Hey Boomer, Tell Us About Loan Quality Audits on a Local Area Network

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Remember the days of Local Area Networks (LANs) when computer systems were linked through hardwired telecommunication within a single building or one nearby? Those were novel times back then. Remember loan quality control in those days? As a Boomer, I do and it’s the topic of our second installment of our “Hey Boomer” blog series.

Before LAN usage, which dramatically increased productivity for QC, auditors sat at their own DOS terminals comparing paper loan documents to manual checklists of GSE regulations built by the lender in Lotus 123 (a primitive version of what we now know spreadsheets to be).  There was no sharing of information between auditors.  Without basic reporting and trending capabilities, at the end of the month lenders would compile the results manually from each review, write a summary and ship the entire printed package into regulators.

When LANs and Microsoft Excel hit the mainstream, audit productivity jumped. Initially, spreadsheets got more sophisticated with customized dropdowns available for auditors to select specific answers for their review while still comparing information from paper documents.  But because emerging QC software companies soon began writing those audit checklists into databases versus static spreadsheets, information could now be shared and processed across the company network (still hardwired, requiring installation on each computer using the application) using a single database store of information.  As such, reporting got a little better and could be more easily compiled and distributed to the various areas of responsibility.  

This is a far cry from today’s SaaS-based (Software as a Service) loan quality control systems that offer greater accessibility, efficiency, high availability and accurate reporting by way of:

Suffice it to say, now with the cloud and today’s technology, lenders don’t need entire storage rooms of post close audit files or to ship the original paper loan files (no time to print!) out to their QC vendor for an audit.  Therefore, the risk of  having the van with all those loan files stolen right outside a convenience store is completely removed! – TRUE STORY!

Check out our first “Hey Boomer” blog here.

About the Author

David O'Malley

David J. O’Malley is a recognized expert in quality control technology and services and holds the position of Director of Quality Solutions for LoanLogics. In his role, he helps guide the company’s quality control product roadmap and works closely with mortgage lenders to apply automated data validation prior to loan review and best practice audit workflows to their quality management procedures. With over 25 years in the financial services industry, his experience includes the establishment of two quality assurance outsourcing operations and co-founding a company that produced one of the first commercially sold quality assurance systems in the country.