Average time to return mortgage pricing results drops to 1.29 seconds, while accuracy and service ‘uptime’ nears 100%, providing lenders with dependable, uninterrupted access to loan pricing and eligibility
APPLETON, WI—October 22, 2012—LoanSifter, Inc. (www.LoanSifter.com), a leading provider of product eligibility and pricing solutions for the mortgage banking industry, announced it has cut in half the amount of time it takes to conduct loan product and rate searches on LoanSifter, its flagship product and pricing engine (PPE), while reporting new benchmarks for LoanSifter’s accuracy and availability.
According to company officials, the average search on LoanSifter fell to just 1.29 seconds in 2012, down from 2.22 seconds in 2011. In addition, LoanSifter’s system availability, or “uptime,” over the last two years has been over 99.97%.
With managed content from over 140 investors, LoanSifter also reported that its real-time loan pricing and product eligibility information had an accuracy level of 99.998% between 2011 and 2012, ensuring lenders have access to fast, accurate loan products and pricing when they need them.
The three tenets of LoanSifter’s recent quality initiative – speed, accuracy and availability – are detailed in a new service level report currently available to LoanSifter clients.
As the mortgage industry continues to recover and as more lenders are relying on timely, accurate and available loan data to serve growing numbers of borrowers, LoanSifter is reporting these metrics on a voluntary basis—thus holding itself to a standard of performance that is unparalleled in the industry today. LoanSifter also continues to invest in the newest and most reliable technology, with redundant servers and multiple datacenters to ensure security and uninterrupted access to critical mortgage pricing tools.
“We chose to use LoanSifter after an extensive search of the marketplace,” said Tony Blodgett, president of Mortgage Advisory Group. “We have found it to be the best PPE due to the number of supported lenders as well as its high level of accuracy and its timely updates. The interface was also much easier for our team to navigate and get accurate pricing to their borrowers.”
“Hundreds of lenders, large and small, trust us to provide technology that drives some of their most vital functions—marketing loans, locking rates and securing the best possible pricing. So earlier this year, we challenged ourselves to find out exactly how good LoanSifter could be,” said Bruce Backer, LoanSifter’s president. “While there may be no official scorecard in our market, we know of no competitor that comes close to our performance. We don’t just say we have strong performance. We stand behind it as a core principle of this business, and have the metrics to back it up.”
Backer said the seeds behind the initiative were planted in August of 2011, when a number of competing mortgage PPE providers all experienced service outages at the same time, causing tremendous losses among mortgage companies that couldn’t price loans or request locks. The problem started after a sudden movement in mortgage rates caused originators to flood the entire market with new pricing and rate lock requests for borrowers, in turn producing an extraordinarily high level of traffic and strain on other loan pricing engines.
Excellent planning, however, prevented LoanSifter from suffering the same fate. But according to Backer, there is always room for improvement. “For lenders in particular, business continuity and reliability are paramount,” Backer explained. “Loan officers rely on a lot of information and often run a borrower’s loan scenario though many different investors at many points throughout the life of a loan. Consumers need to know their options quickly, or they will quickly go to another lender.”
This past June, LoanSifter successfully completed a rigorous SSAE 16 Type 2 examination, formally known as a Report on Controls at a Service Organization (SOC 1), in accordance with the latest reporting standards put forth by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The accomplishment provided assurance to lenders, banks and credit unions that LoanSifter abides by the toughest standards for financial reporting that exist in the financial services industry.
About LoanSifter
LoanSifter, Inc. provides the mortgage banking industry's most comprehensive platform for independent mortgage bankers, credit unions and banks to accurately price, market and manage their loans. LoanSifter is also the leader in delivering marketing tools to lenders, including its eOriginations point-of-sale (POS) platform, email campaigns, rate alerts and automated quoting for Zillow, Bankrate and LendingTree. LoanSifter is recognized as a Top 50 Service Provider by Mortgage Technology magazine and recipient of the Innovations Award from the PROGRESS in Lending Association for its LoanSifter AMRi (www.LoanSifterMortgageIndex.com), the mortgage industry’s premier real-time mortgage rate index. Founded in 2004, LoanSifter is headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin, and has experienced topline growth for 24 consecutive quarters dating back to 2006. For more information about LoanSifter, please visit www.LoanSifter.com.