InsightsMortgage industry trends: a focus on the review process 

The next step in origination modernization is automating valuation and title review processes. The payoffs? Accuracy, efficiency, speed and cost savings.

The future of the mortgage industry depends in large part on lenders’ abilities to harness automation that cuts time and cost out of mortgage origination — without increasing their risk. Lenders who create a mortgage experience that aligns with borrowers’ growing expectations for speed and transparency are positioning themselves to thrive in today’s competitive environment. Those who don’t stay ahead of today’s mortgage industry trends risk falling behind.

Forward-thinking lenders are incorporating automated review processes into their modernization efforts. Replacing time-intensive manual title and appraisal quality control reviews with proven automated processes helps lenders get borrowers to the closing table days sooner, while building new efficiencies and cost savings into their workflows.

Automating appraisal reviews

Lenders working with ServiceLink have an opportunity to holistically streamline their valuation processes. The process starts with ServiceLink connecting the borrower or their real estate agent with the real-time calendars of local appraisers. This process allows them to select the exact date and time of their inspection appointment – within minutes. Ultimately, it shaves days off turn times by eliminating back and forth associated with scheduling. But the efficiency gains don’t stop there: lenders working with ServiceLink also increase efficiency through our automated quality control process. Lenders have an opportunity to modernize key milestones in their valuation workflows – including reviews. The right partner can add value and efficiency throughout the review process.

“The important thing for lenders to consider when choosing a technology partner for automating their review processes is that company’s ability to customize the ruleset to reflect their own quality standards,” says Matt Woodhouse, managing director of valuations at ServiceLink. “At ServiceLink, we mirror the lender’s system, incorporating their unique set of rules and checks into our own stringent quality review processes to ensure our reviews meet all of their criteria. We back those reviews with a quality guarantee that allows them to deliver loans to the GSEs with confidence.”

In one recent example, ServiceLink helped a lender cut post-delivery revisions in half – and redeploy half of their underwriting team. This lender had previously experienced challenges when working with other AMCs on automated reviews. ServiceLink’s level of customization and ability to work closely with their underwriting team allowed for optimized reviews.

Learn more about how lenders can experience efficiency gains by automating quality control review for valuations in a recent article, featuring Matt and his team.

Optimizing origination through streamlined title reviews

Jim Gladden, senior vice president of origination strategy at ServiceLink, agrees that the customization and accuracy of automated review processes are key to lenders’ successful modernization efforts. He shares how ServiceLink has focused on modernizing title processes, in addition to valuations. “Over the past five years, leveraging our EXOS® Title production engine, we’ve eliminated the need for a title examiner to be involved in issuing a title commitment for the majority of the hundreds of thousands of commitments we’ve issued. This process has proven to be sound, delivering enhanced quality, reliability and consistency.” He continues, “For years, we have been evolving the title process to ingest available data through our EXOS® Title production platform, which enables us to provide predictive results and return key elements of title data to our lender partners. This helps further automate portions of their previously manual title review processes, ultimately saving them time and money.”

Importantly, ServiceLink relies on high-quality data. Repositories for its title-grade data include Fidelity title plans, public records, credit repository and LexisNexis. And, it performs real title searches: cloud-based automation engines, localized machine learning rules and logic, natural language processing and OCR technology perform instant title searches.

In a recent article, Jim and other members of the ServiceLink team discussed how lenders can automate title reviews and the impact of automation. Check out the article today.

Selecting the right partner

Lenders can partner with ServiceLink with confidence, knowing that the organization has the strength, stability, and experience to guide them through process changes. With decades of experience and the backing of Fidelity National Financial, ServiceLink is ready to help lenders navigate the future of originations. It invests heavily in legal and compliance teams and partners closely with the GSEs and other industry leaders, ensuring that they’re ready for regulatory changes.

ServiceLink’s track record speaks for itself, Woodhouse says, as lenders seek the utmost in quality, performance and flexibility. “Whether we’re doing a fully automated review with one data set or three data sets, a hybrid approach where the automation leads to a manual review, or a 100% manual review by a title or valuations expert, the lenders who work with us have seen firsthand that they can rely on our work to the point of forgoing their own internal processes and controls. Why should they spend time doing the exact same thing we can do for them — with exceptional speed and accuracy?”