The journey to Digital Transformation in the mortgage industry can seem like an uphill climb at times – uphill across a mountain of documents and data. And yet, technology continues to rise to the occasion, transforming mountains into rapidly moving streams of information quickly ingested and easily retrieved.

In the process, we're saving more than time: quality control is also improving, as error-prone manual processes give way to systems that can weed out duplicate documents and identify inconsistent or missing data.

As a quality control expert with more than two decades of experience in the mortgage industry,  MetaSource Senior Vice President of Mortgage Services Mary Kladde has seen all the ways in which loan quality can fall short.

But while loan defect reporting is an important process, required of any lenders doing business with the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Kladde would like to see a stronger focus on some of the root causes of loan defects – and ways to correct them earlier in the process.

“Lenders don’t always focus on the right place,” Kladde says.

We know how annoying it can be when retailers start reminding you to get a head start on your holiday shopping in the middle of October. But December does have a way of sneaking up on you.

That was part of the message MetaSource Manager for MERS Operations Kelly Jensen shared with the audience at his panel on MERS reconciliation at last month's MERS User Conference in Virginia.

Jensen doesn't really care when you start your holiday shopping. But as an expert on the requirements of the MERS® system, he has seen too many loan servicers wait until the last minute to start planning for the annual report.

Cost and time savings, along with the need for greater accuracy, continue to drive the growth of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in a variety of industries, led by the financial, healthcare and telecom sectors, market researchers report.

While the market is still small, some analysts have suggested that the global market for RPA could reach $8.75 billion by 2024, with small and medium sized businesses expected to incorporate RPA into their processes "at an alarming rate."

With some estimates putting the cost of RPA-accomplished work at 65-80% of the cost of having the same work done by employees, the technology is expected to attract a growing number of businesses whose high volume of routine, repetitive and rules-based processes are easily automated.

With 15 years of experience in the mortgage field, MetaSource Manager for MERS Operations Kelly Jensen has a lot of tips to share on the subject of reconciling mortgage documents with the MERS® system.

His advice: work hard and learn to "speak geek."

That's shorthand for finding someone on your IT team who understands the meticulous requirements of a system that has to match up the nearly three-dozen mortgage document fields with the corresponding fields in the MERS system. Get it wrong and MERS will kick it back to you for corrections. For servicers handling thousands of mortgages a year, that adds up to a lot of time spent rehashing the details.

In 25 years of providing support and solutions to the mortgage industry, we've seen a little bit of everything. But there's almost nothing we hate to see as much as a lien release that comes back rejected – especially when it's completely avoidable.

Lien release rejection leaves lenders at risk, because it creates a break in the custody of the underlying property. Lenders can't move forward and it can take months to correct. Plus to make matters worse, the penalties for non-compliance of state statutes that could be levied on the lender will have a dramatic effect on their bottom line.

But as disruptive as lien release rejection can be, it is, unfortunately, a common occurrence. That's partly because there are so many ways a lien release can be rejected at one of the more than 3,600 recording offices across the United States. Here are the top reasons lien releases are rejected, and how to avoid them.

If you're attending the upcoming National Mortgage Servicing conference, be sure to visit MetaSource at the National Mortgage Servicing Conference & Expo 2018 in booth #618. You will learn about new servicing quality control (QC) requirements, our QC services and a host of other solutions we offer to mortgage servicers.

With 2017 behind us, here is a look back at the top 15 mortgage quality control issues based on tens of thousands of post-close QC audits that we performed over the past year.

In their second full year of adjusting to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) enhanced disclosure requirements, lenders managed a better track record of compliance. Only six of the top 15 findings were related to the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosures (TRID) rule, down from 12 of 15 in 2016, the first full year of the rule's implementation.

Even so, the results suggest that lenders are still in the learning curve as TRID defects accounted for the top six findings on the list.

Though relatively new, robotic process automation (RPA) is already starting to dramatically streamline the mortgage lending process.

The Best Part: there are now mid-market solutions like Kapow from MetaSource that offers the benefits of RPA for a fraction of the price that the large consulting firms and IT integrators would love to charge you. And, it works as you will see in the video below.

In the spring of 2011, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued consent orders outlining a quality assurance mission for MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. and the nation's largest servicers. The mission was designed to ensure the data accuracy within the MERS^® System could effectively support its role in securitization.

As a result, MERS consolidated the Consent Order to reflect new Member requirements. Today, MERS requires an annual scope of review for MERS General Members. It encompasses a review of the 6 conditions listed on the MERS Annual Report. The core objectives of the 6 conditions listed are answering how a Member supports MERS data integrity requirements and operational procedures.

MetaSource performs MERS Annual Report reviews as the Third Party. We perform a thorough review of a Member's data integrity and operational policies and procedures for the production and execution of a MERS Annual Report. Now with more than half of 2017 in the books and servicers are eyeing that end of year deadline for the MERS Annual Report, here's a look back on the top 8 MERS quality assurance (QA) issues based on our client work over the last six years: