Just like in baseball, where stats reign supreme, mortgage lending relies on metrics and statistics to measure performance. Lenders track their equivalent of batting averages and runs batted in (RBIs), whether it’s pull-through rates, costs-per-loan, time-to-process, defects-per-loan, servicing inquiries per employee, or any other mortgage lending units of measurement.

But winning in the mortgage game goes beyond measuring and tracking performance data. Just as baseball managers scrutinize player stats to build a championship team, lenders and servicers need deep insights from their data to navigate an increasingly complex financial playing field. In today’s challenging market, data analysis is the ultimate fastball to lower costs and boost efficiency.

 

Why Numbers Matter

Despite the promises of various technologies, origination costs continue upward. Whether it’s supporting new loan programs and regulatory needs, or making do with manual processes during spikes in demand, lenders manage operations in an environment of constantly changing industry pressures. By leveraging comprehensive analytics, however, lenders can identify operational bottlenecks and uncover ways to streamline loan processing, underwriting, closing and post-closing workflows—and bolster their competitive edge.

Servicers rely on statistics at the loan and portfolio level, too. With every basis point counted, servicers require meticulous portfolio management and efficient loss mitigation strategies to keep costs down. Whether it’s loan onboarding, MSR transfers, investor and insurer audits, or borrower and other customer engagement, having the correct data for the process (and confidently knowing it’s correct) are key to managing processes efficiently. By being able to compare data from different systems with data from source documents and datasets, servicers can reduce costs to locate or confirm “the right answer” and improve the quality of their loan files and portfolios.

 

Where Issues Arise

In essence, as both origination and servicing costs escalate, the value of insightful reporting and performance metrics also rises. By harnessing data-driven insights, mortgage organizations can mitigate operational risks and cultivate resilience to market fluctuations.

But here’s the catch: these data-driven insights are hard to come by. For one thing, many mortgage organizations still rely on manual processes for handling loan documents and data. This approach is costly and increases the likelihood of errors and inefficiencies that increase risk or hamper overall productivity.

This situation is compounded by the prevalence of document technology providers that don’t deliver the promised results shown in their demos. As a result, many lenders and servicers invest in them, but don’t receive their expected ROI. Stuck with inefficient workflows and lower than expected automation results, they feel trapped in a cycle of increasing manual costs. Lacking reliable metrics to identify operational logjams and accurately measure their operational efficiency compounds the situation, even when everyone agrees “our processes are not working as well as they need to be.”

However, there is a way to turn this situation around.

 

AI to the Rescue

Paradatec’s AI-based automation technology is the ultimate designated hitter for lenders and servicers. We have the stats to prove it—and so do our clients.

By leveraging advanced machine learning models and a vast pre-trained library of over 850 mortgage-specific document types, our AI-Cloud solution ensures unparalleled accuracy and efficiency in document processing. With the latest in advanced AI models—pre-trained on hundreds of thousands of examples—AI-Cloud enables remarkable automation for document classification, versioning, data extraction and data evaluation.

Our monitoring and reporting tools empower lenders and servicers to measure Paradatec’s document processing accuracy, automation rates and other critical success metrics, so they can evaluate operational improvements and cost savings with pinpoint precision. For example, one of our large independent mortgage lender clients uses our technology to slash the average amount of time spent reviewing and correcting loan documents from 40 minutes to 5 minutes.

We make the same reports we use to measure the AI-Cloud platform available to customers, so we can both assess its performance in real time. But our metrics don’t stop at Paradatec’s system performance.

Along with detailed reporting that includes end user engagement and usage, customers use our SLA Dashboard to manage their own service levels with real-time information. With the ability to manage priorities both within each of their Paradatec processing queues or across all of their Paradatec queues, customers can quickly adjust to operational demands and support special projects like data mining all while optimizing results.

And that’s not all. Our Analytics Module for the AI-Cloud platform improves overall data accuracy even further through automated data evaluation. It automatically compares extracted data from multiple source documents to data stored in various systems and flags unusual data or missing documents, allowing lenders and servicers to further improve the quality of their loan files while enhancing their issue detection capabilities. It’s like having your own video replay system to catch any potential baserunning errors.

 

If you’re looking to start filling up your stat sheet and ignite your growth and efficiency strategies with Paradatec’s robust system reporting and statistics, drop us a note at info@paradatec.com.

When it comes to managing mortgage data, accuracy is like a perfectly placed pitch in baseball – it sets the stage for success. Just like a single player error can cost a team the game, a data integrity issue can lead to missed opportunities, frustrated customers and investors, and even regulatory penalties.

In other words, lenders and servicers need to consistently hit home runs when it comes to data accuracy — whether it’s a single workflow or the culmination of many processes (such as investor loan delivery or servicing onboarding) that “stack the bases” and bring multiple runs across home plate. In this sense, AI document automation is not just the ultimate utility player, helping every position on the field. It also helps companies score.

 

The Impact of Origination Errors

Loan quality is the cornerstone of successful loan origination. But in today’s market, where regulatory scrutiny and origination costs are both at all-time highs, the stakes for loan quality have never been greater.

Traditional methods of ensuring data accuracy, such as manual reviews, are not easily scalable and are prone to errors and inefficiencies. At a per-loan level, this can impact production efficiency and customer satisfaction; and more broadly, financially impact the business with potential loan buybacks and regulatory assessments.

AI-powered document automation can help lenders streamline data extraction and validation from documents with a level of accuracy and speed exceeding human stamina, while also freeing up staff to perform more complex tasks. Using neural networks, machine learning algorithms and pre-trained models, AI can accurately identify and extract critical data points, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring data consistency.

 

Enhanced Servicing Precision

Ensuring data accuracy is equally important for mortgage servicers, especially when transferring mortgage servicing rights and navigating loss mitigation processes. Just like baseball teams rely on precise communication and coordination between players, servicers depend on accurate data to efficiently manage their portfolios and support the needs of borrowers, investors and regulators.

Thankfully, AI-powered document automation enables servicers to on-board loans and ingest loan portfolios efficiently and effectively. With AI assistance, servicers can perform required audits quickly and accurately, ensuring all key documents are executed properly while validating critical data. These tools help servicers maintain data integrity, minimize discrepancies, and reduce legal and financial risks associated with inaccurate data.

 

Taking Data Accuracy to the Next Level

At Paradatec, we understand how important it is for lenders and servicers to maintain clean and reliable data. Our industry-leading AI technology extracts data from documents and automatically compares it with data stored in your existing systems, eliminating the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual data reviews. With Paradatec, lenders and servicers can focus on just the exceptions.

For example, our AI-Cloud solution includes a pre-trained library to recognize over 850 mortgage document types and extract over 8,500 data fields. Our unique neural network-based platform harnesses machine-learning tools to quickly learn and recognize new documents and fields.

Our Analytics Module acts like your own personal umpire, automatically comparing data and highlighting inconsistencies. It flags missing documents and unusual data points, allowing you to investigate potential errors before they become bigger problems. Its flexible rules engine allows clients to augment Paradatec’s rules library with their own business rules, enabling customers to adapt the module to their unique needs.

Built on Paradatec’s award winning AI-based document classification, versioning, and data extraction capabilities, the Analytics Module seamlessly integrates data from multiple sources, automating calculations and comparisons with ease.

By making it easy to implement Paradatec, our flexible API returns results and data uses configurable triggers and translation formats into customers’ downstream systems, ensuring a smooth and efficient workflow. Paradatec is also pre-integrated into several leading systems of record in the mortgage and real estate industry.

Process automation, reliable results, and innovation driven by customer feedback. These are some of the reasons Paradatec is trusted by 3 of the 10 largest US banks, 5 of the 10 largest mortgage servicers, and multiple system and service providers.

 

Ready to step up to the plate and revolutionize your data game?  Contact us at info@paradatec.com and we’d be happy to answer your questions and provide a demo.

 

In baseball, a utility player is someone who has the ability to play multiple positions based on their team’s needs, both on the field and at the plate. Their versatility enables team managers to adapt to different game situations while allowing more established role players to do what they do best.

Utility players are equally valuable in the mortgage game, too—and they don’t even have to be human. In fact, with AI-based document automation, lenders and servicers have an immensely dynamic utility player that takes the heavy lifting off their plate, so their teams can focus on scoring more loans and delivering a great customer experience.

 

Why Teams Struggle to Score

While technology has significantly impacted mortgage processes, most lenders and servicers still grapple with inefficiencies rooted in handling hundreds of pages of documents in a typical loan file. Reviewing, comparing across different data sources, and finalizing a trusted data set from all of those documents is necessary—but time consuming when done manually.

The repetitive nature of these tasks, coupled with the sheer volume of documents and data being handled, can easily overwhelm staff, especially during periods of high origination volume, bulk servicing transfers, or rising delinquencies. These manual processes also impede productivity and growth, as mortgage organizations become bogged down in document sorting and validation instead of focusing on activities that directly impact revenue.

These challenges can lead to missed opportunities and a struggle to remain competitive. But there is a special player that is always ready to step in and help a lender’s team put more runs on the scoreboard.

 

How AI Fills the Gaps

Baseball has many players known for their ability to make an immediate impact on their team. And in the mortgage industry, there is no bigger impact player than AI-based document automation, because it can be used in any stage of the loan lifecycle.

When combined with the power and accessibility of cloud technology, AI-driven document technology introduces unparalleled levels of efficiency. By leveraging advanced machine learning, including neural networks and other technologies such as text-based analysis, these tools can nearly eliminate the manual processes that historically slow down mortgage processes.

AI-powered automation can extract relevant data from structured and unstructured documents, including pay stubs, tax forms, bank statements and specialty forms. And it rapidly processes files with a level of accuracy unmatched by humans, enabling lenders and servicers to streamline retail and third party originated loan production or onboard thousands of loan files in just hours. It even helps reduces errors that hinder efficiency and raise compliance concerns, helping lenders and servicers avoid the scrutiny of regulators and improve investor relationships.

 

The Ultimate Utility Player

If you’re looking to enhance your team with a dynamic, AI-fueled utility player, you can do no better than Paradatec’s AI-Cloud solution.

AI-Cloud unlocks touchless document classification, delivering a level of efficiency that far surpasses manual processing. Its flexibility adds value to a wide array of mortgage processes, including loan originations, MSR onboarding and portfolio cleanups, transforming document handling with unparalleled speed and accuracy.

AI-Cloud identifies over 850 mortgage document types and harnesses machine-learning tools to quickly learn and recognize new ones. It also extracts more than 8,500 data points to fuel your automation initiatives. Optimized for cloud deployments or available as a service through Paradatec’s SOC-2 certified cloud environment, AI-Cloud is highly scalable and requires minimal IT resources to implement and maintain.

 

To learn more about AI-Cloud, contact us at info@paradatec.com. We’d be happy to set up a demo and put your team in a better position to win.

Every spring marks the arrival of not one, but two of America’s favorite pastimes: baseball and homebuying. And while major league teams chase the World Series, mortgage lenders and servicers are looking to win by growing their portfolios and boosting their bottom lines.

Of course, victory in an ever-changing housing market isn’t easy. But lenders and servicers have a very powerful playbook at their disposal, should they choose to use it: AI-based document automation, which works not only in springtime, but all year round.

Enhancing Origination Efficiency

For lenders looking to accelerate loan production processes, reduce costs and generate more loans, document automation offers a powerful tool to enhance their competitive edge.

By utilizing AI-based text analysis tools, lenders can extract relevant data from borrower-provided documents such as pay stubs, W-2s, bank statements and tax forms, enabling them to accelerate underwriting processes while reducing origination costs. That means less time spent manually verifying documents and more time dedicated to serving borrowers.

As loans progress through the pipeline, AI-powered document automation identifies individual loan documents and compares key data elements with your loan origination system (LOS) in milliseconds, ensuring accuracy and integrity. This saves time and minimizes errors, allowing lenders to close loans with confidence.

Lenders can also use these tools to generate custom reports and perform audits with ease. They can even automatically compare system-of-record data from different systems with extracted and calculated data from source documents and datasets and return fully traceable and auditable results. The result: improved loan file quality and enhanced fraud detection.

Streamlining Servicing Processes

For servicers, the combination of AI and loan document automation is equally valuable, starting from the minute they onboard loans.

AI-fueled document technology can vastly accelerate bulk onboarding and ingestion of loan portfolios, even for loans with inconsistently named documents and error-ridden indexing. By capturing thousands of data elements in just milliseconds, servicers can quickly establish a dependable database of record while simplifying the onboarding of thousands of loans per day.

AI document processing also streamlines loan onboarding audits.  It automatically identifies final versions of key documents, extracts relevant data for due diligence and archiving, and verifies data accuracy by auditing previous servicer data against incoming documents.

AI-Cloud: A Game-Winning Strategy

If you’re looking for a powerful playbook for document processing that delivers results year-round, Paradatec has you covered. Our technologies are used by lenders and servicers of all sizes to process over 2 billion documents per year.

Our solutions are available in the cloud, too. In fact, our AI-Cloud platform provides you with access to over 850 mortgage document types out of the box. And by using machine-learning tools and pre-trained libraries, it’s capable of identifying more than 8,500 data points trapped in those documents and transforming them into actionable data.

There’s a reason why Paradatec is trusted by 3 of the 10 largest U.S. banks and 4 of the 10 largest mortgage servicers—our AI document automation simply works. To see for yourself, contact us at info@paradatec.com, and we’d be happy to set up a demo of AI-Cloud at your convenience.

When it comes to mortgages, accurate data is non-negotiable. It’s simply impossible to maintain regulatory compliance or confidently sell loans on the secondary market without it.  

However, ensuring data accuracy can be a daunting task. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to review loan documents and check and cross-check data manually. At the same time, the traditional technologies lenders and servicers have used to identify and capture data from loan documents are extremely limited.  

Adding to this data dilemma are two recent market developments that have made it even harder for lenders and servicers to ensure data accuracy. Originators are facing new QC requirements from Fannie Mae, while the hot MSR market and the growing potential for increased defaults is placing pressure on servicers to get data right. But as the French playwright Molière once noted, “The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.”  

 

The Latest Push for Loan Quality 

Quality data demands on lenders rose significantly this year when Fannie Mae introduced new pre-funding and post-closing QC requirements that are expected to go into effect next month. The GSEs’ new policies require lenders to complete a minimum number of pre-funding QC reviews every month, plus lenders must now complete their post-closing QC reviews in 90 days instead of 120 days. 

While there has been some pushback on Fannie’s new requirements, they underscore the critical need lenders have for tools that enable them to quickly identify incorrect or missing data that could lead to loan defects and potentially costly repurchases. It also bears mentioning that Fannie Mae is far from alone in demanding higher loan quality. Investors and federal regulators are increasingly requiring it, too.  

Invariably, this means lenders need accurate data extraction technology that enables them to instantly identify, capture and extract data from any loan document. The problem? Most third-party providers of data extraction technology and legacy optical character recognition (OCR) tools have failed to keep up with the growing number of structured and unstructured loan documents. Some providers have been cutting staff in response to higher rates and lower loan volumes, too, so the problem continues to persist.  

 

Servicers Have Their Own Challenges  

The need for accurate data is not limited to lenders. On the servicing side of the business, high quality data is equally paramount—and growing more so. 

One reason for this has been the growing demand for MSRs, as many organizations have pivoted to servicing loans to counter decreased loan production. Ensuring accurate data is critical to quickly ingesting and analyzing loan files and auditing loan documents before integrating them into a servicer’s system. 

Data accuracy will grow significantly more important if mortgage defaults rise, too. Such a development is looking increasingly likely, since many new homeowners have found themselves stretched thin financially due to the recent rise in interest rates and inflation. In order to perform loss mitigation processes efficiently, including forbearance requests or loan modifications, servicers will need to ensure all existing loan data and the data from incoming borrower documents is accurate.  

Unfortunately, many data extraction technologies have proven no more effective for servicers than they have for originators—either because they are built on older technology or because their solutions are unproven. And ensuring data accuracy when exchanging MSRs or determining the proper loss mitigation option for a borrower in default is equally as intimidating when performed manually as it is for originators. Not only do manual processes create delays and potential errors when onboarding loans, but they also add to a servicer’s costs in what is already a cost-intensive business.   

 

Harnessing the Power of AI 

With the proper technology, any mortgage organization can ensure it is working with accurate data and is able to seamlessly identify potential issues before they become expensive problems. The right technology can also help lenders identify mismatched data and use it to help spot fraud. 

The key lies in leveraging modern, proven AI-powered data extraction technology that enables companies to effortlessly classify and extract data from diverse structured and unstructured documents with speed and precision. That is why an increasing number of lenders and servicers are turning to Paradatec’s award-winning AI-Cloud solution. 

Equipped with an impressive pre-built library of over 8,500 unique data fields found in loan documents, AI-Cloud harnesses advanced machine learning capabilities to swiftly and accurately transform the information trapped within documents into individual data elements. And it does so extremely accurately and reliably, so that clients can generate purified data to fuel their automation initiatives and gain valuable insights into their processes and strategic plans.  

Because it can pull data from over 850 known mortgage document types within seconds, AI-Cloud also empowers clients to confidently audit large volumes of loan files to meet Fannie Mae’s new requirements and post-closing deadlines. It also enables servicers to automatically audit data provided by prior servicers against incoming documents before ingesting MSRs into their system, thus minimizing errors and enhancing their overall customer experience. 

 

If recent market developments have you concerned about data accuracy, we can help. Just drop us a note at info@paradatec.com! 

As the housing market takes a breather, most mortgage and real estate companies are turning their attention to reducing costs. And few processes are more costly or time-consuming than document management.

When it comes to improving efficiency, shortening the time between receiving loan documents and making use of them stands at the top of the list. Fortunately, there are many document management software options for streamlining operations, including products that leverage optical character recognition (OCR), AI and machine learning technologies. Yet there are just as many broad and bold claims being made about them. How do you know what to believe? Or better yet, how do you test these technologies?

To help, we list three important questions to ask when evaluating these claims. Before you begin comparing vendors though, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions.

 

Know Thyself

Mortgages may be a commodity of sorts, but every company is unique in terms of their business goals and how they get things done.

Before looking for document analysis technology, first ask yourself, “What specific problems are we trying to solve?” To answer this question, you must know what your requirements are on a high level. What workflows and documents are you using? What data needs to be extracted? And how do you intend to use that data? Which systems will be involved?

You’ll also need to know what your decision factors are. For example, how much are you prepared to spend on implementation and ongoing cost of ownership? How quickly do you plan to implement the solution? Is there an upcoming deadline for an audit you need to prepare for?

Once you know what your needs are, you can evaluate vendors by asking the following three questions:

1. What will I actually get?

Simple question, right? Not exactly. If you’ve done any research into document technology vendors, you’ve encountered mountains of happy marketing lingo and hyperbole. What you need are facts, so this question demands a few follow up questions.

For example, will they do a live demo with you? Will they use documents you provide? What results will you get, and how are they measured? How granular are those results, how confident can you be with them, and what tools help you evaluate them?

Keep in mind that the mortgage and real estate markets aren’t static. What works today may not work as well tomorrow. So, what is the vendor’s approach to confirming results on an ongoing basis? The minute you hear, “you can set it once and forget it,” it’s probably time to look elsewhere.

2. How does the system improve itself?

Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty. The key here is understanding if and how results are improved over time, which is what you really want. You’ll also want to know how the accuracy of the results are measured and whether those measuring tools are available to you.

If you find the vendor uses machine learning, deep learning, transfer learning or convolutional neural networks to constantly improve results, you may be on the right track. If the vendor is using these technologies in a layered approach, that’s even better. But then you should ask whether the vendor built these technologies or licenses them. If they’re licensed, the vendor may not be able to explain how the system improves itself.

3. What can I do with the results?

This is the time to find out whether your needs will be simply met or surpassed. For example, how easily are the results available for you to use with other systems, such as your system of record, data visualization software or reporting tools? What can you do to improve the results? How easy is it to implement changes to increase the number of documents recognized or the amount of data that can be extracted?

Finally, you’ll want to know how proactively the vendor adapts to change. After all, new document types and data needs are constantly evolving with new lending requirements, investor guidelines and market demands. How often is the technology updated? How frequently does the vendor make new releases available? How are they preparing for anticipated market changes? Are they willing to spend the time with you in a true partnership?

 

Gauging Future ROI

If you do this exercise thoroughly, you’ll have all the information you need to make a smart decision. Ideally, you‘ll be able to gauge future ROI in the form of quantifiable and qualitative savings.

Quantifiable savings is determining the amount of time in human process hours you’ll save by leveraging the solution, as well as how much you will shorten process cycles by reassigning staff to other areas. Qualitative savings can’t be measured as easily, but are equally valuable. It’s what you gain through outcomes such as enhancing risk management, using extracted data to feed data analytics initiatives and improving the customer experience.

At the end of the day, finding document technology that fits and is “real” is not an easy task, but it’s an essential one. At Paradatec, we’re always ready to answer your questions about our AI-based document technologies—plus we have real case studies showing they work. To learn more, please contact us at info@paradatec.com.