Cogent QC Systems Archives - Cogent QC: Award-Winning Loan Quality Control & Compliance Software

Mortgage Technology – A Whole New World

April 20, 2018 By Kaan Etem

Mortgage technologists gathered this week at the MBA Tech18 conference to talk about the digital mortgage, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, APIs, block chain, and even drones, robots, augmented reality and the Internet of Things. Heady stuff, and a far cry from pre-crisis days. This is not your father’s mortgage technology, and as the pace picks up, there will be a shake-out of traditional players who don’t adapt.

The theme of disruption was illustrated nicely in the two keynotes. By some miracle, Oakland A’s General Manager Billie Beane made statistics interesting and humorous, showing how he teamed with a baseball outsider to ultimately revolutionize baseball. Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert and Bill Emerson were equally entertaining in their keynote, as they bantered about how Rocket Mortgage came to disrupt the mortgage landscape. Speaker presentations are available to MBA members here.

With loan origination costs now up to $8,500 per loan, cost reduction through process automation has everyone’s attention. The cool technology is coming but until then, most organizations can pick the low-hanging fruit by automating manual processes, according to several speakers. Paper-based processes, error-prone data entry into silo-ed systems (requiring redundant re-entry), triple checking of work, and many things involving Excel can be streamlined without new technology. We have some ideas about this in our earlier post, in case you haven’t explored them yet. Look for more posts soon covering some interesting ways to think about using technology effectively in your organization.

Automating Workflows

March 29, 2018 By Kaan Etem

The mortgage QC sector has evolved to the point where most system providers automate the basic workflows in one way or another: import loan record data, sample loans, conduct audits, reverify documentation, send feedback to business units in the field, resolve findings, and generate reports.

These aspects of the quality control process are well-honed and mature, so it’s comparatively easy to build systems and interfaces to manage them. The question is, what happens when you introduce different workflows, new workflows, or even new audit types?

Cogent’s system architecture, development staff and business model are aligned around helping lenders customize and automate their workflows and integrate them with other workflows in the organization.

If you’d like to hear about how we’ve helped our clients automate their processes, call us or email us at the coordinates at the top of the page. We’re happy to share.

HUD Introduces Defect Taxonomy for FHA Lending

July 7, 2015 By Kaan Etem

In a growing trend towards streamlining and standardization of quality control and compliance methodologies, HUD has introduced a Defect Taxonomy in its “FHA’s Single Family Housing Loan Quality Assessment Methodology“. This document lays out the methodology that the FHA plans to adopt to improve its own QA efforts.

Knowing how FHA will be evaluating loans is helpful in designing your own QA program. Particularly useful is the definition of nine defect categories, numerous sources/causes for the defects, and four levels of defect severity. These can be roughly translated in ‘Cogentspeak’ to audit question categories, preset comments, and findings levels respectively.

For those configuring their Cogent FHA audit shells: your work has just become easier and more complex at the same time.

Cogent Selected for HW Tech100 List of Most Innovative Technology Companies

March 3, 2015 By Kaan Etem

Cogent is pleased to announce that we have been selected by Housing Wire for its 2015 HW Tech100 list of the most innovative technology companies in the housing economy. Over 250 nominations were received by the judges, who whittled the list down to the select 100. Of that 100, 60 were returning winners from last year and 40, including Cogent, were new inductees. We are honored to be included in such impressive company. As always, we will seek to continuously improve our technology in collaboration with our clients.

Here is how Housing Wire describes the HW Tech100:

New Mortgage Servicing Rules Take Effect

January 13, 2014 By Kaan Etem

The new mortgage servicing rules that the CFPB finalized in January 2013 became effective January 10, 2014, affecting the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) under Regulation Z and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) under Regulation X.

The amendments are intended to provide borrowers with detailed information regarding their loans, ensure that mortgage servicers do not unexpectedly assess borrowers with charges and fees, and ensure that borrowers are informed of alternatives to avoid foreclosure. The final rules should also provide borrowers with more timely and accurate responses to their complaints by requiring servicers to follow certain error resolution procedures.

As a servicing QC and compliance professional, you have already been preparing for the additional information and data tracking requirements, as well as the process changes. With luck, your auditors are trained and ready. And your software has been updated and tested to reflect the changes.

If you’re a Cogent client, this means you have updated your audit questions and implemented the appropriate question trigger rules. Maybe you’ve introduced additional findings options and workflow updates and configuration tweaks. Alternatively, you may be puzzling through how to put the pieces together most efficiently. If so, let us know at info@cogentqc.com. We are here to help.