The Mortgage Counselor

The Mortgage Counselor

Mitchel H. Kider is the Chairman and Managing Partner of Weiner Brodsky Kider PC, a national law firm specializing in the representation of financial institutions, residential homebuilders, and real estate settlement service providers.

Technology Marches Forward

This month’s issue of MORTGAGE BANKER Magazine focuses on the technology that is enabling our industry to operate during the coronavirus crisis. Looking back more than six months to when this new reality began, I think we all had a sense of two things: that technology would be crucially important to enabling us to continue working and serving the public; and that COVID-19 would accelerate existing trends toward increased use of technology and the convenience for consumers that it promises.

Both of those things have come to pass. Despite the challenges that any such shift brings, technology has in fact enabled our industry and the service providers who support it to keep working, even when health conditions and/or school closures have kept many of us at home. Increasingly consumers are not only becoming used to conducting more transactions online, but also to expecting that convenience.

The initial IT challenges focused on issues like capacity and reliability as well as information security. Regulators quickly moved out of necessity to permit (at least temporarily) the types of remote work and online transactions that frankly should have been permitted all along. It is my expectation that in various jurisdictions those regulatory changes will either be extended or else re-introduced before too long because of industry and consumer demand.

From a compliance perspective, these new technologies, and also the increased reliance on these technologies, raise significant challenges that companies need to focus on, but which I am confident they can meet. Less face-to-face interaction will require changes in compliance monitoring of employees working remotely. Companies will need to find solutions for things like branch offices that compliance officers may not be able to visit personally. And fraud detection and prevention become more challenging. All of this takes place at a time of record production volume, which both poses its own challenges, but also provides the resources for companies to invest in addressing all of these issues.

Companies with a robust compliance management system (CMS) will already be identifying these issues through the natural functioning of their CMS. Companies whose compliance is still limited to checklists of dos and don’ts will need to pay more attention to the risk assessment aspect of compliance. As the acute crisis fades, we expect regulators to be less forgiving in their supervision and enforcement with respect to the challenges posed by remote work and serving consumers at a distance. Ultimately, we have the tools to address all of these challenges and to keep our industry moving forward in these unprecedented times. MBM