|
Special Reports
Origination Technology Update
Using Technology to Improve Personalized Docs
By Bonnie Sinnock
ATLANTA--Brent Burns complains that he frequently receives letters from his lender
urging him to get a home-equity line of credit even though he already has one.
To Mr. Burns, group vice president for financial services at automation provider
Exstream, this is one example of how the mortgage industry is a "laggard" in terms of using technology
to effectively and efficiently develop and personalize documents.
It doesn't have to be that way, he said. Technology Exstream offers can be used
to "build a rule" into the document system a lender uses to send such letters that addresses the issue,
said the Exstream executive. By building such a rule, the automation can personalize correspondence on the basis
of "if they have this type of account, do not send this insert" or "if they have this kind of account,
send this message," Mr. Burns said in an phone interview from Lexington, Ky.-based Exstream's office here.
Exstream's technology can be used in many ways such as in the U.S. mortgage origination
market's effort to keep up with country's patchwork of state and local laws, said Lisa Metsa, an account executive
in the company's financial services area. In this area it can be used as follows:
"If I was at a branch, for example, and a prospective client [came in], I
would gather all the information for that prospective client, enter the information into our [LOS]. Once the information
was processed and approved, then the appropriate forms automatically were generated, personalized based on that
particular client and then sent to the appropriate branch," she said.
Thus, Ms. Metsa said one client was able to use this to "personalize the
information and the number of forms that needed to be included based on that prospective client's information as
well as the particular state."
Exstream's automation also has been and can be used to monitor compliance, Mr.
Burns said.
One originator the company worked with used the technology to address some concerns
it had "with regards to some of the [loan officers] doing some things in some of the offices that weren't
in compliance with what the institution wanted to do in terms of raising some fees and doing some fee manipulation
and so forth."
He said the technology was able to help the originator monitor compliance by both
allowing the LO to print a document while simultaneously sending that document into a batch process that was processed
at night and sent to the customer through the mail so the customer could compare and make sure the two documents
were the same.
This "eliminated the ability of the individual [loan officer] in the branch
from manipulating some of the fees that were outside of the requirements that that institution had for that particular
area," Mr. Burns said.
Exstream generally sells access to its technology under terms that require the
company's clients to pay a perpetual licensing fee for the use of its software that varies depending on how many
modules of the software they want to use. Most clients also choose to pay this in concert with an annual fee for
maintenance, he said.
However, he also noted that some financial services companies have opted for subscription-based
pricing that "allows them to spread out the costs and treat it more as an [operating] expense as opposed to
a capital expense.
|
