ICE Mortgage Technology is further modernizing the broadly utilized servicing system it acquired from Black Knight.
The technology company plans to unveil functionality at its upcoming user conference that does things like allow mortgage companies to more broadly vet servicing as loans get loaded into its
The new updates arrive amid intensified competition to
"You don't always think of the amount of potential things that can go wrong later on in that loan's life by not getting that part right at the beginning," said Sandra Madigan, an executive vice president at the company responsible for servicing technology product innovation. "We're giving our servicers the ability to QC 100% of the loans."
While some of the larger servicers have been able to implement quality control to that degree, they've required sizable staffing to do it, and more moderate-sized companies have sampled 5% to 20% of loans for QC purposes, she said.
The new automation applies a servicing quality check analyzer to loan data and documents as they get loaded into the servicing system, visually highlighting discrepancies in yellow. This can help identify concerns like an improper rate adjustment or the miscategorization of a mortgage product.
"If you haven't captured something like the fact that it's a military loan in servicing that could create all kinds of compliance problems later on," Madigan said.
While the analysis is somewhat like that done in an origination system, where quality control's focus on addressing loan flaws that could cause repurchase risk, it needed to be tailored for different concerns servicers related to loan performance.
An originator may be less concerned with tax payment information after a loan gets sold into the secondary market but a servicer responsible for consumer payments and escrow will find it essential, Madigan noted.
"Our clients at the beginning identified 47-something fields that they deemed critical. We're up to almost 140," she said.
Another MSP-related capability the company plans to roll out at its conference one is aimed at reducing the number of back-office exceptions for servicers' investor reporting groups by automating more scenarios.
"It reduces your cost to service because you're not spending so much time on those exceptions," she said. "Previously, you would have to manually work through each of those exceptions, and now, through the system, it'll either automatically create a reconciliation for you or present you with the relevant data."
The company also has been working to further build out an integration between MSP and its origination system that was designed to help with retention efforts, and it plans to add a new product and pricing engine component to it. (ICE Mortgage previously had a PPE unit called Optimal Blue but
"Prior to this integration in servicing digital we presented you an average national monthly rate as a borrower," Madigan said. "Now that we have a robust product and pricing engine, we are able to connect to that so that the borrower sees something that is a little bit more tailored."
ICE Mortgage also is working on a servicing technology innovation it hopes to roll out further down the road after the conference which will help in situations where a borrower makes a cash payment and there are complications like a need to reallocate funds, according to Madigan.
