January 12, 2023 — On the heels of the record breaking refi boom, mortgage lending volumes have plummeted for a variety of well-documented reasons. As such, home equity lending (HEL) has taken center stage across many lenders and credit unions.
Most industry participants we have spoken to confirm the lack of investing in HEL programs and solutions. Given the past few years of the refi feeding frenzy, you cannot blame anyone for simply just plowing through the overflowing pipelines, without distractions.
Fortunately, multiple industry vendors read the writing on the wall, knowing a robust HEL market would return, and they built or refined some impressive HEL and HELOC solutions for originations, servicing and trading.
Our most recent article published by our friends at the MBA NewsLink identifies three notable vendors with must-see solutions. Find the article HERE.
A brief overview:
FirstClose™ Equity
The new platform is an impressive, one-of-a-kind equity solution that reduces operational touchpoints in HEL as well as HELOC origination and improves the overall customer experience for borrowers. The platform boasts some amazing improvements to application rates, cycle time, quality and pull-thru rates.
First American’s FraudGuard® Home Equity
Once you have the home equity application in house, First American now let’s you re-imagine and simplify engaging third-party vendors.
FraudGuard® Home Equity is a streamlined version of First American Data & Analytics’ FraudGuard fraud analytics suite. It consolidates all the different tools that a lender normally would run separately to safely originate a home equity product, including AVMs. This single-source solution is essential in reducing vendor costs and improving efficiency. While always wise to do, this is critical in home equity lending given that the cost of originating is usually absorbed by the lender.
Wolters Kluwer OmniVault for Real Estate Finance
In May 2022, they announced their OmniVault platform, an eVault solution that enables clients to manage digital HELOCs and eMortgages on a single platform and provides clients with the same user experience and visibility across all enterprise asset classes (i.e. mortgage, auto, home equity, unsecured, etc.).
The OmniVault uses the company’s industry-leading, multi-award winning eVault technology to support digital home equity lending, both HELOCs and home equity loans, in addition to already supported conventional, U.S. government and jumbo first mortgages. This enables banks and credit unions to originate digital HELOCs as a Digital Original® to be managed as an authoritative copy, rather than just a PDF or a paper document. Wolters Kluwer’s proprietary technology has more than 20 years of proven success and supports both MERS® and non-MERS® eRegistry transactions.
In Summary
If you are a credit union or lender ramping up your home equity program, you would be wise to take a closer look at these impressive solutions. Ask to see the respective demos, you won't be disappointed.
Thanks for reading.
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Scott Roller, President
