Commercial Servicing Platforms of the Future.

Ms. Eshoo is president and CEO of National Tax Search, based in Chicago.

Effective data exchange capabilities are crucial for the efficient management of commercial servicing portfolios. However, despite the tremendous increase in efficiency this would bring to lenders, the majority of servicing platforms do not accommodate tax and insurance data exchange with outside vendors. It's troubling that in this day and age, something as fundamental as human error in rekeying tax and insurance information from one source to another is still such a prevalent problem.

This vendor data is extremely valuable to lenders, as well as highly recommended by the ratings agencies. And yet, far too often, lenders are left to devise a way to transfer that information from vendor systems to their loan management platforms. Such great inroads have been made to enable property data information sharing via initiatives such as MISMO that we wonder why leading servicing platform vendors have yet to enable similar data sharing capabilities associated with other critical information fields.

For example, when dealing with property tax data, there are three primary areas of change that must be accounted for: changes that relate to the loan and asset, jurisdictional changes and changes in the parcel itself. A common method for getting data updates electronically transferred and seamlessly fed into the servicing platform should be available, but in most cases today, it isn't. While there are some individual platform vendors moving in this direction, they are very much the exception to the rule.

Another immensely beneficial factor for lenders would be the ability to enable automatic rolling of disbursement dates. As soon as there is a disbursal of a tax payment, the loan record within the management system should automatically roll to the next property tax payment date, without the manual intervention of the lender's staff. Again, while simple, this is a surprisingly rare feature in the majority of servicing platforms.

The advent of service oriented architectures has made it possible to develop common plug-and-play interfaces to facilitate data exchange with multiple third-party tax, insurance and other vendors that ...