Mortgage scoring systems that do more than just measure a person's  creditworthiness are fast becoming a banking industry requirement. And PMI   Mortgage Insurance Co. (PMI) has carved out a significant portion of the   market for such systems with its pmiAURA Score, which now scores about 20   percent of the first lien mortgages in the United States.       
Its appeal continues to grow. Recently, two industry leaders agreed to  use the pmiAURA Score system for loan purchase and pricing decisions.   General Motors Corp.'s residential funding subsidiary, GMAC-RFC, a leader   in the mortgage-backed securities and housing finance industries, will   integrate its own automated underwriting system with DecisionWise, the   Windows-based platform for pmiAURA. And First Union Capital Markets Group   now is using pmiAURA in its loan purchase program.           
  
Although pmiAURA incorporates personal creditworthiness in its overall  score, it is just a portion of a score. Other factors in the scoring   calculation include mortgage payment history, regional housing market   statistics and other predictors of the future performance of a mortgage.     
"It's predictiveness is more in line with a mortgage than just a  person's credit history," says Dan Bettenberg, managing director of GMAC-   RFC. He also says the pmiAURA system has broader data capacity than other   scoring systems and is cheaper than the competing Freddie Mac and Fannie   Mae systems, which charge a per loan fee. "When you license pmiAURA, you   pay one upfront fee and annual maintenance fees, but no per loan fee," he   explains.           
  
The pmiAURA score uses a computerized statistical model that calculates  information pulled from a database that draws on the experience of more   than 1.5 million loans dating back to 1981. The score thus reflects the   experience of economic cycles, including recent regional recessions. "We   elected to use pmiAURA because we get product from many disparate sources,   from relatively small mortgage bankers to large mortgage bankers who sell   us large quantities of loans on a flow basis," says Trez Moore, managing   director of whole loan trading at Charlotte-based First Union Capital. "We   needed a tool that could provide uniform assessment of loan quality plus   accommodate a great variety of different loan programs."                 
-peterson tfn.com