The Mortgage and Mutual Fund Industries Compared

Both the mortgage and mutual fund industries experience cyclical business environments driven by external market conditions beyond their control. As a result, firms in these industries have established a pattern of laying off and re-hiring workers in response to changing demands.

In both industries, product quality suffered as a result of manual processes that required sequential steps, multiple hand-offs, large volumes of paper, and the involvement of multiple parties.

Both industries experienced the emergence of innovative technologies that automated parts of the process but lacked integration with other parts of the business. In the mutual fund industry, the use of the FundServ automated order placement system led to process efficiencies. In the mortgage industry, the use of automated underwriting systems and loan origination systems have resulted in automation of numerous sub-processes, but significant automation and integration gaps still remain.

A number of in-house and Web-based single-point technology solutions address specific loan origination and servicing processes. However, there has been little progress toward integrating these process improvements and solutions. Lenders must optimize their use of technology by better integrating these solutions with the functions they address.

DST helped to resolve some of these problems in the mutual fund industry through workflow automation and imaging solutions. DST has also deployed a process optimization solution to create a similar impact in the mortgage industry. AWD, a process optimization solution, has been tailored to meet the specific challenges of the mortgage lenders.

AWD encompasses all facets of loan origination, beginning with loan application and extending through conditions fulfillment, integration with closing and funding platforms, and facilitation of post closing, validation and packaging for the secondary market. AWD integrates with a lenders loan origination system and is compatible with image repositories and document vaults.