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The Mortgage Products Division of Fiserv now packs a powerful suite of solutions for the mortgage banking business. Fiserv executives like Sadu Thinakal have helped orchestrate the company's growth and success.
TOM MATTHEWS, A VICE PRESIDENT AT South Bend, Indiana-based Fiserv Mortgage Products Division, likes to create little pictures when he talks. The more he expounds, the more intricate the diagrams. As Matthews discusses Fiserv's approach to the mortgage business, his slow, Southern drawl notches up in rapidity and the drawings on his yellow pad began to close on top of each another.
The biggest box in Matthews' sketches, which he puts in the middle of the pad, is Data-Link, Fiserv's loan servicing system. Two years ago, Matthews' diagram would have ended there, but the world of mortgage loans is a lot more complicated than that. Mortgages are aggregated and sold to securitizers. Mortgage bankers are then responsible for tracking what is in the securitization pipeline as well as servicing the loans. So to accommodate that complexity in 1998 Fiserv acquired the UniFi Origination and Secondary Marketing system. Thus, Matthews was able add another box to the right of the big box drawn in the middle of his page.
That created somewhat of an imbalance as the space to the left remained unfilled. Finally, this year Matthews was able to create the third box and balance his illustrations. In March, Fiserv acquired RF/Spectrum Decision Science Corporation, Oakland, California, which creates analysis and risk-management software for mortgage bankers. In other words, it is a system that helps companies evaluate mortgage application risk. Matthews' three little boxes illustrate his point that Fiserv can now handle a loan throughout its lifecycle.
"It's true each of our products interfaces with the products of our competitors and clients' in-house systems," says Matthews. "But there is increased operational functionality available to clients when they bundle Fiserv products for their mortgage operations."
Corporate acquisitiveness
It's called putting together the pieces, and Fiserv has been doing it for years. While Fiserv Mortgage Products Group calls South Bend home, its corporate parent can be found outside Milwaukee in the suburban town of Brookfield, Wisconsin. Fiserv's corporate objective is to be the leading technology provider to the financial services industry worldwide-and with more...