ORLANDO, Fla. — When Fairwinds Credit Union saw a way to speed up the mortgage application process for both the borrower and the loan department, there was little hesitation.
The $1.2 billion credit union is a major player in mortgage lending. In 2005 it originated about $150 million in first-mortgage loans. Fairwinds moved to easyLENDER Mortgage, a loan origination and processing software package from Fiserv Lending Solutions, based just up the road in Lake Mary, to try and bring some technology efficiencies to the mortgage process.
"If you get the loan right away and there is no delay, you're going to get the member's attention right away, and they're not going to go somewhere else," said Ruth O'Brien, Fairwinds' vice president of real estate. "With easyLENDER, we're able to provide disclosures on the spot. They're e-mailed to them when they apply. That gives them upfront information as far as what the costs are. They don't have to be guessing."
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According to Mike Dahlquist, assistant vice president mortgage lending manager, the loan origination software that Fairwinds had used prior to implementing easyLENDER was "out of date and getting further out of date every month that we stayed with it." Moreover, O'Brien added, its customer service was dicey, leading to "some nightmares."
easyLENDER Mortgage is an "all-in-one solution" aimed at full-service lenders looking to automate and control the entire lending process, said Jeff Berg, senior marketing consultant for Fiserv Lending Solutions easyLENDER Products, a business unit of Fiserv. "The name 'easyLENDER' is not marketing hype," Berg said. "Our clients constantly tell us it is easy to use. The reason is that the easyLENDER user interface mirrors the 10-03 loan application form. For the various steps and parts of that application, there is a part that corresponds to easyLENDER. In addition, easyLENDER is completely free-form. You can jump around–part 1, part 2, part 7, anyway you want to do it." Because the program is self populating, data needs to be keyed in only once.
As a Microsoft Windows-based product, easyLENDER runs on a Pentium III system or better. "Typically our clients will license software for a server and then will deploy it in thin-client mode, using Windows Terminal Services or possibly Citrix MetaFrame [now called Presentation Server] or something like that," Berg said, adding that three or four dozen credit unions currently have the easyLENDER Mortgage in use.
It also has built-in interfaces to a variety of mortgage services, among them Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and flood, title, appraisal, credit reporting, and front-end solutions such as Mortgagebot for getting loan applications off the Web.
Thus, said Berg, "A Fairwinds loan customer would go out to the Fairwinds Web site, which is actually a Mortgagebot site but completely transparent and complete the loan application in 20 minutes or less. The whole mortgage loan application is brought over seamlessly and all the fields get populated right into the database for processing, underwriting, and closing. It's all completely seamless. There is no going out to get a file, importing a file, checking to see if the file is there. You also have online loan-status return, so the borrowers themselves can go online and see what status their loan is in."
The integration with Mortgagebot was a big selling point for Fairwinds. "The interface and everything already existed," said Dahlquist. "We didn't have to do anything. It was almost right out of the box–take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it."
Almost–the implementation did require that certain data, such as that needed to comply with Florida mortgage parameters, be inputted and the Mortgagebot interface needed testing. The CU was also in the middle of a conversion to Open Solutions on the core side, so that added some extra complexity. –[email protected]
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