Sagent & Bizzy Labs to automate servicing compliance
Mortgage servicing fintech Sagent announced a partnership with Bizzy Labs, a provider of compliance-risk mitigation technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data tools. The partnership will help automate compliance, lower operational costs, and improve borrower experience for servicers and special servicers.
Sagent and Bizzy will jointly offer Libretto, an AI-powered compliance engine servicers can use for portfolio onboarding and continuous monitoring to ensure loans comply with over 600 business rules from regulators, investors, and top servicers.
“This new automated compliance engine accelerates Sagent’s consumer-first modernization of mortgage servicing,” said David Doyle, EVP of business development at Sagent, a joint venture that combines Fiserv Inc.’s fintech expertise with Warburg Pincus’ experience in growing technology companies. “Servicer errors can erode profitability, rattle customers, and lower retention. Sagent’s Bizzy Labs partnership ensures servicers get the experience right for their customers and their bottom line.”
Furthermore, as COVID-caused forbearances mature into loss mitigation scenarios, servicers risk incurring compliance and portfolio error monitoring costs. AI-powered compliance tools help servicers substantially increase the efficiency of loans serviced per employee (LPE).
Bizzy Labs is a big data regtech spun off of AI pioneer BSI Financial Services that brings to the partnership years of experience in applying AI to identify data integrity issues in special servicing.
“We’ve been refining our AI to solve data integrity issues for the last nine years,” said Gagan Sharma, CEO of both Bizzy Labs and servicer/subservicer BSI. The result is Libretto, a digital loan filing solution that’s reduced error rates by 80% and borrower complaints by 50%. “It runs 600+ investor and regulator rules on portfolios to deliver precise, department-specific checklists for resolving customer loan issues daily.”
Through Sagent – Bizzy’s cloud-based Libretto now is available for the millions of loans Sagent powers for servicers.
Docutech announces new Encompass integration
First American Docutech, the provider of document, eSign, eClose and digital to print fulfillment technology, reported a new integration with Ellie Mae’s Encompassloan origination software. The integration enables Encompass lenders of all sizes to accelerate their document generation and closing process, updates key disclosure tracking fields, and automatically delivers documents into Encompass.
“We recognized the need to provide lenders with more options,” said Amy Brandt, president of First American Docutech. “This new integration model was designed with small- to medium-sized lenders in mind to give them the ability to close more loans, faster.”
The combination of Ellie Mae’s Encompass loan origination system with First American Docutech, which is a long-time Ellie Mae partner, provides lenders with higher digital mortgage efficiencies.
“Lenders of all sizes are focusing on digitizing as much of their loan process as possible to optimize the borrower experience, maximize loan production, and reduce costs,” said Brandt.
For smaller lenders however, it has been challenging to compete, she added. “Now, through a new integration with Encompass, lenders can easily implement our suite of solutions with very limited effort, enabling them to digitize their process from point-of-sale origination through closing, and on to secondary market delivery.”
MomentFeed: Lenders missing opportunity for local business
Multi-location lenders are not taking enough advantage of the untapped local customer lead opportunities available to them, according to a study published by MomentFeed, the provider of Proximity Search Optimization, a proprietary marketing platform.
The MomentFeed “Banking Proximity Search Optimization Report Card” study analyzed the strength and depth of the proximity search strategies used by the ten largest U.S. retail banking and mortgage institutions, based on total assets, to assess how efficiently they leverage digital marketing to tap local customer leads via their physical branch locations.
The report demonstrates a missed opportunity for banks and mortgage lenders to generate tens of millions of exclusive, free local leads, and to fully optimize their proximity to these potential customers, according to Nick Hedges, CEO of MomentFeed and a former Ellie Mae SVP.
“In a fiercely competitive market where purchased mortgage leads cost $100 or more, it’s surprising that some lenders aren’t enacting strong, comprehensive proximity search optimization strategies,” he said. “Proximity search optimization, when done right, can help large banks put their locations to work, driving greater online visibility at a much lower cost.”
Physical branch locations provide an even greater digital marketing advantage in the current housing boom, while millions of Americans are relocating because of the pandemic. Relocation offers one of the top opportunities for new bank customer acquisition for home loans and other financial relationships, the study notes.
The study finds that banks have a massive opportunity to generate additional local home loans and other banking services using proximity search optimization (PSO).
Multi-location brands can use PSO “to improve their rank on search engines that use the user’s location to suggest nearby businesses in response to keywords such as ‘car loan near me.’ It’s critical that brands show up in the Google 3-Pack, the first thing most consumers see when performing searches,” the study notes.
PSO and search ranking requires users to manage all related metrics including data accuracy, location profile, reviews and local-social publishing and advertising.
How do banks and mortgage lenders perform against key PSO signals?
Unclaimed bank Facebook listings may lead to large amounts of inaccurate data. When users look for “atm near me” or “home loan,” search engines “often devalue nearby listings whose data doesn’t line up with other web sources,” the study found.
Data consistency across the footprint of a large financial institution matters. The study found many banks had not claimed their local business pages on Facebook – which resulted in inaccuracies on 59% of these banks’ Facebook data, compared to 18% for banks with claimed Facebook pages.
Most banks had customer ratings of an average of three out of five stars, replying to only 21% of reviews on average, the study found. Only 11% of negative reviews received a response within the recommended 24 hours. Some banks did not respond at all.
That matters because research shows that poor ratings have an impact on business success. Three-star reviews receive 15% fewer clicks than 4-star reviews, and 80% of shoppers say they’ve changed their mind about a purchase based solely on negative reviews they found online.
All of the above suggests that alongside other measures lenders need to optimize for keywords on Facebook. Yet, while most banks hit the recommended levels of nine to ten posts per month, they failed to optimize those posts with keywords. Only 22% of posts contained keywords.
These and other findings in the study indicate that consumer banks are having limited success implementing strong, comprehensive PSO strategies and struggle to control their data accuracy across all channels, the study concluded.
“Clearly, proximity search optimization in banking is far less advanced than other industries and therefore ripe for disruption,” said Hedges, “banks should view their proximity search optimization strategy as a significant opportunity to dominate the competition.”
MomentFeed identified 50 locations for each bank then matched locations to their corresponding network listings across Facebook, Google, and Yelp. Individual reports of the companies studied are available to representatives of those companies by request.
Amilda is a journalist and branding consultant interested in how entrepreneurs turn brilliant ideas into products and services that advance business acumen and improve people’s lives in unprecedented ways. She has covered mortgage finance for over 15 years.
