Growth
06/03/2019

Five Reasons Behind Mortgage Subservicing’s Continued Popularity


mortgage-6-3-19.pngMortgage subservicing has made significant in-roads among banks, as more institutions decide to outsource the function to strategic partners.

In 1990, virtually no financial institution outsourced their residential mortgage servicing.

By the end of 2018, the Federal Reserve said that $2.47 trillion of the $10.337 trillion, or 24%, of mortgage loans and mortgage servicing rights were subserviced. Less than three decades have passed, but the work required to service a mortgage effectively has completely changed. Five trends have been at work pushing an increasing number of banks to shift to a strategic partner for mortgage subservicing.

  1. Gain strategic flexibility. Servicing operations carry high fixed costs that are cannot adapt quickly when market conditions change. Partnering with a subservicer allows lenders to scale their mortgage portfolio, expand their geographies, add product types and sell to multiple investors as needed. A partnership gives bank management teams the ability to react faster to changing conditions and manage their operations more strategically.
  2. Prioritizes strong compliance. The increasing complexity of the regulatory environment puts tremendous strain on management and servicing teams. This can mean that mortgage businesses are sometimes unable to make strategic adjustments because the bank lacks the regulatory expertise needed. But subservicers can leverage their scale to hire the necessary talent to ensure compliance with all federal, state, municipal and government sponsored entity and agency requirements.
  3. Increased efficiency, yielding better results with better data. Mortgage servicing is a data-intensive endeavor, with information often residing in outdated and siloed systems. Mortgage subservicers can provide a bank management team with all the information they would need to operate their business as effectively and efficiently as possible.
  4. Give borrowers the experience they want. Today’s borrowers expect their mortgage lender to offer comparable experiences across digital channels like mobile, web, virtual and video. But it often does not make sense for banks to build these mortgage-specific technologies themselves, given high costs, a lack of expertise and gaps in standard core banking platforms for specific mortgage functions. Partnering with a mortgage subservicer allows banks to offer modern and relevant digital servicing applications.
  5. Reduced cost. Calculating the cost to service a loan can be a challenging undertaking for a bank due to multiple business units sharing services, misallocated overhead charges and hybrid roles in many servicing operations. These costs can be difficult to calculate, and the expense varies widely based on the type of loans, size of portfolio and the credit quality. A subservicer can help solidify a predictable expense for a bank that is generally more cost efficient compared to operating a full mortgage servicing unit.

The broader economic trends underpinning the growing popularity of mortgage subservicing look to be strengthening, which will only accelerate this trend. Once an operational cost save, mortgage subservicing has transformed into a strategic choice for many banks.

Michael Wilkinson