Thoughts on spam, venture capital, a new product and more
This week, a LoanStream Mortgage technology executive sounded off on cybersecurity and spam. Real estate technology company Flueid raised new financing. FirstClose brought in a veteran of ICE Mortgage Technology as its new chief marketing officer. Truv launched a new insurance verification product. LauraMac rolled out its new loan acquisition system. Redwood Trust and LauraMac are collaborating on the development of new loan acquisition technology.
LoanStream Mortgage
Cybersecurity is increasingly important to the mortgage industry even as spamming is getting worse, Thomas Shaw, LoanStream Mortgage’s chief marketing and technology officer, told Mortgage Professional America.
“Cybersecurity is hugely important today … and I don’t think there’s anything that you’re ever going to do to lessen that. It’s only going to get harder,” Shaw said.
He noted that cyberattacks have become more frequent this year in the mortgage industry, despite efforts to manage or stop them. With that in mind, spam has become a particular problem.
Read more: LoanStream tech exec role designed for maximum innovation efficiency
“We’d love to see a lot of these fraudulent spammers get out of the way,” he said. “There’s just a ton of … spam going on out there [affecting] customers and everybody else that’s really going to muck up the industry,” he said.
Mortgage companies, Shaw said, need to keep an eye on cybersecurity and manage closely what is going on within their systems and how they’re being used.
“You need to keep your visibility and monitoring across everything you have, and you’re going to need to invest in making that better,” Shaw said. “Make sure you can manage and monitor what’s going on within your systems to prevent any sort of cybersecurity incidents.”
Shaw also spoke about mortgage industry technology trends and other tech perspectives. Those insights are featured in a recent MPA story, which can be accessed here.
Flueid
Real estate technology company Flueid plans to accelerate its product diversification and growth, propelled by $20 million in new financing.
That includes $15 million in a Series B raise, and $5 million as a relationship extension with Silicon Valley Bank. Aquiline Technology Growth, a previous investor, led the Series B round, which also included previous investor Commerce Ventures.
Flueid’s platform uses title data and insights to fuel real estate transactions. It is designed to unlock data and embed it into core operation systems of point-of-sale platforms, lender operating systems, title production systems, servicing platforms and marketplaces. By doing so, it hopes to enable more efficient decision-making in different parts of the real estate process.
The company describes itself as a hybrid of insurtech, proptech and fintech. Its technology has supported more than one million transactions as of summer 2022 while adding purchase and home equity transactions to its platform’s existing refinance capabilities.
Flueid is based in Austin, Texas.
FirstClose
FirstClose brought in a veteran of ICE Mortgage Technology as its new chief marketing officer.
Carol Crawford will lead strategy and implementation for brand development, integrated marketing and multi-channel communications efforts.
FirstClose is a fintech that provides data and workflow products and services for mortgage and home equity lenders.
Crawford has more than 20 years of experience in mortgage and financial services marketing and leadership. Previously, she was senior director at ICE Mortgage Technology, where she handled business strategy and product marketing for ICE’s AIQ and TPO Connect products.
Before that, Crawford was chief marketing officer of ClosingCorp, where she, in part, led the account management and marketing teams.
Truv
Truv launched a new insurance verification product designed to help mortgage and auto lenders instantly verify proof of insurance.
The company is an income and employment verification provider. Its new insurance verification product is designed to help mortgage and auto lenders instantly verify 90% of US insurance policyholders in less than a minute. Lenders can embed the Truv Connect bridge into their loan onboarding flow where applicants can login directly to their insurance provider.
Once that connection is successfully established, mortgage and auto lenders get more than 100 different data fields from the insurance provider including current coverages, deductibles and premiums.
LauraMac
LauraMac recently rolled out its new loan acquisition system, a platform that connects sellers, buyers and third-party review (PR) firms to streamline the diligence vendor management process.
The system also enables real-time communications and seamless exchange of documents and data without the need for emails or spreadsheets.
LauraMac is a provider of SaaS technology for the mortgage secondary and capital markets.
Read next: Flueid fetches $20 million in Series B funding round
LauraMac launched in 2019. It offers products designed for mortgage capital markets including document recognition and management, data extraction, loan due diligence, quality control, pricing and transaction management, and service transfer.
Redwood Trust/LauraMac
Redwood Trust and LauraMac are collaborating on the development of new loan acquisition technology to be used by Redwood and its clients.
Redwood is a specialty finance company focused on a number of areas of housing credit, such as providing liquidity to segments of the US housing market not well served by government programs.
LauraMac is a modern SaaS technology provider for the mortgage capital markets.
