Cloud-based Mortgage Processing Designed to Reduce Time to Value

Published in Document Imaging Report

Ephesoft recently announced a new cloud-based service for capturing mortgage documents. Ephesoft Transact for Mortgage is based on the company’s proven capture platform and designed to decrease the time to value for end users implementing mortgage processing technology. The service was announced at last month’s Mortgage Bankers Association Technology Solutions Conference & Expo, which was held in Detroit. It is currently available through Ephesoft’s sales channels.

“Mortgage capture has been a good market for us and I believe we have great technology for helping companies classify and sort their mortgage documents,” Ike Kavas, Ephesoft Founder and CEO, told. “The includes the ability to automatically classify hundreds of document types. The challenge has been that no customer wants to share files with other customers, so, with every implementation, we’ve had to start from scratch.”

The idea behind Transact for Mortgage is to reduce implementation times by an estimated 80%. “We have collected more than 30,000 images and organized them into hundreds of document types,” said Kavas. “We have applied our machine learning technology and built a cloud-based solution that makes it very easy for a customer to start auto-classifying mortgage documents the day they purchase their software. It’s set up as a single-tenant service, so that we are never sharing our customers’ documents with anyone else.”

For a combination of reasons, Transact from Mortgage is only available on the cloud. “In an effort to create a best-of-breed solution, we utilize various cloud providers (Azure/AWS) for its infrastructure,” said Kavas. “The main goal we have is to reduce the friction related to deploying these types of solutions. Reducing the time to value is important, and the cloud is a key factor in enabling us to achieve that.”

According to a press release, “Transact for Mortgage enables underwriters and mortgage loan processors to upload loan documents into a batch class. It automatically and accurately classifies and separates documents, before validating and exporting them into loan origination systems like Ellie Mae and Mortgage Cadence, along with others. The system automatically recognizes where each document starts and stops within large multi-file PDFs, splitting up individual document types.

“Transact for Mortgage provides unprecedented workflow efficiency by automatically determining which documents are needed to process loans and which are ancillary, such as the cover pages, blank sheets of paper and invoices that are often attached to appraisal documents. Ephesoft does the heavy lifting, removing extraneous content and focusing on high-value documents that can be categorized into batches such as lease agreements, tax returns, loan applications and disclosures.”

“The first version is designed primarily for auto-classification,” said Kavas. “But, with the purchase of Transact for Mortgage, customers get access to our complete Transact product on the cloud. So, they can set up data extraction, it’s just going to require some configuration.”

Two versions of Transact for Mortgage are available: one for conventional mortgages and one for U.S. Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured loans, which involve significantly more document types. Transact for Mortgage is targeted at the U.S. market. “We have partners in other countries who address mortgage applications, but they have different sets of documents they need to work with,” said Kavas.

Ephesoft is one of several vendors we have talked with recently that is focusing on the mortgage capture market. We asked Kavas if the space wasn’t getting a bit crowded and if there was enough business to go around. “Some of those companies you talked with are also using our technology behind the scenes,” he noted. “It’s our goal to continue to improve and stay ahead of the competition. We think that as long as we continue to provide excellent technology and service, as well as ease of deployment, we will stay ahead of the pack and gain more customers.

“We spent about $1 million to build Transact for Mortgage. We would not have done that if we didn’t feel there was a market. It’s a mixed bag what businesses are using now to process mortgages. In many cases, their accuracy rates are lower than what they could get with our technology. Also, with Transact for Mortgage, the time to value factor is key. Customers can start using the technology almost immediately—no one else is offering that.”