In a world where seemingly everything has its own devoted search engine, mortgage lenders still have not had a tool to allow them to quickly and easily identify third-party service providers that have all the certifications and offerings they need. Until now, at least.
Vendor Surf promises to be a first-of-its-kind search engine platform, enabling mortgage professionals to browse more than 75 vendors to find the right ones for their respective businesses. It also is intended to afford vendors a single location where they can be discovered and showcase their offerings to potential clients. Vendors can buy listing packages, although searching the site is free to everyone.
Vendor Surf co-founders Craig Leabig and Scott Roller sat down with Dodd Frank Update during the Mortgage Bankers Association’s 2017 Annual Convention to talk about the company’s platform, which can be found at vendorsurf.com.
“It’s a search engine spanning the entire mortgage ecosystem, from origination all the way through secondary marketing,” Leabig said. “It’s a platform where people who are looking for vendors that support any one of the areas within that loan life-cycle can discover a service provider via very specific user-desired criteria. So, we bring searchers together with providers and help them quickly and easily narrow down to those vendors who meet their specific needs.”
All 75-plus vendor categories contain product and service specific search filters that searchers can use to refine their results to help them identify vendors with such specialties. Searches can be refined based on the searcher’s location, product types, business model, how they handle orders, whether they are integrated with a particular loan origination software (LOS) provider and many other criteria.
Leabig spent 16 years working for Citibank, and another four at Equifax, and has leveraged lessons learned about the needs of various entities in the financial marketplace and applied them to the development of the Vendor Surf platform over the last year-and-a-half.
Roller also knows a thing or two about third-party entities, having previously run global vendor management for Citibank’s mortgage division prior to leaving in 2012 to start his own niche consulting and training firm called 3W Partners, dedicated to the vendor management space.
“If there was a vendor on the planet that was a partner to us, my staff and I managed the relationships, the day-to-day performance, the contracts, legal regulatory compliance items for all of those service providers,” Roller said. “I claim to know the service provider market like nobody else. It’s my life-blood.”
Roller also is well-versed on the topic of compliance concerns pertaining to vendors and the companies that contract with them. He noted that, while still at the bank, he worked in conjunction with a pair of “powerhouse” consulting firms to help develop the third-party oversight and governance model to be used by the whole mortgage business, covering origination, servicing and default.
“So, our past challenges and experiences have led to many core competencies that we consult on today,” Roller said. “Vendor Surf, when we launch, won’t indicate that certain companies are at ‘X’ level of compliance. However, search criteria in virtually every vendor category will let you drill down to locate certain certifications and best practices that apply to various vendors.”
The platform also will include a digital calendar allowing anyone in the industry to promote events, such as conferences, compliance webinars, education and training sessions and whitepapers at no cost.
“The tag line that we have is, ‘If it’s happening in the mortgage industry, you’ll find it on Vendor Surf,’ ” Leabig said. “So, if people are looking for compliance-related training, they can search our educational section and our calendar. If they’re looking for webinars on that subject, they can go search our calendar for those as well. But, if they’re looking for vendors that provide solutions, we have specific categories that will help them narrow down their search for solution providers that will help them become more compliant.”
With the creation of Vendor Surf, Leabig and Roller are attempting to take the concept of personalized vendor management solutions and blowing it up into a much more expansive, ubiquitous technology solution.
“Much like Angie’s List, Home Advisor, Trivago, Expedia and every other commercial you see on TV for a search engine, we thought, ‘that’s it, that’s what’s missing,’ ” Roller said. “When you go to Google today, you’re looking at the whole universe of everything on the Internet and you find vendors who advertise and do good SEO (search engine optimization). It has no bearing on whether or not they’re a good and specialized performer or not.”
Leabig noted that the goal of their new search engine is to put more of an emphasis on the types of services companies provide, the types of certifications they have and specific characteristics about certain vendors that match the needs of those doing the searching.
“You can just click down through the levels of detail that allow you to take the universe of what’s out there and shrink it down to a much more manageable list of vendors to evaluate,” he said. “And from the vendor perspective, it allows vendors who maybe never would have been on the radar of these searchers to actually show up in results, allowing them to get discovered.”
Vendors that list their products and services will be monitored to ensure that those offers are legitimate, Leabig said, taking into consideration feedback from users who may be able to tell them if a company falsely indicates that they offer something that they do not.