a la mode inc. has announced that its Mercury Network cloud-based appraisal vendor management platform has reached its first major volume target of 10,000 transactions a day sustained over a full month. a la mode's Mercury Network allows lenders and appraisal management companies (AMCs) to manage their entire appraisal workflow while being compliant with all appraisal independence standards and banking security regulations. Mercury combines a cloud-based SaaS core with a robust appraiser desktop plugin architecture that automates the appraiser's data flow to and from clients.
"Getting to a consistent level of 10,000 transactions a day would be an achievement under any circumstances, but doing it in such a slow overall mortgage market and during one of the worst seasonal periods is a reflection of the strength of the Mercury brand and the superiority of our technology platform," said Dave Biggers, a la mode's founder and chairman. "I'm very proud of the team here for creating such a high-growth product."
Mercury's permission-based desktop software plug-ins work with appraisal files from a la mode's WinTOTAL software, as well as the offerings from other software vendors, making it a one-stop shop for automating appraisal workflow. The plug-ins not only deliver order data and manage status updates and quality control rules, but also supply the appraiser's original data file back to the client as "first-generation XML," eliminating the common alternative of error-prone OCR extraction. Data is returned in both TOTAL XML and MISMO XML format along with the original appraiser-signed desktop PDF file.
Providing MISMO XML straight from the appraiser allows lenders and AMCs to fully comply with Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA's) newly mandated Uniform Mortgage Data Program (UMDP), and to submit appraisal reports to the UMDP's "front-end," called the Uniform Collateral Data Portal (UCDP), without fear of rejection due to OCR or data entry errors.
For more information, visit www.mercuryvmp.com.
