Regulatory risk management has always been a minefield of potential costly missteps and omissions for mortgage lenders. Over the past few years, it’s become even more challenging–especially as demand for mortgages climbs and firms expand into new arenas.
For one thing, the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to utterly transform the way they operate. As they scrambled to adopt digital workflows and capabilities largely overnight, regulatory changes governing those new operations came in fast and furious—and changed just as quickly, as potential risks were brought to light in real time.
And even before the pandemic, the rise of e-commerce and digital delivery giants escalated issues of consumer privacy and data security.
These are just two of the recent struggles facing mortgage lenders, who have long dealt with a vast and complex regulatory landscape.
Depending on where they operate, mortgage lenders need to look at the regulation feeds from multiple states–sometimes all 50. And because states change their licensing requirements regularly, it can be nearly impossible to stay on top of the latest updates—in addition to trying to manage federal regulatory requirements and ever-evolving consumer protection rules.
Often, mortgage lenders turn to industry-familiar search tools to help them determine what they should be doing from a compliance perspective.
But what these sources provide for mortgage lenders are entire legislative bills or full regulatory rule updates—tens or even hundreds of pages in length. To actually determine what they should be doing, mortgage lenders need to:
- Read through the entire text
- Subjectively decide which requirements are relevant to them
- Record those requirements for implementation
The results: over-served information that requires time consuming manual analysis, causing feelings of overwhelm and often opens up more risk.
Within these lengthy legislative bills and regulatory updates, there are the regulatory requirements—the prescriptive “to-dos” which get to the heart of what mortgage lenders need to do to stay compliant.
But there’s also important supporting information in these texts—exemptions, clarification statements, and definitions that are further needed to interpret the requirement.
Unfortunately for mortgage lenders, this supporting information is typically not found directly next to its corresponding requirement. Users have to dig through different sections of the document, which wastes more time and creates even more uncertainty around what they need to do.
Identifying compliance requirements for mortgage lenders doesn’t have to be tedious.
Ascent RegTech automatically defines—and identifies—obligations for mortgage lenders much faster and more accurately.
We create a to-do list specific to your firm by extracting precise compliance requirements from the broader rule book, including all laws, rules and regulations applicable to you. Once complete, you can be assured of continued compliance, because regulation changes are automatically captured and updated–even as your firm expands into new jurisdictions.
Ascent also packages each obligation alongside its relevant support information, creating what we call a “complete thought” explaining the specific task required of your firm, as well as all necessary context for completing it.
Using Ascent, you can:
- Centralize and automate your obligations in a single place
- Eliminate the manual tedium of sifting through large regulatory documents to determine what applies to you
- Filter out what doesn’t matter and take action on specific to-dos
- Reduce cost associated with compliance management
Find out how Ascent can help you manage the evolving mortgage lender regulatory risk landscape. Contact us to request a demo or talk to our Sales team.
