UniversalCIS and Credit Plus are combining to create the mortgage industry's largest provider of trimerge credit reports.
Terms of the transaction, which is described as a merger of equals, were not disclosed.
UniversalCIS, based in Philadelphia, has grown in the past 14 months via a series of acquisitions. The first deal took place in August 2020, when CIS merged with Avantus. The following October, it
In contrast to UniversalCIS, Credit Plus, founded in 1997, grew organically to become the third largest credit report company.
"We had worked hard to try to move into that top spot and made it into the top three and our goal was always to become the biggest and best in the industry," said CEO of Credit Plus, Greg Holmes. "We're aligned in how we run our businesses, and we found a good partner, in the fact that we were all independently small at one point, and then we all grew our businesses very aggressively and outsold the competition."
The combination's management team consists of Holmes as chief revenue officer, Perry Steiner, UniversalCIS' chairman, as chairman and CEO and Jerry Haftmann, who was UniversalCIS' CEO, now is the vice chairman.
"When we looked at the natural next step, our goal was always to be the largest, not just for the sake of being largest but being the best," Steiner said. "We're really bringing together the executive talent and leadership and the entire employee base of both businesses and it was just a natural evolution to have the resources to be servicing, not only the top lenders in the country, but also smaller mortgage brokers because both constituencies are very important to us."
The combined company will have 12 operations centers (seven from UniversalCIS and five from Credit Plus), with over 750 employees. Credit Plus services over 4,000 customers while UniversalCIS has 2,700 clients.
Private investment firm Lovell Minnick
"The backing of Lovell Minnick was actually a very important financial part of the equation here," Steiner said. "It is exactly why UniversalCIS partnered with Lovell Minnick as our private equity partner, to have the capital to be able to go out and do a merger of this scale."
For the time being, UniversalCIS and
"This is an industry that has stayed relatively stagnant in terms of the way it delivers its products and technologies for the last decade or so," Steiner said. "We believe there are opportunities to really optimize the industry and change components for the benefit and efficiencies and part of that will be represented in a rebranding that [shows] it's different, it's a new way of doing things."
When lenders need data verifications and information, it's readily available through both a web portal and hundreds of integrations that Credit Plus built over decades, Holmes said.
"But in the last three to five years there has been a stronger emphasis on trying to create the digital mortgage and make that a reality, to try to cut down processing time from 30 days ultimately to, the goal is five to seven days," Holmes continued. "We know we're not quite there, obviously, but anything that we can do with our new brand to facilitate faster and quicker closings, we're doing our part for the industry."
