Cascade Financial Services has implemented Portfolio Underwriter, LoanScorecard’s automated underwriting system (AUS), the companies announced.
The implementation enables Cascade to automate underwriting its portfolio loans and manage exceptions based on valid compensating loan factors, rather than loan officer discretion. It also ensures consistent, transparent credit policy application.
“Having an AUS to provide quick and consistent underwriting decisions on portfolio loan products is a very important part of being able to scale a business. And building an internal system that is intelligent enough to read credit reports and interface with an LOS takes significant time and upfront expense,” Cascade Executive Vice President of Production Gerron Dover said in a release.
“We selected LoanScorecard’s Portfolio Underwriter because it works seamlessly with our LOS, it was relatively quick and inexpensive to get set up, and it is now providing us the efficiency we need to offer our portfolio loan products on a more expanded scale,” Dover added. “It also provides us the ability to quickly revise system parameters as we get more experience with our new loan products, and our lending guidelines evolve over time.”
Portfolio Underwriter delivers a rules-based underwriting decision in seconds, which is documented in an in-depth findings report that includes the program-specific, conditional underwriting criteria used in the data analysis.
“Manual underwriting is time consuming, costly, and puts lenders at risk for Fair Lending violations,” LoanScorecard Executive Director Ben Wu said. “That’s why more and more forward-thinking portfolio lenders, like Cascade, are turning to sophisticated automation. By using Portfolio Underwriter, they’re able to not only automate underwriting for their unique portfolio products, but also reduce errors, improve efficiency, and expand their manufactured housing finance business.”