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Standardizing the Mortgage Industry

Data standardization has been a key area of focus for the GSEs through the Uniform Mortgage Data Program (UMDP) first introduced in 2010. On Tuesday, FHA Senior Policy Analyst in the Division of Housing Mission & Goals Nana Nkrumah released an FHFA [1] Insights Blog into better understanding the program.

“Since its inception, the UMDP has supported improving mortgage industry data standards and enhance accuracy and overall quality of loan data for home mortgage. We will continue to assess the project and its components in order to make improvements over time,” Nkrumah wrote.

As Nkrumah goes on to explain, the UMDP program is split into four main components: Uniform Loan Application Dataset (ULAD), Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD); Uniform Closing Dataset (UCD), and Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset (ULDD). To view descriptions of each component, click here [2].

Updates to UMDP’s components include newly designed ULAD maps that will enhance the Uniform Residential Loan Application starting in July 2019; the UCD allowing information from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Closing Disclosure to be transmitted electronically to the GSEs as of September; and an Update to the ULDD that adds HMDA fields and will be available for use in February 2018.

In a feature article for MReport’s June 2017 issue titled “A Spoonful of . . . Clarity,” Andrew Bon Salle, EVP of Single Family Business at Fannie Mae, goes into depth regarding how the UMPD program has enhanced the mortgage industry along with enhanced data and analytics. “In the early 2000s, mortgage lending went crazy. The industry was living in the moment, with little focus on the future. Then the bubble burst. Once the industry caught its breath, data standards again became a priority. There was renewed interest in loan quality, and the post-crisis regulatory climate tended to drive up costs, fueling a quest for efficiency and willingness to invest in it. The industry could not continue to meet quality requirements and embrace changing consumer expectations without end-to-end digitization of the mortgage life cycle,” Bon Salle said of the events that led to the creation of the program.

To learn more about what Bon Salle says on Fannie Mae’s take of the UCDP program, and the GSEs Day 1 Certainty, click here [3].

To view the full Insights Blog, click here [2].