Fidelity Leverages Transaction Management Skills.(Brief Article)

Increasingly, firms that provide title related services are branching out to perform other real estate related functions on both the loan origination and servicing sides of the business.

Executives at Fidelity National Financial say the expertise they developed in the title business can be leveraged to provide other types of transaction management services.

On the servicing side of the mortgage business, Fidelity National Financial provides a variety of portfolio management and default related services to lenders.

Ernie Smith, an executive vice president at Fidelity, said lenders have different philosophies about what functions they should outsource and what should be done internally, but in general lenders are most likely to outsource work that is paper intensive and subject to regulatory compliance.

"For every day you make a mistake or forget to do something, its costing you some of your profit," he noted.

A specialist like Fidelity can take advantage of scale to perform functions efficiently and stay on top of compliance changes at the federal, state and local levels, he said.

By running a title company, Fidelity has developed expertise in managing employees in a cyclical business that requires expertise managing tedious paperwork.