Can Technology Really Save Mortgage Servicing?

Today's mortgage loan servicers have only two choices: figure out how to deal with these problems on their own or figure out how to effectively outsource them and then manage that process. And companies are rising to the challenge of making that possible.

The need is definitely there, according to Michael Detwiler, CEO of Denver-based Mortgage Cadence, who lays out the problem with a simple statement: "Servicers are being asked to behave like underwriters."

Detwiler is not the first to point out that servicers lack the technology, the expertise and the know-how to help their borrowers meet the stringent requirements of these new government programs. HAMP drives a significant amount of work that servicers are not trained to do. They just can't get this job done, he argues.

Detwiler says the right technology will start by qualifying a borrower for a loan program, which he says is no different from what the LOS and Product and Pricing Engines (PPE) have been doing since the refinance boom. Once the loan program is discovered by the technology, the tool should define a workflow path that will walk a servicer (or their outsource partner) who is unfamiliar with underwriting and processing through the process stage by stage, step by step, task by task until the deal is closed.

Detwiler maintains that the only difference between what servicers need today and what originators have always had is that the analytics used to qualify the borrowers are different with a loan modification.

This past summer, Mortgage Cadence announced that the nation's largest loss mitigation and modification provider had chosen its system for their technology platform and document supplier. Pittsburgh-based Urban Settlement Services replaced its primary analytic and document solution with Mortgage Cadence Orchestrator, Mortgage Cadence Harmony and Mortgage Cadence Finale, all parts of its ELS offering.