The Mortgage Bankers Association subsidiary, Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, is seeking industry experts to work on development groups that will shape the way properties and mortgages are tracked in the future.
MBA CEO David Stevens told a crowd of risk managers in Dallas Tuesday that MISMO is likely to remain the standard bearer of guidelines for dealing with data, information security and risk in the mortgage industry. But it is incomplete.
He sees the process of streamlining loan data as even more critical as the industry rebuilds itself with the goal of eventually creating a new secondary mortgage market.
The MISMO entity develops residential and commercial property and technology standards. It was pulled back under the MBA umbrella last year after being managed by the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems platform.
The first MISMO development work group will develop improved property identification technology and procedures. There is currently no standard process for identifying properties — a situation that can lead to fraud or mistakes when tracking home locations. This development group will discuss what systems and processes can be used to perfect that process.
The mortgage industry currently uses a combination of postal addresses, legal descriptions, assessor parcel numbers and geospatial coordinates to track homes. MISMO wants this group to focus on the development of a universally accepted system for the future mortgage market.
Tracking loans also remains a problem. The single, Unique Loan Identification Number is not used across the industry. Firms today use different identifiers for loans and not having a standard ULIN number attached to each loan can make it difficult for investors, lenders and title insurance companies to quickly locate accurate loan information.
To address that problem, the second MISMO group will work alongside the Universal Document Identifier Development Group to establish a uniform process for tracking loans throughout the origination and securitization processes. The two teams will investigate the possibility of rolling out a universally accepted loan identification number.
The third working group will focus on how to encourage and foster additional industry adoption of the MISMO version 3 reference models. The goal of this development group will be to create universal guidelines describing all of the elements and guidelines for using MISMO version 3 reference models.
“The production and maintenance of this documentation would provide a significant advancement in the ability to gain industry adoption for MISMO and increase the MISMO subscriber base,” the MBA said.
