Mortgage lender updates tech regularly
The challenge of how to expand capacity led to AmeriSave Mortgage’s AUSSIE broker platform more than six years ago, Magesh Sarma recalled.
Sarma (pictured), the company’s chief information and strategy officer, said he and CEO Patrick Markert began to conceptualize the system in 2016, based on wanting to address a considerable challenge.
“It was very hard for us to expand our capacity to very rapidly meet a demand that was being placed by the market,” Sarma said. “We realized at the end of that year that we needed something that was more elastic, where we can scale up and down our capacity based on whatever the market throws at us.”
Eventually that became AUSSIE, a system that continues to be a valuable tool for AmeriSave, one of the nation’s fastest-growing privately held mortgage lenders. Platform users include wholesale brokers, loan originators and processors, underwriters and loan customers.
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More than 20 years old, Georgia-based AmeriSave employs over 2,590 people and does business in 49 states as well as the District of Columbia. The company helps consumers either purchase a new home or refinance their existing mortgage. Brokers are a crucial part of that equation, and AUSSIE has been a valuable and adaptable growth tool in that regard.
“It’s a living and breathing system,” Sarma said.
The company has regularly updated the system, particularly in recent months.
“In the last several months we have made strides in making it even more simple and intuitive, for customers to get credit approval in as little as three minutes, for example,” Sarma said. “We continue to reduce paperwork, making it very simple for our customers to achieve their goal of financing, and now we are able to bring that to market on all kinds of loans that we do.”
Sarma reflected that the process has moved well beyond “conventional conforming loans” that were the norm back in the day.
“Now, we are able to unleash the power of this platform,” Sarma said.
The platform
Sarma describes AUSSIE as a proprietary system nurtured by a development staff that continues to add enhancements and updates.
“What we do is we identify opportunities where either it is taking a little bit longer or taking more human resources or it is harder for the customer to fulfill that need for us to get the loan approved,” Sarma said. “It’s a constant thing that we study” as the company continues to use AUSSIE to automate and improve the underwriting process.
Big data and predictive analytics play a big role in the programming and functionality, he said, as well as data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning “and run of the mill rules-based decision-making right in its basic form.” Also in the mix: OCR processes (optical character recognition), text mining and natural language processing. In addition, the company continues to integrate its platform with multiple third-party systems via APIs, including agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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AmeriSave seeks service providers who can do system-to-system integration capabilities using APIs and data, not just documents or an Excel spreadsheet, Sarma said.
“They should give it to us in a machine readable, digestible, understandable form and format that are the source of factual information, not the destination,” he explained. “An applicant who is an employee of a company receives [his or her] pay stub, and is the recipient, but we try to go to the source of the data and integrate with systems that can provide us with fraud-free data from the source.”
When AmeriSave identified the need for what became AUSSIE, they decided to build it in-house in order to boost efficiency and be more cost effective than bringing in expensive outside experts.
“[Markert] and I [knew] we had to change the game, so we wanted to free up our loan originators to focus on the customer’s goals and advising them on the best loan for them, versus following up on paperwork,” he said. “We wanted to increase our processing and underwriting efficiency and reduce our cost.”
The name
AUSSIE’s name evolved over time.
As Sarma explained, the first part – AUS – is a standard industry acronym for “automated underwriting system,” so the platform was referred to as the company’s internal AUS in the beginning. Then, spellcheck presented a problem.
“When you spellcheck it in Microsoft Word, [the system] puts a red squiggly line underneath and says it’s a typo and it shows a spellcheck error,” Sarma said.
For a while, the name changed to “AUSY” before executives settled on its current spelling.
“Eventually we changed [the name] into something of an acronym that stands for what it really does,” Sarma said.
AUSSIE – Automated Underwriting Solution, Streamlined Internet Experience.
