Vendors Bring Business Intelligence to Midtier Lenders

By Anthony Garranano

In the current turbulent market, keeping an eye on business analytics to turn them into action plans is key. To serve this need Lydian Technology Group, Jacksonville, Fla., and Intelli-Mine, Newport Beach, Calif., have formed an alliance to put actual business intelligence into the hands of small and midtier lenders.

Intelli-Mine offers a pre-packaged mortgage performance management system for the mortgage industry that integrates data from the lender's loan origination, accounting and other source systems. From there the system provides mortgage-specific key performance indicators via integrated dashboards, scorecards, alerts and analytics.

Executives and operational managers of mortgage companies use the technology to define, monitor and proactively manage their business. Over 110 lending and financial metrics are delivered out-of-the-box in the standard product and 180 overall, as well as 50-plus standard analyses. All of this is driven by an enterprise data warehouse that has been specifically designed for the mortgage industry.

Lydian Technology Group offers one of the most widely used integration hubs in the mortgage space. As the keep of all the crucial data connecting the lender's systems, the integration with Intelli-Mine offers an out-of-the-box solution for midtier lenders already using Lydian to take advantage of Intelli-Mine's business intelligence expertise.

"We're always keenly aware of data integration," stressed Brian Fitzpatrick, president at Lydian Technology Group. "We integrate data from systems internally and externally. But what do you do with that automation next? To me the next step is managing your business. There is no executive that can manage the business without seeing what's going on.

'Through the Mortgage Connectivity Hub, there's a large synergy to say we have all this data so how can we help lenders manage the business. Intelli-Mine has the best technology solution and they understand the business. Now we can rapidly deploy a business intelligence solution that is already suited for the mortgage business."

"Weenable lenders to look at performance," added Anil Suri, CEO and president at Intelli-Mine. "Lydian's hub provides consolidated data. Your information infrastructure stays the same no matter if your systems change or not with this integration. Lenders are asking how are we doing? Why are we doing this? What should we be doing?

"Well, our dashboards and scorecards tell you how you're doing. We'll help lenders look at historic data, trends and anomalies to help them understand why they're doing what they're doing. Then we can look to see the impact of entering a new channel, for example. Lenders are always asking these questions. We're just giving them data to back it up. This is the turf of the top five lenders. Midtier lenders don't have that luxury."

"There's a lull for middle-marketcompanies to deploy these solutions," pointed out Mr. Fitzpatrick. "We have a large midtier client base, so instead of them having to go through a huge implementation, we can centralize the data so they can get at it instantly. From there Intelli-Mine has done a great job with their analytics and decisioning. We've made this easier to launch for midtier lenders to do business intelligence."

And at the MBA annual, Lydian and Intelli-Mine expect lenders to be looking seriously at technology solution, although they expect overall attendance to be down. "Boston is one of my favorite cities," said Mr. Fitzpatrick. "It's a great city to be in. With under 1,000 lenders registered it will be interesting. Lenders attending will certainly be tired. The strong are left so it'll be interesting to see who is in the game. It's a good time to look at technology investment."

"We'll see the same scenario as what happened when we had the hurricane at a prior MBA," added Mr. Suri. "The industry is consolidating. It's a great time for vendors because lenders are getting more serious. Prospects are better. It will be [interesting].

"As such, risk mitigation and compliance will be big issues at the show. Lenders will look at technology to help them get there in terms of compliance, measure themselves and keep their executives on their toes. A lot of companies have skeletons in their closets that are going to be coming out over the next few months."

"Companies will be focused on process efficiency as well," said Mr. Fitzpatrick. 'They will also be talking about risk reduction."