Residential folks attending the MBA’s conference in are talking about the validation service powered by Desktop Underwriter (DU). The introduction of the Fannie Mae’s DU validation service announced earlier this week will redefine how lenders verify income, assets and employment of borrowers. And if the level of conversation at this year’s MBA Annual Convention & Expo is any indicator, the ripple effect of these new standards – which are expected to result in fewer borrower documentation requirements and reduce underwriting times – will reverberate throughout the industry for quite some time. Along with this, the updates have the potential to enhance credit risk assessment for lenders, while adding certainty to the information lenders are submitting to DU.
The changes result from a newly announced data and technology integration with FormFree and The Work Number, an Equifax database that enables instant verification of employment and income (VOE/VOI) via payroll record information from thousands of employers nationwide. Equifaxalso provides a manual verification solution and a 4506-T tax transcript service that are also being included in Fannie Mae’s new service. The FormFree AccountChek integration will support the automation of verification of assets (VOA).
…To further streamline the origination process for borrowers and lenders alike, Equifax also announced from MBA Annual that it will begin a strategic alliance with FormFree’s AccountChek web-based platform to provide verification of assets alongside employment and income verification data. This, in effect, will provide lenders with the ability to order, analyze and certify a borrower’s financial data within minutes via a secure, web-based platform.
…Based on the news coming out, a big theme of this year’s annual MBA meeting is automation around the mortgage decisioning and underwriting process. It seems that Equifax, FormFree, and a few other innovative companies have been quick to recognize this and are leveraging some of its unique data sets through products like The Work Number, to bring it to market. That is good news for the industry and consumers.
Read this commentary as it originally appeared in Rob Chrisman’s influential mortgage news and commentary blog.
