Image by Tessa Hunkin 

Fannie Mae’s new Loan Quality Initiative adds a number of new quality control requirements for originators that must be in place by July 1, 2010.  Perhaps the biggest change is the new requirement for all originators to perform pre-funding quality control reviews, in addition to the existing requirements for post-funding and early payment default (EPD) reviews.  For mortgage quality control professionals, this is another step toward what we at Cogent call “Enterprise QC” — an integrated, end-to-end approach that promotes continuous QC monitoring of all loan origination and servicing processes.

Until now, most lenders have had a disjointed and incomplete approach to quality control across the enterprise. Even among lenders that have been doing some form of pre-funding review, the results are often not available to post-funding reviewers, because there is not a common database for sharing the information.  Although many lenders have begun using automated compliance engines (ACE’s), such as those provided by Mavent and ComplianceEase, the loans that are flagged by the ACE for potential compliance errors are not automatically targeted for post-funding reviews. And QC auditors doing reviews of EPD’s, Repurchases and Claim Denials often do not have access to the data from the pre- and post-funding reviews. On the servicing side, many lenders still do not have a formal quality control process in place, and those that do often do not have access to data from other servicing department audits, let alone audits of originations.

We believe the keys to successful Enterprise QC are: (1) the ability to easily access and manipulate the production and servicing data that are needed to accurately define the populations and select the loans that qualify for each quality control audit, (2) continuous communication between quality control managers and the managers of the processes being audited to ensure that audit checklists always reflect the most current policies and procedures; (3) closed loops for reporting, feedback and response, to ensure that adverse findings are responded to and corrective actions are implemented and documented; and (4) sharing of all quality control data across the enterprise, to maximize the returns from the risk information generated from each QC process.

It’s been no surprise to see a flood of books aiming to unravel the causes of the financial crisis of 2007-2009.  By many accounts, Gregory Zuckerman’s “The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History” is the best of the bunch.

Now Michael Lewis, one of our favorite financial authors, has thrown his hat into the ring and released “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”  Lewis is one of the most engaging writerss working today, with a particular flair for apt analogies and clear phrasing (”A credit-default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all.  It was an insurance policy…”)

By weaving compelling characters into his narrative, he manages to entertain while informing.  No mean feat.   

For a taste of Lewis’ latest, check out the long excerpt in Vanity Fair.  You’ll see that it reads like a thriller and crystallizes a lot of the thinking that’s surrounded this epic debacle.

(By the way, note the interesting phenomenon on Amazon’s customer reviews of the Michael Lewis book.  Almost every one-star rating bemoans the lack of a Kindle version of the book, not the actual content of the book.)

We said in an earlier post that we would try to formulate “return on quality” and as a step in that direction, we offer a Cogent white paper called “Quality Performance Benchmarking” that was originally developed for an audience of mortgage quality control professionals. 

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In this paper, we talk about the prevalence in the mortgage industry of a production maximization mentality, in which metrics and compensation are centered on volume; the potential hazards of this mentality; guidelines for estimating the costs of poor quality, (the inverse of the return on quality); how to reward good quality; and how to craft appropriate performance metrics, or benchmarks.  The second part of the paper talks in depth about one of the most powerful tools for benchmarking performance, control charts.

This white paper was written in 2002.  Nothing has changed in the methodology.  But in the last couple of years, the eyes of most of us in the industry have been opened to the dangers of focusing exclusively on volume, volume, volume.  We welcome your comments.

While loan modifications are not new, the sheer scale of pending loan modifications has overwhelmed servicers and drastically extended processing times.  At the same time, critical scrutiny of the process and pressure to accelerate the pace of completed modifications, has created fertile conditions for a new loan quality disaster. 

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This represents a vastly more complicated “servicing” process than traditional servicers are used to.  Indeed, the modification process is arguably more complex than the origination of a new loan, requiring a re-underwriting of the loan, complete with credit reports, appraisals and verifications (income, asset and employment).  All this in addition to program-specific documentation requirements, which in the case of HAMP, are onerous.

Recognizing this requirement for a different skill set, servicers have been hiring servicing reps with origination experience.  Thus, much of the production staff of now defunct mortgage lenders have new gigs as servicing staff, no doubt helping unemployment numbers in subprime epicenters such as Irvine, CA. 

In addition to massive new hiring, servicers are deploying new or modified software systems to automate what they can; outsourcing various sub-processes where they can; and trying to stay in compliance as program guidelines change.  Which they do, frequently.

As servicers struggle to meet these challenges, it falls on auditing and quality control professionals to ensure that the latest processes and compliance requirements are adhered to.  Unfortunately, this is not an area where software vendors have invested much time or effort.  Except Cogent, as it happens.

Cogent’s ServicingQC system was introduced more than a decade ago and has evolved into the most sophisticated quality control system available for servicing operations.  Moreover, with the release of the CogentQC.NET platform, virtually all of the functionality of Cogent’s ProductionQC system - designed to monitor origination quality - can now be embedded into a ServicingQC system.  Result?  A ready-made platform for servicing quality professionals to monitor their new “servicing” process: loan origination.

In congressional testimony, Ocwen’s President Ronald Faris claimed:

• that Ocwen is converting trial modifications to permanent modifications at a rate that is 10 to 20 times greater than industry average;
• a 3-month re-default rate of less than 5% for Ocwen, versus 18.7% to 33.7% for the industry; and
• a total of 100,000 successful modifications since the beginning of the mortgage crisis.

These impressive numbers could use a little clarification.  So could the statement that Ocwen has spent “$100 million in R&D to build loans servicing technology that incorporates behavioral science for effective customer communication and is also scalable for high volumes.”  But Ocwen is an industry leader and when they report these kinds of results, it’s worth listening.

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Likewise, their recommendations for improving the HAMP program carry weight.  Among those:

• Lower the borrower debt-to-income (DTI) ratio for modifications to below 31%; in other words, allow for lower monthly payments on modifications  
• Allow for principal reductions on modified loans  
• Make additional funding available for housing counseling groups
• Require underperforming servicers in HAMP to outsource to servicers that perform 

Also worthy of note: Mr. Faris is one of the few industry voices who believes that HAMP is a “well designed response to the mortgage crisis”.  Maybe he’s on to something.

Mortgage servicers have no choice but to open their kimonos to Freddie Mac’s MHA Compliance (MHA-C) division.  So when MHA-C offers to share its insights, as they did at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Servicing Conference last week in San Diego, there’s a rapt audience of servicers, most of whom are struggling to comply with HAMP programs.

Servicing Management magazine was there to capture the main points.  The presenters were quick to acknowledge the difficulty of setting up and complying with the program.  However, citing Sarbanes-Oxley as an appropriate benchmark for packaging HAMP modifications, the panel suggested that a lot of the loan packages they see seemed devoid of any due diligence or quality control. 

So how do you deal with a constantly changing program that is known to be difficult to comply with but that has high documentation standards?

“The biggest takeaway I’d have for a servicer is to really understand the program, which is why I recommend having somebody in the organization who is the ‘internal expert,” says Vic O’Laughlen, vice president of servicer oversight for the division.  This becomes more important as the programs morph and spin off programs are introduced (like Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA).) 

As we all know, MHA is a work in progress.  The question is, will it ultimately be a successful work?

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For a clear, concise perspective on which parts of HAMP are and aren’t working, and why, take a look at this interview in HousingWire with Gagan Sharma, president and CEO of BSI Financial, “an outsourcing provider specializing in mortgage subservicing, default management, loss mitigation, due diligence, REO and quality control services to over 240 lenders and investors.” 

Among the insights:

• Loan modifications will only work for a subset of distressed borrowers, as the Treasury Department admits.  Of the 7 million or so eligible, only 1.5 million are real candidates and with fewer than 800,000 trials in place, it’s doubtful that we will see 1.5 million permanent modifications.
• Even modified loans are in danger of re-default, for two main reasons: 1) many if not most HAMP borrowers are underwater and 2) unemployment will remain high for some time.
• The willingness to reduce principal may be the single biggest determinant of modification success. But owners of mortgages have different incentives in that regard.   Banks must recognize the loss immediately, which is not appealing.  Investors who bought loans at 40-to-50 cents on the dollar may be more willing.
• Short sales and deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure are good alternatives to HAMP (and non-HAMP) modifications.  Generally faster to process, these alternatives give borrowers an incentive to maintain the property and leave mortgage owners with better collateral.

If we’re going to solve the problems that HAMP was designed to solve - stabilizing the housing market and keeping borrowers in their homes - we need to look at the incentives built into the program.  The reality is that for most servicers, HAMP is not a money-making proposition.  It costs them more to set up and maintain a HAMP infrastructure (people, systems, processes) than the payback they can expect from the program.  There must be a better way.

It’s no secret that the mortgage servicing sector is under severe strain, especially when it comes to loss mitigation and default management.  In response to massive distressed borrower volumes, servicers have hired armies of new, inexperienced servicing reps and asked them to manage loan modifications for a wide variety of complex borrower situations.  This is happening even as fundamental regulatory change is being introduced (e.g., RESPA) and loan modification programs are shifting beneath servicers’ feet.  

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department and the courts are pushing for faster loan modifications while investors who have interests in such loans are balking at the kinds of concessions necessary to make the needle move.  Thus, servicers find themselves between a rock and a hard place as they face the flood of modification requests.

Because this deluge happened suddenly and is still roiling the industry, there has not been time to automate many of the standard tasks involved in the loan modification process.  Indeed, compared to the origination side of the business, servicing automation - or workflow management - is relatively undeveloped .  This is certainly true in mortgage quality control, which is why Cogent can tout that ServicingQC is the only quality control system developed specifically for mortgage servicing. 

But as a recent piece in MortgageOrb confirms, it’s the case in default management workflow systems, too, and no doubt in other servicing sub-processes.

On the positive side, mortgage servicing is finally getting some attention.  With luck, we will see promising technology solutions at the MBA Servicing Conference, which is gathering this week in San Diego.  And given the pressure from inside and outside the industry, we should start to see some adoption of new solutions.

Currently, the biggest enemies of efficient workflow are paper and the telephone, as the MortgageOrb article reiterates.  Both are inefficient, hard to track and prone to error and both are legacies of the traditional workflow of mortgage lending and servicing.  Now that the light of day is shining on the servicing world, we can hope that new technology adoption will lead the way to the Promised Land of eMortgages.

It’s good news that in some quarters, quality control is beginning to matter. But here’s the Economist to remind us that the job of risk manager “is said to have the risk profile of a short option position with unlimited downside and limited upside — something every good risk manager should avoid.”

Small wonder that talent is staying away in droves.  In sales-driven cultures - like mortgage banking - it’s frowned on to discourage transactions, without which money can’t be made.  The bias is to get the deal done.  So risk managers are always swimming against the current. 

However, risk is currently the busiest area for financial recruiters, which means there is a lot of activity.  Chief risk officers are being appointed, risk committees and departments are being formed, and new regulations are announced with frequency. 

But business practices adapt to new structures and find their way around them. (Like fraud, in some ways.)  Once the spotlight is off regulation and compliance, experience suggests that a new innovation will make it seem like “it’s different this time”.  And the Cassandras in risk management will be ignored anew.

So how does a risk manager survive the next bull market?  Hope that new incentives will be put in place to encourage the right behavior.  And show the ROI of risk management - or in the case of mortgage quality control professionals, show the return on quality (ROQ).  In future posts, we’ll try to help formulate that ROQ.

Apparently, in early 2007 - at the peak of the real estate bubble - the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) came to the “inescapable conclusion that owning [their]own building was the smartest long-term investment for the association.”  So with $75 million in financing, they purchased a new headquarters building.  Then on February 5, 2010, they announced that they had sold it for a little over $41 million.  Oops.

This is the sort of fiasco that the mortgage industry can dine out on for years.  But it’s just the latest irony that we’ve witnessed recently.  Remember the advocates of unbridled capitalism on Wall St. asking for government assistance so that they could continue to do ”God’s work“?  Then paying out billions in bonuses with taxpayer money?  Irony verging on outrage.

But more ironic to mortgage quality professionals, and likely to have a larger impact, is another major story these days: the recall of millions of cars by Toyota due to quality issues. 

Toyota?  Poor quality?  How could the company that virtually invented the quality revolution in manufacturing over the past 50 years be in this position? 

As one article points out, it was a combination of things: the goal to be Number One in the world driving rapid expansion; increasingly complex products with multiple potential points of risk/failure; uninterrupted success leading to arrogance; a culture that discouraged bad news; and managerial sclerosis. (One might almost be talking about Wall Street).

It might seem like the compeuppance of a world leader in the quality movement would negate the value of a quality culture.  Yet this story may unfold to include other car manufacturers, too.  Everyone is trying to sell as many complex ‘world cars’ as they can, and each car shares components with other cars in manufacturers’ product lines. Will Toyota’s brand be the only one tarnished?  Probably not.  But Toyota will recover, while others may not.  And Toyota at least will re-learn a basic lesson: don’t rest on your laurels.