Xerox Aims to Lead Originators into Paperless Mortgage World

The latest venture in mortgages for Xerox Corp. (XRX) is a move to make the name synonymous with paperless electronic mortgage origination, according to the company. The company is now focusing efforts on its eVault, an off-site digital storage repository for electronic loan documents, as a way to try to grab more market share in paperless origination. Currently the company holds more than 35,000 mortgages in the vault. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) is offered on a per-loan basis, which the company said makes it more affordable for originators with varying levels of loan volume. The data storage demands of housing mortgage documents are not that great, approximately one megabyte of data per loan file. Xerox said its service integrates with the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) eRegistry platform as well as provides secure access to mortgage investors and servicers and meets standardized storage and security requirements. That sort of functionality would prove costly and timely for a company to implement on its own, Greg Smith, the vice president of Xerox Mortgage Services, told HousingWire from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Technology Conference underway in Chicago. “It’s not enough to have the technology. It’s about having the technology that maintains compliance but also has the connections to the various parties throughout the transaction. A mortgage banker can come to us and plug into what we’ve already built in a model where they don’t have to spend not only a lot of time but also a lot of money setting it up and maintaining it themselves,” Smith said. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently approved provisions to allow e-signatures for certain mortgage disclosure documents, and it’s expected that e-signatures for closing documents will be approved in the near future. While electronic origination is beginning to take off, it’s still a small percentage of most originators’ overall business. That makes using a third-party electronic storage feature “With enough time and money you can do anything yourself, but the issue is that we’ve built all the infrastructure and all the connections to the parties and that should not be underestimated how big of a deal that is,” Smith said. Currently, the Xerox data center is headquartered in Texas, with a backup facility in Georgia. As younger generations that are more accustomed to working in a digital world begin to become not only mortgage borrowers, but also origination employees, Smith sees the number of electronic mortgage documents increasing. “The Gen-X, Gen-Y population, the post-Baby Boomers, for the vast majority of careers, they’ve been online and more comfortable doing transactions online,” Smith said. “We think the trends are on our side, not against us.” Write to Austin Kilgore. The author held no relevant investments.