MISMO, Snapdocs team up on e-Mortgage data exchange

While more digital mortgages are being made these days, participants in the origination chain are getting varying and possibly conflicting information about what is permissible in different jurisdictions.

That has led the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization to work with Snapdocs to create a repository of information to be that “single source of truth” lenders, title and settlement services providers and other participants can turn to, explained Camelia Martin, vice president of industry & regulatory affairs at Snapdocs.

The MISMO e-Eligibility Exchange, Powered by Snapdocs went live on April 12 with a demonstration at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Technology Solutions Conference and Expo.

“What we were hearing and it turned out MISMO was hearing as well is that lenders were either reverting to the safer e-option or they were just grappling with trying to maintain all of these requirements and making sure that they kept them up to date and didn’t really have a great way to automate and operationalize this,” Martin said.

Hundreds of lenders are doing hybrid or fully digital mortgages, and while the adoption rate keeps rising, “the problem [for originators] of scaling it to large amounts of their volume, is what they were struggling with,” said Jonathan Kearns, MISMO’s vice president of product. This is the first time the organization is providing a service of this nature, he added.

The service provides information on the jurisdictions that accept electronic recording of documents, where remote online notary is acceptable, which warehouse lenders are willing to take e-notes and more.

“All of this information is a lot for a lender to understand and it’s all out there,” Kearns said. “It just wasn’t in a single repository that is easily accessible for the entire industry and so that’s why we decided to build this.”

This service will be free to access for MISMO members (who can then distribute this to their clients at no charge), exchange data contributors, and innovation investment fee payers via an online interface and APIs that can be integrated into other technology platforms.

With those interfaces, “we want you to be able to see this information wherever you’re used to working, so that way, everybody gets the information in the systems that they’re used to,” Kearns said.

Among the organizations that already have contributed data to the exchange are: the American Land Title Association’s ALTA Registry; Deutsche Bank; First American; Freddie Mac; Freedom Mortgage; Mr. Cooper; the National Notary Association; the Property Records Industry Association; and Stewart Title.

“It’s crucial that the title insurance industry urge progress and innovation in the digital closing space,” ALTA CEO Diane Tomb said in a press release from that organization. “With 9,000 locations already listed in the ALTA Registry and 2,000 of them showing a state of ‘RON readiness,’ now is the time for all title insurance companies and real estate attorneys to register.”

The Exchange can provide other information to users that will allow them to view where others in the industry are on digital mortgages.

“It will also drive uniformity in the sense that this will be the first time that organizations and counterparties can look at what their peers are doing and benchmark it and really see, where do they fall?” Martin said. “Are they falling behind their peers? Is there more that they can be doing to stay competitive when they compare themselves to others that are in a similar role?”

Kearns added, “It’s all about providing that clarity and transparency throughout the industry on how a mortgage can be ‘E.’”

MISMO and Snapdocs are expecting other entities to submit their information as well.

“What we’re really trying to do is encourage the industry to come in, provide their eEligibility acceptance criteria, so that we can make this as robust and useful for the industry and for lenders as possible,” Martin said.