Case Studies » Leading Financial Institution

Managing change

Guiding 1500 loan Servicers through new processes

Streamlining reporting to meet industry standards improves efficiency and operations.

A leading financial institution serving mortgage lenders was charged with updating their single-family reporting requirements to achieve three goals—align with new industry regulations and standards, provide transparency to loan Servicers, and update their remittance cycles. The Servicers are financial institutions of varying sizes, from financial behemoths that produce 500K loans per month to community banks that generate just a handful.

To achieve the financial institution’s goals, each Servicer would need to change their established reporting cycles to allow for daily reporting. With 1500 Servicers impacted, a wide-scale change management initiative was necessary to help Servicers understand the changes coming to their systems, people, processes, and reporting. The 30+ technology providers who support each of the Servicers, including leading providers like Black Knight, FIS, and Fiserv, also needed education and facilitation to support a painless transition.

It was important to the financial institution’s leadership team that the change management effort be a customer-centric approach that highlighted their ability to better serve their customers. For the financial institution’s updates to be successful, they needed a dedicated team of project managers to facilitate the changes with Servicer teams, technology vendors, policy officials, communications teams, and their own internal change management team. Due to Celerity’s deep industry knowledge and previous engagements with this financial giant, we were brought on board to manage the change and provide a customer-friendly transition for the Servicers.

Developing a customer-centric roadmap for change

Leveraging our deep knowledge of mortgage servicing and investor reporting, Celerity addressed the challenge with a consultative approach, frequently serving as the face for the financial institution to their customers where there had been none before. We developed a project plan that covered all phases of this complex multi-year effort, from requirements and change management to training, testing, and implementation rollout, including a roadmap that clearly outlined key activities, dependencies, and impacted stakeholders. This helped with the transparency of this project throughout the financial institution, from IT and policy to communications and account management.

The initiative was made more complex by both the number and size of the Servicers impacted. Larger Servicers, for the most part, had more robust in-house teams and more comfortable relationships with their technology vendors. Smaller Servicers needed more guidance and facilitation to make these large-scale changes. Rather than make these changes an edict, the financial institution wanted to take a customer-centric, partnership approach. With this in mind, we calibrated our approach to each Servicer while educating, informing, and updating them and their technology providers on the upcoming changes and implementation.

An additional, integral step Celerity took was to set up a first-ever, comprehensive database of Servicer information. Prior to its creation, Servicer data was stored in separate locations and departments across the company and was rarely reconciled for inaccuracies. Because access to this information was critical to contacting Servicers, we centralized the information, structured it, updated it regularly, and built executive-level reporting into the database to surface important changes. This comprehensive repository gives the financial institution immediate access to Servicer information and enables a more customer-centric approach.

Delivering benefits that make everyone more responsive to change

Celerity helped 1500 Servicers successfully transition from their legacy reporting process to a new system that enables:

  • Standardized monthly investor reporting cycles beginning on the first of the month
  • Daily loan-level reporting and editing vs monthly
  • A single common remittance due date for principal and interest on all loans (excluding payoffs)
  • Funds to be drawn from Servicers directly on the remittance due date
  • A system to capture bug tracking and defects found in testing environments to ensure production systems were error-free at launch

Because the financial institution took a customer-centric approach to instituting the changes, rather than just mandating changes, relations between them and the Servicers have become more synchronized. The Servicers also report closer alignment with their technology vendors as a result of Celerity’s facilitation. And the financial institution has a new database of Servicer contacts that they can consult regularly for accurate Servicer information.

Before Celerity

Inefficient reporting standards

Incomprehensive access to Servicer information

No dedicated team to handle and triage Servicer queries

Unreliable system of open-text ticket reporting

With Celerity

Updated reporting requirements that align with industry standards

Database comprising contacts, inventory, updates, history, and reporting

Program managers for addressing concerns of Servicers

Bug tracking system to track repeat defects and better triage ticket requests

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