Europe Searches for Unity.(interview with Toni Moss, EuroCatalyst)(Brief Article)

Toni Moss said that when she was director of international business development for Stater BV in the Netherlands, the challenges she faced in helping the company introduce third-party servicing to Europe included not only explaining a concept the market was unfamiliar with, but finding a cohesive European mortgage community to bring it to.

Ms. Moss told Mortgage Servicing News that it is the latter issue that she now is attempting to address in her new position as founding partner at EuroCatalyst BV in the Netherlands. Described as a "market positioning company," EuroCatalyst has several goals that Ms. Moss refers to as "the five Cs": to aggregate content related to European mortgage lending, provide a context for it (globalization), facilitate communication between countries and outside players, build a "pan-European" mortgage lending community and accelerate convergence.

The evolution of Europe's third-party servicing market, where both European companies like Stater (now owned by ABN AMRO) and a handful of U.S. companies are trying to stake their claim, is among the reasons Ms. Moss believes that EuroCatalyst's efforts are timely and likely to prove valuable to the mortgage industry.

Among the reasons that U.S. market participants might see value in these efforts is that, in addition to third-party servicing, U.S. mortgage market models that are being implemented in Europe include securitization, mortgage insurance and conduit lending, Ms. Moss said.

Ms. Moss said that lack of community and information sharing among Europe's mortgage market participants has been a roadblock to those involved in these efforts, as well cross-border efforts within Europe as it has moved to a common currency. She depicts Europe as not being wholly lacking in such information resources so much as needing someone neutral to connect the dots, as it were, and put them in perspective.

Ms. Moss, for example, gives the European Mortgage Federation in Brussels a lot of credit for being a valuable source of information. But she said the federation doesn't replace the need for a broader view of the market that could be obtained from a more neutral source of information drawn from the viewpoints of a variety of market participants.

To address the latter need, EuroCatalyst is holding a conference this fall in Madrid, Ms. Moss said. Although the event is European oriented, many of its original sponsors are U.S. companies such as GE Mortgage Insurance, EDS, Standard & Poor's, Fitch Ratings, PMI and Tower Technology. Having such information can help avoid market participants avoid what might otherwise be costly strategic mistakes.