The new URLA approved by the Federal Home Finance Agency gave lenders a three-year runway to prepare. Beset by development delays, the URLA improves standardization and assists lenders in digitizing the loan-origination process as they take residential mortgage loan applications from borrowers with the intent to sell the closed loan to either Fannie Mae or to Freddie Mac. Yet despite the extended time to ready their systems, many vendors struggled to develop and test software that generates compliant URLA forms.

Having worked in loan-origination software since 1985, Wipro Gallagher Solutions delivered the first SaaS-based LOS platforms to support the URLA. Leveraging the Launchpad solution – part of Wipro’s NetOxygen portfolio – several leading companies incorporated the needs of the URLA as soon as the form was approved. This meant implementing their rollout roughly one year before other lending institutions, with their staffs fully trained and fully compliant long before the March 1^st requirement.

By being able to move quickly, these companies could capitalize on some of the URLA’s core benefits:

• Increased relevance of the data collected
• User-specific, interactive data collection
• More intuitive for consumer borrowers
• Easier to review
• Less legalistic language

While evaluating their options, companies should consider some key attributes of a good digital loan-origination process:

1. A borrower-centric user experience. Using borrowers’ common language, the experience should be intuitive and easy to use, with each field expanding or contracting depending on how much information is required.
2. Well-defined separation of borrower and lender information. In addition, if multiple borrowers have disparate financial information, they should each be able to fill out separate fields. These applications could be submitted simultaneously or at different times that suit the borrowers’ work hours.
3. Logical question order. Questions should be organized so borrowers can complete related fields in a logical order, enabling them to complete the application faster and without assistance from a loan officer.
4. Self-service. Modern consumers use both computers and mobile devices to fill out forms. If they need help, enable a chat function or conferencing within the application to help them complete the form immediately.
5. New fields to reflect relative trends. Today’s workforce is changing. Processes should include not just fields for email addresses, but also space for second incomes such as consulting or 1099 work. Fields should also consider questions relating to loans available to minorities or protected groups such as veterans.
6. HMDA demographic data. Including this information ensures easy compliance with the Act without requiring extra work or addenda.

The Launchpad loan-application solution fulfills all of these requirements and leads the market in data aggregation. With Launchpad, approximately 70% of the borrowers’ application data - including personal, employment, income, and asset information - is populated via data aggregators. This makes the borrower experience extremely simple and streamlined. In addition, a visual card system dynamically asks the borrower only relevant questions, while ADR/OCR minimizes the borrower’s effort and reduces processing times, thereby increasing the number of applications that can be processed in a given time period.

To learn more about Launchpad and how the Wipro Gallagher Solutions portfolio brings value to lending organization, please click on Get In Touch at the top of this page.