Licensing new mortgage origination software represents the midpoint of a multiyear project at Charter One Financial Inc. to update its home-lending system.
After beginning a review in mid-2002, the Cleveland company signed a contract at the end of 2003 to license the UniFi Pro Mortgage eX loan origination software from Fiserv Lending Solutions.
It plans to spend 2004 preparing the new system for use in Charter One Mortgage Corp., with an eye toward beginning pilot tests of the software in the first quarter of 2005, said John A. Barb, a vice president at Charter One and the manager of its residential lending systems and technology group.
"We wanted a system that would take the [loan] application from the cradle to the grave," Mr. Barb said in an interview Friday.
Charter One Mortgage has lending operations in 15 states, mostly in the East. It has used its existing system since 1994, and its origination volume went from $800 million in 1995 to $12.5 billion last year, Mr. Barb said.
"The system has been a workhorse for us," he said.
It was built around a product called TMO (for The Mortgage Originator) from London Bridge Software Holdings PLC. Other programs are tied in to capture loan applications electronically and to manage the pipeline to the secondary market.
"It's a good system, it's just that that system is outdated," Mr. Barb said. "It would be a new installation for us, whichever way we went."
After doing the review, Charter One had whittled a list of 13 candidate vendors down to three finalists by early 2003. It spent most of last year analyzing the contenders.
"We put just as much emphasis on the vendor that we ultimately would be dealing with" as on the software's capabilities, Mr. Barb said. "We didn't want to jump into something that hasn't been battle-tested."
Charter One signed a contract in late December for the UniFi system, he said. Fiserv Lending Solutions, of Lake Mary, Fla., announced the deal Feb. 25.
