Denver-based ARMCO has been helping leading financial institutions nationwide automate and understand quality control in their lending processes for more than two decades.
The Colorado company has now refined its experience into the ACES Consumer platform, an enterprise quality control solution that addresses opportunity for peak performance in auditing and optimizing consumer and mortgage lending and account opening.
The concept begins with ensuring compliance and then extends through the account opening and lending processes to enhance workflow, communication of issues, and visibility for the executives responsible for all this execution.
Here, ARMCO CEO Trevor Gauthier describes his company’s ACES Consumer platform.
Please describe your new software platform.
Trevor Gauthier: ARMCO has been a leader in mortgage quality control technology for more than 20 years. Now, ACES Consumer offers our ACES platform to help credit unions better manage risk in consumer originations.
ACES Consumer helps streamline the audit process and improve compliance across all consumer lending channels, account opening, and branch audits. The system takes data in from the loan origination system and automates a workflow for reviewing and analyzingindirect, direct, credit card, unsecured, and HELOC loans.
Our compliance team has created a set of questionnaires for consumer lending and account opening that will help credit unions identify and review loans to stay in compliance with today’s rapidly changing regulatory environment. When defects areidentified, ACES communicates the defects to the business line, through its web-based portal, to help the organization mitigate risk and improve quality.
ACES Consumer is the underlying safety net that helps ensure clean originations, which improves investor confidence and downstream liquidity. ACES Consumer provides executives single-platform, powerful insight in defect trending and a holistic view acrosstheir enterprise of their quality in consumer lending and mortgage lending.
What challenges and opportunities does it address?
TG: Auto lending, especially indirect, comprises the majority of consumer lending at today’s credit unions. With indirect, dealerships handle the entire loan process and credit unions place a lot of trust in the auto dealers’hands to collect the right documents, follow state and federal requirements, and get everything signed the proper way.
ACES Consumer creates a safety net that imports the loan data and applies the necessary questions and policy and procedure checks against those loans to ensure things were done correctly. This creates better quality portfolios and helps prevent lossesdue to fraud, delinquencies, and buybacks.
It’s important to have a strong quality control safety net on the back end of your loan process, and ACES Consumer automates that entire process from the beginning to that crucial end point.
How does it increase member value?
TG: Members own their credit unions, and I would want to know my credit union originates loans and accounts in accordance with its own guidelines and in line with state and federal requirements.
I would also want to be assured that they have a process in place to identify any discrepancies. ACES Consumer is an enterprise-wide quality control platform that provides a holistic view on how a lender is processing loans, opening accounts, and evenhandling consumer calls through its call centers.
What we see with many credit unions are hybrid uses of an internally built Excel spreadsheet and/or homegrown platform being utilized for a quality control system of record. They have inherent shortcomings, such as the limited ability to provide trendinginformation, inadequate governance to keep up with changing regulations, and an inability to identify hotspots.
In most cases, these homegrown QC systems were simply not built to operate as a secure system of record. This is where ACES Consumer steps in, providing credit union leaders with visibility into where and how errors and defects are occurring.
ACES Consumer not only mitigates current issues but through corrective action planning ensure they do not become recurring issues.
The platform also provides a secure web-based environment with assigned access rights based on user roles. Security is always a key risk, and even more so with the recent changes we see from our credit union partners moving many of their quality controlfunctions to a remote workforce in response to the COVID-19 social distancing mandates.
What differentiates ACES Consumer from competitors?
TG: ACES Consumer is really the only enterprise-wide quality control platform on the market that is a pure software solution and works in consumer lending, consumer account opening, and mortgage lending.
We built the company by partnering with many of the largest financial institutions in the United States, developing a best-in-class, robust, and proven platform that supports most all quality initiatives within an organization.
ACES Consumer is also highly configurable and enables credit unions to integrate their unique policies and procedures into the software. This configurability allows a credit union to utilize the pieces of their workflow alongside our compliant intelligentquestionnaires, thus delivering the best of both worlds compliance and customization.
Tell us more about ARMCO
TG: ARMCO is the leading provider of loan quality enterprise software, services, data, and analytics for financial institutions and independent mortgage lenders. Our flagship product,ACES Audit Technology, has set the bar for user definability in its category and is used at virtually every point in the mortgage lifecycle, as well as for awide range of risk-prone business operations across the consumer lending spectrum.
More than half of the top 25 mortgage lenders and 33% of the top 150 lenders and servicers combined choose ARMCO. ARMCO’s consultative approach to customer relationships leverages 25 years of risk intel, ensuring that its clients are using the mosteffective risk mitigation strategies and the fastest, most reliable, most efficient means for preventing risk-related loss.
ARMCO also distributes the ARMCO Mortgage QC Industry Trends Report, a free quarterly analysis of industry-wide mortgage loan quality. For more information, contact our QC experts atinfo@armco.us or 800.858.1598.