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56 C O V E R S T O R Y / P H I L B R I T T Protecting Borrowers Mortgage servicing technology has taken some giant leaps in the last year. Tech and mortgage experts have been joining forces to push past the current boundaries of doing business with the aim of strengthening in-house efficiencies, providing faster and more seamless connections for customers to make payments on their mortgage, or staying compliant with the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection rules. Some of these technology transitions have been made by other industries many years ago, but for one reason or another, have not transitioned into the mortgage sphere. "Mortgage servicing has been based on outdated technology like mainframes, COBOL, etc., it has been slow to enter the millennial footprint," Bryce Elliott, Chief Technology Officer for SunTrust Mortgage shared. e company is servicing approximately 900,000 loans. "e primary origination and servicing platforms have been around for a number of years and continue to provide a huge value to the market," Steve Comer, Financial Services Sales Director at Hyland added. "Updates to platforms of this scale don't come without a significant investment in both time and cost, and when the market is moving as fast as it is currently, it's challenging for these platforms to make changes on a global level. So while many core technologies are updating parts and pieces of the platform, it still leaves large portions of the application operating on technology that is quickly becoming outdated. is current state is forcing servicing vendors to evaluate whether to buy, build, or partner with third-party providers to advance the capabilities of their platform and remain competitive." "A combination of accumulated technology debt at banks, the shift of focus away from the customer experience, open APIs, mobile, and fintech have all combined to disrupt the traditional mortgage business model recently," Tyrone Canaday, a Managing Director with Protiviti added. "Today, the ability for mortgage fintechs to leverage alternative data sources to do underwriting and create lending services that are user-friendly, quick and efficient is gaining New tools are easing the loan handoff from origination to servicing, and helping servicers better predict borrowers who are at risk of default. Through Tech 56