Assisting a Leading Real Estate Company in the US in its Enterprise Consolidation Initiative
Our Client
The client, a leading provider of real estate transaction services, is one of Fortune's most admired companies. The company provides real estate services to leading lenders in the US. Through its many subsidiaries, the company serves residential and commercial customers with over 600 offices and a network of several thousand active agents throughout the US, Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe.
Business Challenge
The business intent was to increase productivity, improve quality and achieve cost benefits. While it was experiencing good customer traction, the company was facing issues related to scalability of operations. The client was also grappling with ways to ensure adherence to delivery standards when there was a surge in transaction volumes. Hence, it was considering opening of more centers to handle growth.
The company wished to systemically consolidate over 100 of its production locations into less than 20. The company opted to do this through an outsourcing arrangement that would convert the fixed costs into variable, and achieve a progressive reduction in operating costs.
After extensive due diligence covering 20 vendors, the company selected Indecomm as its outsourcing partner.
Challenges during the implementation of the outsourcing initiative:
• The client had never outsourced any of their operations before, and hence it was a major cultural shift.
• Over the years, the client had grown through several acquisitions - small and large. The acquired entities retained their identities and independent styles of operations. Now, as a part of the consolidation exercise, over 100 production centers, would need to adopt uniform processes and systems. This posed a major change management challenge.
• Since the outsourcing initiative was part of a larger strategic initiative to streamline the business and consolidate locations, the client wanted to achieve significant process efficiency improvements.
The Indecomm Approach
Indecomm adopted a consultative approach and studied the company’s processes in detail to pick processes that would yield maximum benefit. A multi-disciplinary core team was chosen comprising domain, process and technology consultants. An Outsourcing Roadmap was developed detailing various processes across different locations that could be outsourced. The implementation was to be carried out over a 24 to 36 months time period.
To handle disparate systems and processes across various locations, Indecomm leveraged its proprietary eTitleExpress platform to manage transactions and underlying workflows. This was pivotal in establishing the foundation for a uniform definition of a business transaction. A dashboard was developed for the company’s operations’ team members to track the status of orders as they were being executed within Indecomm’s production environment. This seamless transparency was critical in overcoming resistance associated with the fear of moving processes to an offshore model.
Indecomm evaluated one of the client’s large cost centers in Louisville and proposed an enterprise partnership model to take over the entire management of the center. The goal was to convert this cost center into a profit center by driving other document management business to this location. The client accepted the recommended enterprise partnership model. Indecomm leveraged its 700 people strong IT Services division to integrate the existing production systems and plans and develop a new order management system.
Scope of Services Offered
• Full life cycle of title production services ranging from searching, examination, underwriting support, typing, commitment preparation and policy production. In the last four years, Indecomm has processed over 1 million transactions in these areas for the client.
• Tax certification services – support all 3200 jurisdictions. Through the course of the engagement Indecomm has processed over 1.5 million tax certifications.
• Closing and Settlement Services – curative, closings scheduling, HUD preparation, payoff, post-closing quality control and recording services. Over the last four years, Indecomm has processed close to 750,000 transactions in this area.
• Processing premiums and policies remitted by 10000s of client’s agents across the country. An average of 4 million policies and $2.5 billion remittances processed every year for the last three years.
• Indecomm provides outsourced IT services and currently has 75 IT professionals working on various IT initiatives for the client.
Outcome
• Operating cost reduction of 35%. While part of the cost reduction is a result of consolidation efforts, outsourcing was a key enabler.
• Indecomm has taken over one of the client’s processing centers and made it a profit center by driving work from other clients to the center.
• Indecomm and the client have worked on a number of process improvement initiatives over the years and have streamlined various areas.
Benefits
- Operational efficiency
- Scalability – to meet peak transaction volumes
- Consolidation of 100+ locations into less than 20 centers helped in making the business more agile
- Adherence to delivery standards
Indecomm streamlines Loan Review and Quality Control for a National Lender
Client Profile
The client, a top 10 mortgage originator in the US, specializes in originating residential mortgage loans through retail, wholesale and telemarketing channels. With over 350 branches in 37 states, the client’s operations originate, acquire, market and service loans. It has a servicing portfolio of $170 billion representing over 1.1 million mortgage loans.
Business Situation
The lender approached Indecomm’s Mortgage Dynamics subsidiary in late 2003 after suffering significant losses from a HUD audit. In the audit, it was determined that the company did not have sufficient underwriting and quality control practices and procedures in place. As a result, it owed significant fines to HUD.
The lender intended to rebuild its production and quality control processes and procedures internally. As it began making and implementing changes, the company wanted to ensure policies and procedures were being followed. The company put in place a system of weekly reports highlighting branches and production channels within the business lines that were still making the most errors, and not adhering to new guidelines.
The company chose Indecomm (Mortgage Dynamics) to streamline its loan review and quality control process.
Indecomm Solution
Indecomm’s Mortgage Dynamics (MDI) subsidiary had a sound track record in performing loan level quality control reviews. MDI used its own proprietary question-based software product for conducting such audit. . MDI recommended customized questions to cover each area of change in addition to standard questions used for a quality control review. The lender’s underwriting guidelines were also embedded into the questions that were developed and periodically updated as product lines changed.
The lender would select loans over and above its required 10% sampling for Indecomm to review. Within this selection, it may choose different product lines, originators, branches or underwriters to target while selecting loans that represented its typical portfolio. As a result, the weekly reports provided to the lender identified loan officers and branches whose monthly originations exhibited certain risk patterns when compared to their typical origination portfolio. Similar risk factors were identified among underwriters and closers within the organization.
Scope of Services Offered
Although Indecomm provided multiple reviews and projects for the client, the scope of the review included:
• Determining whether the underwriting decision were sound and adhered to company guidelines
• Ensuring all regulatory compliance guidelines were met in a timely manner
• Checking whether the loan was closed using correct documents, all documents were signed correctly, consistently and that all requirements set forth for closing had been met
• Indicating any evidence of fraud or misrepresentation by any parties to the transaction, inclusive of its employees
The services provided were supported by Indecomm’s proprietary QC Review system. All guidelines were used to support the compliance review. Various industry websites were utilized for fraud detection purposes.
Outcome
• Within two years, the company saw significant improvement in the quality of the loans that were reviewed
• The nature of the audit required highly skilled underwriters who were able to maintain review times of 80 minutes or less
• Because the lender’s volume fluctuated with market conditions, Indecomm was able to maintain staffing using contract underwriters on an average industry standard hourly rate
• In late 2005, the lender was able to provide images for the review process, which eliminated delivery charges, reducing the cost to the customer
The lender found it beneficial to continue the review beyond the initial two-year contract. This was during a time when there was an extensive amount of no-doc or stated loans and the company felt it is in best interest to maintain a careful watch on production. The lender presently uses Indecomm’s services under the scope of this engagement.
Benefits
- Robust quality control practices and procedures in place
- Compliance with regulatory guidelines ensured business continuity
- Better quality and reduction in customer cost resulted in higher customer satisfaction
Lien Release Process for Major Service Provider
Client Profile
The client is a leading service provider to the mortgage industry. A member of the largest family of title agents in the world, the company utilizes its 12 regional production centers and qualified abstractor network to pull property records virtually anywhere in the US. It has onshore and offshore resources to provide expanded back-office production, with a capability to handle transactions in over 40 states.
Business Challenge
The client was experiencing significant out- of- compliance issues with lien releases. Its internal costs were higher than industry average. It had established an outsourcing initiative to meet the following business objectives:
• Reduce cost of internal operation and implement a variable cost model
• Eliminate out-of-compliance within 180 days and reduce risk/exposure
• Access to technology platform to facilitate eRecordings and complete transparency into the outsourced solution
The client selected Indecomm’s US Recordings division to execute the service in an outsourced model.
Indecomm Solution
Indecomm’s initial focus was to help the client achieve compliance. Once the compliance issues were fixed, a turnkey lien release solution was implemented. The service provider’s internal systems were built with integration to allow seamless exchange of data. Indecomm customized the InteleDoc Plus platform to ensure processing of lien releases. The online dashboard was extended to service provider’s employees and clients to enable high degree of self-service.
Outcome
• Compliance achieved earlier than planned
• Significant reduction in costs and staff within the first 6 months
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