Jeff Mouhalis, EVP, CIO
Mortgage Services
Fidelity National Information Services
The demand for data, at an increasingly granular level, continues to accelerate in the mortgage industry. Originators need customer data to select mortgage loan products and lender data to identify product requirements. Underwriters need data to approve loans and servicers need data to service them. Investors need data to conduct the due diligence process and customers need data to access account information, make payments and request a pay-off quote. Third party vendors need data to provide credit histories, appraisals, flood insurance, title work and closing documents and when loans default, they need data to manage the foreclosure process and maintain REO properties until they’re sold.
The tremendous investments that have been made to enable data access and transmission throughout the industry have accomplished little more than that. Countless proprietary interfaces have been built to allow data to move between disparate systems while bulk files, spreadsheets, dial ups and screen scraping continue to be the norm. The data is moving, but it takes more time than it should, isn’t always as secure as it could be and is unwieldy to control.
However, the use of Web services is rapidly changing the way we think about data – and the way we interact with it. It is a cleaner, faster way to access data regardless of where it resides, either inside the organization or with a third party vendor. It frees organizations from having to develop and maintain a network of hard-coded integrations, and once a particular Web service has been implemented, it can be endlessly reused by anyone authorized to deploy it.
Most institutions have incorporated Web services architectures into their environments - initially to solve a particular business problem – and found they could leverage those same services across multiple applications and multiple processes within applications. Web services also enable a high level of control over data, delivering only the data set that is needed in order to perform specific tasks. It allows a highly secure environment that authenticates users and validates the data sets they are authorized to view and/or update.
In fact, there is a multiplier effect associated with Web services that expands the benefits of implementation far beyond data access and transmission. Services can be used and reused to eliminate business processes and drive others across the mortgage chain. This is where mortgage visionaries are now focusing their attention. The aggregation and orchestration of Web services to handle multiple tasks is the next frontier of efficiency, cost reduction and time-to-market speed in the mortgage industry.
One example of Web services orchestration is embedded in the FIS Pay-Off Express solution that is available for loans serviced on the FIS MSP servicing platform. When an authorized user deploys Pay-Off Express, it calls up a service that validates the loan using the lender’s rules, and then kicks off another service to get the pay off quote and deliver it back to the user. Together, these services do more than what either one does alone. Another example occurs when a customer makes an address change on a lender’s Web portal. The institution can deploy a Web service and business rules to update the address on the mortgage loan and on every other account the customer has with the firm. Propagating this change across all accounts is simple and fast. Imagine the speed with which Web services can allow financial institutions to change business processes throughout the enterprise.
Using a supply chain analogy, Web services delivers only what the user needs and does it just-in-time. It can get to the data through multiple paths, depending on where the request comes from, and it can go out to multiple databases to build the particular set of data that a requester needs. It both enlarges the world in terms of the vast array of databases that can be accessed, and makes the world smaller because it delivers the data exactly when and where the user needs it.
Web services technology has helped mortgage companies dramatically improve operations and solve complex business problems. It is also the technology that can help the mortgage industry reach new levels of speed, efficiency and customer experience. Certainly, Web services technology offers a very promising path to the future.