Mortgage LEP firm adds Chinese services

Talk’uments, a mortgage technology company that enables consumers to understand their loan documents, has added Mandarin Chinese to the services it provides in English and Spanish.

Going forward it will be introducing Vietnamese, Korean and Tagalog to its lineup. Those are the six languages that the Supplemental Consumer Information Form is available in. The SCIF is a soon-to-be mandatory form that regulators use to see if needs of borrowers with limited English proficiency are being met.

“Numerous states have already unveiled LEP requirements, and we’ve already seen strong language from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicating support for new requirements for multi-language resources for LEP borrowers,” Talk’uments founder and CEO George Baker said. “As the American home buying demographic grows increasingly more diverse, it’s simply good business for lenders to make the process as smooth as possible, and that would include digital language services and educational materials their borrowers can easily understand.”

Baker started Talk’uments after running a mortgage call center and seeing the need to educate borrowers who predominantly spoke English but were still having problems understanding their loan documents because of the legalese they were written in. He began by providing those borrowers with explanations written in plain English, and later expanded into clarifications for people who spoke other languages.

“What we do is offer digital services that comply with all of the state and federal guidelines,” Baker said. “We provide digital tools to basically extract all the important information associated with a person’s mortgage loan.”

The technology takes loan information and boils it down to a level that makes it “abundantly clear” to the consumer what is going on with their loan, in a language that they prefer and can understand, he continued.

What Talk’uments does not do is directly translate the documents; it’s just a tool that helps the consumer comprehend what is on them.

For the mortgage lender, the SCIF puts one more piece of information into consumers’ loan file for the regulators to examine and focus on, Baker pointed out.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is mandating lenders’ distribution of the SCIF for all loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac starting on March 1, 2023, but borrowers can decline to answer the questions.

This form came out after the 2019 revision to the Uniform Residential Loan Application omitted a language preference question that policymakers have long debated over whether or not to include.

Of the nearly 305 million people living in the U.S. in 2019, nearly 25.7 million said they are not proficient in English, according to the American Community Survey. By far the single largest group is the 16.3 million Spanish speakers. Over 1.8 million Chinese speakers and more than 875,000 people whose primary language is Vietnamese make up the next two largest groups. People who primarily speak Korean (572,000), Tagalog (532,000) and Arabic (438,000) round out the top six LEP categories.