Inman

Industry sees first eMortgage guide

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, or MISMO for short, has released the first eMortgage Guide for the mortgage industry. The guide aims to educate the industry about eMortgage business, as well as high-level technical aspects of eMortgages and their benefits.

MISMO is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“This guide is intended to be an executive-level guide addressing all aspects of eMortgage implementations — key concepts, benefits and ROI, legal background and industry best practices for the various steps of an eMortgage implementation,” said Igor Derensteyn, vice chair of the eMortgage Workgroup and senior vice president of eMortgage Technologies at Countrywide. “Many of the workgroup members who created this guide are experts and have generously contributed their knowledge to this release.”

The guide provides an overview of the eMortgage landscape as it exists today, including: the benefits of eMortgages, key industry standards and concepts, underlying legal framework and concepts, general guidance for best practices, and sources of additional information to get started.

The mortgage industry is slowly but steadily moving forward on eMortgage development and implementation because the resulting paperless processes promise significant time and money savings for businesses and consumers.

MBA’s board of directors recently endorsed the industry’s adoption of residential and commercial eMortgages. MISMO standards are critical to achieving eMortgage adoption across the industry. During the transition from paper to eMortgages, both individual loans and loan pools may be hybrid, using combinations of paper, imaging, and electronic documents. The new guide provides a reference tool to help you move forward toward a standardized eMortgage environment.

The guide was developed by MISMO’s eMortgage Workgroup, established in January 2001 to develop standards, specifications and guidelines toward fully electronic mortgages that correspond to the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN) and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) legislation enacted by the U.S. government in 1999 and 2000.

MISMO aims to develop, promote and maintain through an open process voluntary electronic commerce standards and best practices for the commercial and residential mortgage industries.

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