Black Knight this week launched a tool that enables lenders to compare loan estimates and closing disclosures from closed loans to minimize expenses in a higher rate environment.
Dubbed the Black Knight “fee cures suite,” the program combines loan information from the lender’s loan origination system with the firm’s Ernst fee data, as well as analytics from the company’s “actionable intelligence platform,” to minimize mandatory 0% and 10% fee cures.
The mandatory 0% tolerance fees are paid to the creditor, the mortgage broker, or an affiliate of either party. Any origination fees charged to borrowers fall under this category. And the 10% tolerance fee includes recording costs and charges paid to unaffiliated third-party service providers.
“As lenders struggle to maintain profit margins, fee cures are a preventable expense,” said Rich Gagliano, president of origination technologies at Black Knight. “We have seen fee cures average hundreds of dollars per loan and over time, can add up to millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars at the portfolio level.”
Black Knight, which has agreed to be bought by rival ICE Mortgage Technology in a deal valued at $13.1 billion, says its AIP is a framework for analyzing data from multiple data sets across the loan life cycle. The Ernst Fee Service is used by lenders to minimize fee cures by providing recording fees, transfer taxes, property tax, title, settlement, inspection data, and lender and appraisal fees.
Through the combination of the AIP and the Ernst Fee data, lenders can identify and drill down to causes by loan attribute including city, state, country, loan type, loan officer, vendor and number and size of cures, according to Black Knight.
Amid plunging origination volume, originators they are facing significant margin compression this year. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) projects about $2.4 trillion in origination volume in 2022, a 40% decline from the previous year’s $4 trillion. The drop is led by refis, which is expected to tally $730 billion, a 68% decline from $2.3 trillion in 2021.