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.
E5: Stewart – From Mortgage Data to Mortgage Servicing
Marvin Stone: Welcome everyone to this week’s episode of Stewart In The Studio. Today, our thought leaders include Rich Kugler, Shannon Santos, and Matt Jenkins. Rich, you regularly rack up miles talking to mortgage lenders of all shapes and sizes all over the country who really still think of Stewart as just a title company.
Can you shed some light on how Stewart has really changed to become that full mortgage lifecycle partner?
Rich Kuegler: Sure, Marvin. And it’s interesting because while some people do still think of Stewart as a primarily a title provider, there’s so much more to the story. In addition to our title solutions that we’ve built over time, Stewart has added an offering that really spans the entire lifecycle of a loan.
Starting with lead generation and pre qualification, moving into application. Then into your familiar underwriting and processing, normally associated with title, but then we’ve also added appraisals and other services that help get through loan approval, closing and funding, and most notably servicing. A number of servicers have partnered with Stewart, as a matter of fact, in default servicing, portfolio management, lead generation, retention, and loss mitigation.
Marvin Stone: Sounds good. And Shannon, you lead the Informative Research Data Solutions Division, which has created some very unique solutions for mortgage servicers. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Shannon Santos: Sure. Informative Research Data Solutions currently helps our lender partners with a number of things.
Specifically, we’re focused in four pillar areas, which is Our customer acquisition or lead generation solutions, risk and retention, upsell, cross sell, and custom data analytics. And we do this through utilizing a number of tools, specifically as it relates to our data assets, which we use credit data.
Public record, property, demographic and marketing data. So we are very adept at combining these disparate data sets and our customer data to come up with unique and hybrid solutions to help drive better retention and portfolio analytics for our customers.
Marvin Stone: So that’s on the portfolio level. And now on the property level, Matt, our steward valuation intelligence division is one of the largest and most tech forward AMCs in the country.
Can you share a bit about the wide range of valuation solutions that you offer mortgage servicers?
Matt Jenkins: Yeah, sure, Marvin. So we have a full suite of valuation solutions for all of your servicing needs from portfolio analysis to PMI removal, loss mitigation default all the way through REO valuations include AVM, property condition reports, broker price opinions, which is the most common evaluations, desktop appraisals, all the way to full appraisals.
All those valuations are powered by our integrated market data computer vision, AI, and our intelligent quality control platforms.
Marvin Stone: Great. So really a full range of services. So rich with that one area we haven’t talked about his integrations and obviously integrations are a key component. Can you touch on that?
Rich Kuegler: Certainly. We talk about the processes and all these different capabilities that Stewart has, but the integrations literally tie it all together and in the origination space, we’re very familiar with integrations that are standard, whether it’s Encompass or Black Knight, but we’re also seeing that servicers are starting to take advantage of the process advantages.
And the efficiencies that integrations will offer. And Stewart has both the integration expertise for large systems, like a Black Knight, MSP or LoanSphere, but we also have dedicated APIs for each of the service offerings that we have. And the technology strength and expertise that we have as a 130 year old company really do span that whole life of loan cycle.
And Stewart is more than title.
Marvin Stone: Yeah, of course it certainly is big changes over the last few years. One of the things that we hear from servicers is these different service providers out there that they have to deal with rich to put things together. Can you just shed some light on the breadth of steward, that one partner, one agreement, one integration type of a mindset and how that benefits lenders in the servicing space?
Rich Kuegler: That’s a huge benefit because, as you mentioned, multiple touch points make for a lot of confusion in the process, makes for a lot of additional administrative overhead, and also makes it a little more disjointed rather than a full on process of view of things. And as we approach solutions with our customers, Our lender clients and our servicing clients, we know that providing them with a holistic solution really allows them to take advantage of the best of the offering and to tailor that offering that best fits their needs.
Marvin Stone: Yeah, said, and then Shannon I’m just going to ask you one quick question. I know you have a wide variety of solutions. You mentioned numerous databases that you work with. Does it matter which system they’re on, or can you pretty much help any servicer on any system out there?
Shannon Santos: We can help any servicer on any system.
We have a lot of clients who work with MSPs of the world. However, we do custom one off integrations for our clients.
Marvin Stone: Great. And then Matt, on the valuation side, it sounds like you can go from BPO all the way to full valuation. Is there any valuation or appraisal product that you really are missing that a servicer would need?
Or do you really have a full suite of solutions?
Matt Jenkins: We have the full suite of solutions that any servicer would need from the valuation perspective.
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