Stewart in the Studio, hosted by Marvin Stone, SVP, Strategic Initiatives, is a fast-paced monthly podcast focused on issues vital to the mortgage lending industry. Tune in each month as Marvin and industry thought leaders discuss important trends and timely topics.
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Speakers for this episode include:
Marvin Stone
As Senior Vice President, Director of Strategic Initiatives for Stewart Lender Services, Marvin Stone is working on the digital transformation of the transaction process for Stewart’s full range of services that cover the entire mortgage lifecycle. He also contributes to industry technology by participating in MBA’s MISMO Title and Settlement Community of Practice and being part of Stewart’s generative AI council.
Stone has been with Stewart since 2007 and has managed various technology, process and compliance initiatives for the direct, agency and centralized title divisions. Before joining Stewart, he was CIO for a large title company on the West Coast and held strategic roles with other national underwriters and mortgage lenders.
Stone is a frequent speaker at industry events and is sought out for his commentary on industry trends.
E1: eMortgage Transformation – The 2024 Done For You Approach
Marvin: Can you talk a little bit about the ” e” initiative at NotaryCam and how it ties in maybe to what lenders are trying to achieve in 2024?
Brian: Absolutely. I think it’s a huge boost in our product and capability offering. From a lender, and doing this twice, knowing firsthand how difficult it is for a lender to make the necessary changes to implement a fully digital mortgage transaction just from the docs to the process, to being able to generate the, funding and delivering into the secondary market, all of the component requirements that are needed to support that process, including the eVault and eVault and MERS registrations. There’s a lot of boxes to check while they’re not individually overly difficult, it’s difficult to put them all together seamlessly and when a lender is, struggling just to keep volume up and to keep their staff productive coming up with a separate project that requires touch points and every part of the organization in order to implement a new process can be overwhelming and daunting to say the least.
So what we’re doing here at NotaryCam is we’re building out the full digital capabilities within a single platform. What that’s going to do, it’s going to empower, Stewart or other title companies, either from a direct operations from, especially within Stewart Lender Services, to be able to have the platform to go to a lender that says, give me your documents just like you do today.
I will then close the transaction. However, you and your borrower want to, whether that is in person in a Stewart office, whether it’s a hybrid, whether it’s remote with an iPad or full RON transaction, by the way, we can generate the note on your behalf as well. So we’ve partnered with the leading provider of eVault technologies in the country, it’s not just within the mortgage space, but eOriginal is a leader, both within mortgage and within non mortgage, the chattel space. So we have a NotaryCam e vault. We have the ability to generate an email just based off documents that are being presented to us by the lender. We partnered with another vendor that will allow us to index and tag the lender documents, so we don’t need any additional information from the lender. What that does is it creates a transaction that any title company using our platform can then close the transaction electronically, notarize all of the documents remotely, generate an email through our partnership with eOriginal, get it executed and deliver it back to the lender fully executed, fully compliant with an email that’s dropped back into their vault, or if they need us to host for them, we can do that as well.
What that means is the lender only needs to worry about funding and delivering into the secondary market. Those aren’t minor, but those are much easier steps to control and to implement the needing to worry about all of the different controls, changes within their process different kind of workflows, depending on whether it’s going to be an electronic or a paper transaction.
Lenders can continue to do business as they do today, have little disruption to their internal operations and be able to take this tremendous step forward and be able to implement and deliver a truly digital transaction to their consumers.
Marvin: What a great story. So I’m going to it sounds like that somebody could maybe gloss over that and just think, oh, there’s a lot of great functionality there.
But I think what you put together is really unique. So I’m going to try to summarize this and you tell me if I’m right. So I think the prevailing wisdom amongst lenders that they have this sort of DIY approach where I’m a lender, I have to go to these different providers, get them all on board, get the pieces to work together, get my settlement providers to work together and make sure that somehow this all comes together, which is very challenging.
You’ve got all these different technologies to integrate, even if it’s just with your LOS and your processes. So number one, what you just talked about is not really the D. I. Y. approach that most lenders face today. It’s the Done For You approach. And so all of this, you brought together under one roof and that one roof being Stewart you have the size and strength of a company.
That’s not looking for more cash in the next funding round or something like that like a lot of the smaller RON providers typically are in that space. You have the strength of a public company, a company that’s been around 130 years and the ecosystem that Stewart has built lenders get to benefit from all of that in a done for you fashion.
So is that a good way to summarize that?
Brian: That’s an even better way of summarizing and that’s fantastic. It is. And I love that term Done For You. We might have to come up with a marketing campaign around that. Instead of the DIY approach is the DFY approach. Because I truly believe that this is what’s going to be The gigantic leap forward is an organization like Stewart, especially with an SLS that has all of the other capabilities of all the other kind of acquisitions and companies underneath the Stewart umbrella to be able to go to a lender and we can do 1 thing or we can do it all and anything in between and really allow lenders to focus on production and allow.
What they do best making loans and allow, Stewart, let us do what we do best, we’re closing and ensuring the transaction and oh, by the way, we can do it however you want to even electronically and give you a truly digital transaction and take all of that burden away. From the lenders and then, and basically, I don’t want to say worry free, but pretty darn close.
Marvin: Pretty close. Yeah. And I think there was a thought here at the one of the recent conferences. I forget who said it, but we, someone on the panel said lenders are not rushing to do eNotes, even though they have every advantage by doing going fully paperless, fully. All the way.
Huge advantages, especially mortgage bankers. And one of the panelists on this conference session said, Hey, lenders are just always too busy or too broke. And so that’s the problem is they just can’t find. They can’t seem to devote the time, invest the time. To put all those pieces together, but now I think it sounds like you’re coming in with more of a consultative approach to where you can say here.
The piece is done for you. You can just implement the NotaryCam Stewart solution and be there.
Brian: Yeah, we, you and I have talked about this developing kind of that playbook there’s. Several companies, several articles, a plethora of information out there that says, how do you implement, an e mortgage and they’re all very high level.
They’re very, talk to your title partners, talk to your investment partners, and it doesn’t really break down what needs to happen. There’s an order to everything, you got to make sure you have these five things in place before you can go to the next 10 things. And. Empowering kind of Stewart to be able to walk into an organization to say, look, we can take 8 out of the 10 steps.
Of this playbook, we are bringing them to the table for you. Here’s the 2 things that you need to be able to do. Mr and Mrs lender and really again, it fits into their little house. It’s. Yeah. Production, it’s funding, it’s delivery, right? And, taking all the other kind of noise out of the equation for them and letting us, letting Stewart be able to handle it for them.
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