By: Abby Gregory

With risk-retention regulations weighing heavily on exposed lenders, servicers, and investors, it's critically important to develop the right strategies and protection for success in today's mortgage marketplace.

An excellent risk management program should be a simple matter of ethics, right? Maybe to the uninitiated, but professionals in the industry who are juggling compliance with evolving risk-retention rules, the resulting changes in the secondary market, and a dearth of new risk-targeting technology wouldn't agree. New government initiatives to prevent risky business in the mortgage landscape are stringent, and in combination with a still-recovering housing market, everyone from originators to servicers to investors is struggling to create new strategies for successful lending.

While an excellent board of directors, precise executive management, and a healthy company culture are all important to risk mitigation solutions, some of the best methods for improved risk limitation come in the form of advanced technology. Many tech tools are available to serve businesses, but there are 11 programs that stand out from the rest when it comes to better risk return evaluation, information aggregation, and oversight processes.

Finale Document Services, Mortgage Cadence
Finale makes document processing and prep a task that's easy to tackle through its compliance-focused program that aggregates loan content, documentation, and management into a single point. The product is a spinoff of Mortgage Cadence's original Finale product, and the document services entity evolved into a separate project based on the high demand for enhanced risk policy, courtesy of the company's encryption and rules-based documentation processes. Finale offers remarkable processing speed as well as good customer support resources. The software's fast pace is attributed to the program's ability to sort data via original sources as opposed to requiring a forms library.