Mortgage insurance Company

The Company

This mortgage insurance company has a strong capital position, financial strength, and is unburdened by legacy portfolio risk. A U.S.-based company, they enable low down-payment borrowers to realize home ownership, while protecting lenders and investors against losses related to a borrower’s default.

Another business differentiator for them is the use of a delegated-underwriting model for trusted business partners. In addition to underwriting mortgage insurance policies internally, they will allow trusted mortgage lenders to perform the insurance underwriting process and streamline the insurance issuance lifecycle as long as their requirements are met.

The company has received approvals by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as an eligible mortgage insurer and is licensed to offer mortgage insurance nationwide. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, they provide innovative risk-management solutions and significant insurance capacity geared to support the needs of an evolving housing finance industry.

The Challenge

As a new entrant into a very competitive industry, a significant component of the they company’s value proposition was to fundamentally change the way mortgage insurance applications are processed. This new model included the full underwriting of every application; in an industry where typically less than 15% of all applications are fully underwritten prior to decisioning. In order to efficiently and, more importantly cost effectively, execute this model, the paper intensive mortgage insurance process required significant automation.

The company was looking for an integrator with prior experience in setting up solutions for mortgage processing.

As one of the leading partners of Alfresco, Zia was brought on board to create a solution. They engaged Zia Consulting to assess their technology requirements for:

• Electronic document capture, classification and indexing
• Content management, including workflow, and document annotation
• Integration with their insurance management system (IMS), UltraESB enterprise service bus, XMediusFAX platform, and EDI platform

The Solution

During an initial Assessment, consisting of Zia working onsite with the company’s IT team for a couple of weeks, Zia identified their desire to only process documents in electronic form. The implementation and deployment of Ephesoft Intelligent Document Capture and Alfresco Content and Process Services was proposed to automate their underwriting and servicing processes. An iterative methodology was employed to enable rapid delivery of incremental business functionality.

The solution created supports the underwriting of mortgages in an expedient manner so as to meet the tight timelines faced by the company.

The Alfresco repository serves up documents to the servicing and origination apps, and then Ephesoft is used to classify and apply metadata to bundles of loan docs as they come in, primarily in electronic formats. There is aso an ongoing proof-of-concept for extraction for 1008 forms to initiate an application.

While Zia is responsible for all development work and Level II support, the internal IT team is able to handle the infrastructure and initial support. This ongoing, collaborative effort between Zia and with both IT and business teams at the company works to evolve the solution and meet their evolutionary and growth needs. Zia performs periodic onsite visits to check in and ensure proper functionality with changing needs.

The Results

The company averages 2800 batches (over 16,000 docs and over 500,000 pages) per week.

The processing time for batches has been reduced to as little as four minutes/batch, a decrease of up to 10 minutes over the previous year. Upon implementation of the solution, the company saw a yearly decrease of 64% in overall processing time—going from 24 minutes to 8.6.

Zia and the company continue to work together to evolve the solution according to the company’s needs and the ever changing regulations.

“We faced the multifaceted challenges of entering a highly competitive industry as a new entrant, introducing new business models, building all systems, processes and procedures from scratch—and all in a very short period of time. To be successful, we require strong technology partners, willing to go the extra mile and form strong strategic alliances for the long haul. Zia Consulting fits the bill.”