5 things Fannie Mae’s chief information officer shared about its plans

“We work closely with internal business on creating the right products that make sense for our lenders, servicers, as well as our engagement with investors. The important outcome for us is the increase of access to housing for borrowers and renters. There are [also] other external parties that have a role to play in order for those outcomes to be achieved. We look to optimize the technology we bring to the table with those external partners. 

“When we kind of look at some of our back office functions, general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable — these are functions that we couldn’t make the investment to build our own solution, but there are some really good third party products out there. 

“An important part of our evaluation process for bringing a third party on board is that the third party meets our expectations when it comes to something like cybersecurity. One of the things that I think all industries are reacting to is the pace in which a space like cybersecurity is evolving.

“What you define as safe [yesterday] may not be what we define as safe today. Log4j was a big item of security vulnerability that came out last December, which required a lot of companies to have to react and make some adjustments, including us. Not only were there things that we had to address, but we were very active in our engagement with our third parties as well.”