RoundPoint Financial Group

RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation (“RoundPoint”) specializes in the servicing of residential mortgages. With its servicing portfolio growing, RoundPoint needed a new way to handle large volumes of loan documents. It turned to a KnowledgeLake solution that combines rapid scanning of loan documents, precise indexing, search-and-find capabilities, and easy custom integration on Microsoft SharePoint.

RoundPoint provides a full array of servicing support for investors, including helping economically distressed customers stay in their homes when they have fallen behind in their mortgage payments.

A dramatic increase in refinance requests and stricter regulations resulting from the national real estate crisis has put tremendous pressures on mortgage companies. “Our business has expanded rapidly due in part to handling troubled mortgages,” says Brian Crumly, Vice President of Operations for RoundPoint. ”There is the need to more carefully manage all the documents associated with a loan in addition to meeting the increase in processing requirements.”

These challenges created a growing problem—the time and human resources needed to manage loans, with a typical loan package consisting of up to 60 distinct documents containing 300 pages or more. “We were scanning documents to Adobe PDF files and using a file folder method to organize the documents,” says Crumly. “But loading files was becoming more time-consuming and didn’t allow for much indexing quality control. And there was no way to efficiently keep track of missing loan documents, which could lead to a repurchase.”

RoundPoint used Microsoft SharePoint technologies for various business processes, but there was no easy way for the company to integrate its loan content management processes with SharePoint to make documents easier to find.

RoundPoint decided to work with KnowledgeLake, which provides enterprise content management solutions that integrate with SharePoint, to create an efficient and scalable system for handling its loan documentation.

RoundPoint deployed KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint and components of the KnowledgeLake Capture Suite. These include KnowledgeLake Capture, which is used for scanning and capturing documents and storing them as TIFF or PDF files in SharePoint, and KnowledgeLake Imaging, which is used to search for the documents using meta-data and then viewing the documents within SharePoint. Scanning is performed on Fujitsu 5900 series hardware capable of scanning up to 112 pages a minute.

As part of the solution, RoundPoint uses electronic forms created with Microsoft InfoPath. When a trailing documents specialist is assigned a new loan, he creates a new InfoPath form and then enters the loan number. Using document information in the KnowledgeLake repository and a Microsoft SQL Server database, the InfoPath form is populated with documentation requirements, due dates, and other information. The InfoPath form automatically tracks information related to that loan and identifies documents that are missing based on the particular type of loan being processed. InfoPath forms can also be sorted so that any loans with missing documents are grouped together, making it easier to identify loans that need attention.

The company also uses KnowledgeLake Connect, a desktop application that lets RoundPoint users save electronic documents to various SharePoint document libraries. This allows employees to save documents, including e-mails and other documents related to key internal processes, to the SharePoint Server system from applications such as Microsoft Outlook or their desktop.

The company integrated its SharePoint imaging repository with a custom application called Servicing Best Execution (SBX), which is used by servicing personnel and investors.

The KnowledgeLake solution combined with SharePoint helps RoundPoint improve its business processes at a critical juncture in the company’s growth. It provides a highly scalable system for efficiently handling large numbers of documents. RoundPoint employees can manage vital loan documents faster and more efficiently.

“The KnowledgeLake solution makes it much easier to load and access documents on SharePoint and SBX, our custom servicing platform,” says Crumly. “That helps us serve our customers and investors faster and more efficiently. KnowledgeLake gives us a competitive edge and puts us in a better position to handle future business growth.”

Provides a Highly Scalable System
The technology has dramatically enhanced the ability of RoundPoint to handle increased volumes of loan documents. “The KnowledgeLake solution has increased the overall capacity of our system to receive and effectively distribute documents by about 375 percent,” says Crumly. “We can now scan and store up to 15,000 documents a week as opposed to 3,500 a week in the past. We’ve also been able to index and load over 375,000 electronic documents in a week. In the past, it would have taken us weeks or months.”

Increases Efficiencies for Finding, Managing Documents
The indexing provided by the KnowledgeLake products and the management capabilities provided in InfoPath forms is a powerful combination that helps mortgage processors stay on top of their work. “The combination of technologies helps streamline organization and management of our loan documents,” says Crumly. “For example, instead of taking several minutes to find a specific document within a 350-page loan application, an employee can retrieve that document in a matter of seconds. Additionally, we are able to store the documents individually as well as provide a single package containing all these documents, if warranted by the investor’s requirements—all without rescanning.”

Eases Integration of Information
RoundPoint can easily integrate its SharePoint document repository with SBX, its strategic servicing platform. SBX is used by servicing personnel such as loss mitigation specialists, call center representatives, and property evaluation analysts. “This integration is a powerful feature for our SBX community,” says Crumly. “It helps them easily determine if key documents are available or missing.”