankers Association, opening the door to many more mortgage lenders.

eLynx reportedly released an updated version of its SwiftView Tool solutions that supports PDF/A, Vista, and IE7, and adds numerous features that improve the viewing, printing, and conversion capabilities. Among other features, the SwiftView Pro 8.3 and SwiftConvert 8.3, allow for the creation of secure, password protected PDFs.

eLynx also recently said it enhanced its online electronic signature service, uSign, specifically to give insurance carriers increased efficiency, quality and cost reduction. Allianz Income Management Services, for example, reportedly used the eLynx electronic process to significantly reduce turn time for agent consent.

Secondary marketing technology is active, with Mavent Inc. announcing its chief executive, Louis Pizante, will participate in a panel discussion, “Selling and Buying Loans Using New Technologies,” this afternoon at the Mortgage Bankers Association Secondary Marketing Conference 2007. Some of the discussion’s focus will be on how “some lenders and purchasers have implemented new due diligence processes such as Transaction Automation and Correspondent Decisioning, which increase loan consistency, electronic delivery speed, accuracy and communication among these investors and originators.”

Mortgage Builder Software Inc. announced user demand for its secondary marketing tool continued to increase, with an estimated 75 percent of its customers using some portion of the tool and a quarter of these clients using the entire package. The tool is fully integrated into the Mortgage Builder loan origination system, and “seamlessly performs the processes required to efficiently manage pipeline risk, perform best execution analysis, sell and deliver loans to secondary market investors.”

Pricing technology news included Sollen Technologies’ announcement it enhanced its product and system management tools by simplifying the configuration site interface to make product and pricing administration tasks easier and more user-friendly. The redesigned configurations site provides “more powerful and flexible features such as product filtering and the removal of excessive administration steps.”

Warren, N.J.-based Lancaster Mortgage Bankers LLC chose Sollen’ Lender OnLine and Best Ex, which are Web-based applications that match the most compatible loan with the borrower with real time pricing information. Lancaster transitioned from a bulk to a flow model and needed a pricing engine that could be implemented seamlessly. Sollen was able to develop a private labeled site, integrate custom guidelines and product enhancements, upload Lancaster’s 1,800 brokers, and train all sales and operations staff in only three days, according to an announcement.

NYLX Inc. integrated its product and pricing technology into ProLender Solutions, a provider of loan management software. The integration allows bidirectional communication between the two systems, ability to update data in real-time throughout the life of a loan and combines advanced pricing and eligibility technology with mortgage back-office automation. The NYLX technology eliminates labor-intensive product decisioning, qualifies loan scenarios against multiple lenders’ guidelines, price adjusters and matrices to display fully adjusted rates and prices, and ranks the results.

On the origination side, Calyx Point, which offers software for streamlining the loan process, also integrated NYLX’s product eligibility and pricing — a combination that provides “unmatched” functionality mortgage brokers and direct lenders require for loan marketing, prequalification, origination and processing, the companies announced.