Offering a new method to aide residential mortgage lenders in preparing for electronic examinations (e-Exams), ComplianceEase announced that it will offer a complementary Pre-Exam Portal “sandbox” beginning in January, in cooperation with the Multistate Mortgage Committee (MMC).
ComplianceEase referred to the Pre-Exam Portal as a “public service available to any lender” in a press release. It affords lenders the opportunity to test the accuracy of data they are submitting to regulators and previewing audit results.
“The Pre-Exam Portal is an important first step in the process of getting lenders comfortable with e-Exams, and we’re pleased to be able to offer it as a public service to the industry,” ComplianceEase Executive Chairman John Vong said in the release. “This is the first of a series of initiatives that we will be announcing to further improve lenders’ confidence and experience during the e-Exam process.”
Upon enrollment in the portal, lenders can submit as many as 100 Lending Examination Format (LEF) files for validation. The portal tests the files for proper formatting and evaluates them against federal, state and local consumer protection compliance requirements.
The Pre-Exam Portal provides lenders with complete ComplianceAnalyzer audit reports, similar to those the examiner in charge (EIC) receives after conducting an exam.
By receiving the same EIC reports as examiners, lenders can identify data integrity, mapping and translation issues and correct them before an examiner does. They also can view compliance findings before submitting the LEF files for the “live” e-Exam through RegulatorConnect, the regulators’ e-Exam platform.
The preparation process offered by the portal is designed to provide lenders transparency as they are being examined and to enable them to verify that their LEF files accurately represent the loan data held in their system of record. Neither the LEF data submitted to the Pre-Exam Portal, nor the resulting Pre-Exam audit reports, are accessible to regulators.
ComplianceEase’s portal release came shortly after the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and American Association of Residential Mortgage Regulators (AARMR) jointly called for the industry to integrate state-development standards with mortgage loan origination systems (LOS) to accelerate the e-Exam process in October. At that time, Jeremy Windham, vice chair of Multistate Mortgage Committee at CSBS and AARMR, said, “Developing processes for clean data transfers will streamline the e-Exam process mandated by the MMC, benefitting industry and regulators alike,” the release notes.