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Last week LoanLogics’ director of data governance, Mike Bixby, was named a 2021 MISMO Outstanding Contributor. The Outstanding Contributor award is presented from the MISMO staff to the person who stood out over the course of the past year with their contribution to the organization as a whole.
Mike has been active with MISMO for more than two decades and has held the position of chair of its Information Management Workgroup (IM) for the past 6 years. “While always a significant MISMO contributor, Mike’s dedication to MISMO and leadership of the IM team in 2021 has been particularly remarkable,” as described by director of MISMO, Kelly Bradshaw, earning him this year’s award.
As with prior industry award winners from LoanLogics, we wanted to profile Mike and his dedication to the industry in an interactive Q&A with him. Before we dive into that, below we share a few anecdotes from his MISMO colleagues following his recent win.
“It has been a true honor to work with you all these years. Your contributions to MISMO and the mortgage industry have been invaluable.”
“Thank you for volunteering your time as a grounded and down-to-earth business partner.”
“Your leadership and expertise have truly been an asset to the MISMO community and an inspiration to us all.”
“Your contributions to MISMO are immeasurable and your ability and willingness to always explain and help “those of us” understand certain principals is a quality few people possess.”
And now onto our Q&A with Mike:
How did you feel when you won the MISMO Outstanding Contributor Award for 2021 and does this recognition mean to you?
Awards are nice, but the real credit should be given to the companies, like LoanLogics, who allow their employees to volunteer time towards creating and maintaining standards that make the entire mortgage industry operate more efficiently.
How long have you been a involved with MISMO and in what capacity?
I was involved in the founding of MISMO in 1999 and served on the Residential Governance Committee through 2021 except for a 2-year period when I was on the MISMO Board of Directors. Before MISMO, the MBA had an informal ANSI-X12 working group which created X12 data exchange specifications for the loan application, credit reporting, and mortgage insurance. In 1999 the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) specification was created and the MBA ANSI-X12 working group decided to create standards using XML. And this group became the founders of MISMO. I was also Chair of the MISMO Credit Reporting Workgroup from 2000 through 2010. For the last six years I was Chair of Information Management workgroup, which reviews and approves all changes to the MISMO Reference Model and supporting Implementation Guides, Mapping Guides, Data Dictionaries, Business Glossaries, etc.
In 2022, you’re stepping down from your current position at MISMO, how will you be working with MISMO going forward?
MISMO is developing a new data architecture for the fourth generation of the MISMO Reference Model. Now that I have stepped out of the Information Management Chair position, I will have some time to contribute towards that effort.
Your mortgage experience is vast and you have an impressive tenure with MISMO. What drew you to join LoanLogics in 2020?
In addition to the evolution LoanLogics is on, I took this role because I would be able to utilize my years of data governance experience with the MISMO standards to bring those governance principles into the LoanLogics organization. My role as director of data government is to implement a data alignment strategy across the LoanLogics product offerings. As part of this effort, I am defining a LoanLogics Master Data Dictionary and documenting the associations between those terms and the LoanLogics internal data formats and databases, mortgage industry document formats, as well as external data formats such as MISMO. As a product organization, we’re working at the highest of standards both literally and figuratively.
What do you believe is one of the industry’s greatest successes with respects to data standards in the last 5 years?
For well over a decade, MISMO standards have become commonly accepted for mortgage services such as credit reporting, title, mortgage insurance, closing. In the past five years, the acceptance of electronic Note documents using the MISMO SMART Doc standard has been growing. The new Uniform Loan Application Dataset (ULAD) is continuing the move away from paper-based documents as the primary way of exchanging mortgage data.
Surely your childhood-self did not say, “I’d like to grow up and have a career related to data standards in the mortgage industry.” What did you aspire to be when you were young?
At MISMO meetings we often joke that as a child no one aspires to work in the mortgage industry. When I was young, I wanted to be an international airline pilot. I was inspired by the stories of the early Pan Am Clipper ships flying across the Pacific. But when I was in my 20s you had to have 20-20 vision uncorrected, so that left me out. In college I was aerospace engineering major and worked for Pan Am as an engineering intern in fuel systems and hydraulics during the introduction of the Boeing 747 – a fascinating and fun time.
After graduation with a B.S. degree, I followed a circuitous route of employment over several decades that included building oceanographic scientific instruments, programming microprocessors, and custom computer programming. That led an opportunity to co-found a software company that created and marketed mortgage credit reporting software and mortgage quality auditing software. After a few decades more of data integration and data standards consulting, I joined LoanLogics.
