DS News - U.S. Bank

14 Tim Neer serves as the SVP and Director of Loan Servicing for Colonial Savings in Fort Worth, Texas. As Director, Neer is responsible for all loan servicing operations, including the division's purchased servicing business. Prior to Colonial Savings, Neer was a Senior Executive at Morgan Stanley where he held the position of SVP over Saxon Mortgage's Financial Transaction Management Group. With over 35 years of experience in all facets of the mortgage business, Neer has held numerous senior leadership positions with American Home Mortgage, HomeBanc Mortgage, GE Capital Mortgage Services, and Washington Mutual. Neer is actively involved in numerous industry committees and advisory groups and currently resides in Fort Worth, Texas. What are the trends and challenges you see as being important in 2018 for the servicing side? Right now, the biggest challenges are the disasters that we had in Houston, in Florida, and the wildfires in California. e industry is focused on how to assist those borrowers and what is the right level of assistance to provide. How do we get them back on track to start making payments again? Delinquencies overall are way down as well. We're pre-crisis levels, so the big chal- lenge is how to reset our capacity to match de- clining delinquencies. Another big item facing us in 2018 is how to create a better self-serve experience for customers. We're in a day and age where consumers are very tech-savvy. Cell phones, text messages, email. Everybody's try- ing to address, what is self-serve? What level is the right level? How do we get the right mix out there but still manage our risk? Now is the time for the industry as a whole to take a step back and figure out how to improve the overall technology platforms within our industry. e technology in the servicing space has probably lagged behind the industry and consumer needs for some years now. So, how do we get with our core servic- ing providers and figure out how to change the technology to be more consumer-friendly, create better productivity, and remain flexible to an ever-changing regalutory landscape, all while preparing for the future and any crisis we may incur? What are the emergent technologies you think are poised to be useful or transformative for the industry? e problem with most platforms today is they're not very self-providing. So, if you have an insurance policy as a consumer and you want to make a change to your policy—for example, your insurance carrier—you can't to- day go into our core platforms and effectively self-serve yourself. Today, you can't go into our system and make that a self-service event. e overriding factor for mortgage servicers is going to be, how do we get to an environment where if I want to go in and make a change to my insurance carrier, I can go online and pro- vide all of that information to you and get that new carrier set up without the servicer having to get involved with it, and without me having to pick up the phone and call you to figure out what's going on. On the question of blockchain, it really hasn't gotten into the mortgage space in a big way yet. We've talked about things like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and how all that will work in our payment systems, but we're a way out before we begin to see that kind of progress take effect. We're so far behind the times regarding technology in the servicing space; we're struggling with the basic things like text messaging, emails, websites that allow borrower uploads of documents to us. We are heavily regulated in several key areas. For example, with text messaging we have the FIVE MINUTES WITH GET TO KNOW INDUSTRY EXECUTIVES BEYOND THE BOARDROOM "Let's build a playbook for the future, so if these 10 things happen, we have a roadmap to be able to implement the right changes and make sure that things happen." Tim Neer SVP and Director of Loan Servicing, Colonial Savings

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