Customer Story

Phoenix Offers Premium Mortgage Advisory Services with Cloud-Based Data Analytics Platform

Company Overview

Founded in 1997 and based in Denver, CO, PHOENIX is the premier residential mortgage industry advisor with over 250 customers including banks, credit unions, independent mortgage companies, mortgage servicers, investors, and owners of mortgage loans and mortgage servicing rights(MSR). PHOENIX provides comprehensive advisory, brokerage, valuation, analytics, transaction support services, capital markets consulting, and a broad array of operational risk management and oversight services.

Problem

Collecting and analyzing extensive quantities of data is a challenge for PHOENIX, but also presents similar challenges for clients to produce and service mortgages in an efficient, effective, and compliant fashion. The information they need comes from multiple sources, due to the variety of systems these firms employ.

For example, an MSR owner might employ multiple third-party subservicers to manage its MSR portfolio, compounding the complexity of viewing performance data. It is increasingly difficult to sift through and focus on salient information on a consistent and timely basis to enable informed, smart decisions and to monitor outcomes.

A great deal of highly specialized effort is exhausted gathering the data, understanding what has happened with a particular loan, realizing what it means and then planning a course of action. To help clients accomplish this and to support its own needs, PHOENIX envisioned a solution that would also be a competitive differentiator for its business.

A critical component of our business is our analytics services. We analyze and value assets for clients on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, based upon a multitude of economic and operational factors. Analyzing those factors so our clients can make smart decisions is one of our core value propositions. Also, the data we have is our clients’ data so we are uber-focused on security and access. We do everything possible to prevent non-public information from entering our environment. This high level of control and governance is one of the benefits we could achieve with AWS, Snowflake and Qlik.

Solution

To make that vision come to life, Analytics8 created a cloud-based Performance Management Platform (PMP) using Qlik and Snowflake that automates the reporting process. The client-facing portal uses a SaaS model hosted on AWS, and provides immediate and dynamic mortgage portfolio analytics to replace manually created performance reports that are largely static and untimely.

PHOENIX’s PMP portal is hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is used for the Qlik Sense repository with advantages that include elastic-scaling, push-button redundancy, and automated patching and backups. PMP is delivered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model on monthly subscription.

Future development will use Analytics8’s geospatial mapping engine, QlikMaps, which could help when natural disasters strike and affect mortgaged properties.

Results

PMP enables users to quickly identify opportunities, discover correlations, make fact-based decisions, deploy practical solutions and monitor outcomes. It delivers over 100 standard reports and processes ‘out of the box’, saving countless hours with its instantaneous creation.

“It is saving an extraordinary amount of time in amassing this information. Importantly, it is done in a way that is consistent and pervasive throughout the operation, so you get a standardized approach as opposed to everyone having their own view,” says McCoy.

First User

An early adopter of PMP is TruHome Solutions of Kansas City, which provides a range of private-label mortgage services to credit unions. It initially used the platform for analytics concerning mortgage servicing rights.

“We found that the power of Qlik analytics really allowed us to expand the usage of PMP beyond the specific questions we were asking. It has ultimately provided an analytical platform that can help us ask new questions that we had not thought about already,” says TruHome Solutions CFO, Brad Richardson.

TruHome Solutions SVP of Secondary Marketing, Greg Spurgeon, adds: “What is invaluable is how quickly you can get this thing stood up. What you get is out of the box analytics, so we spend less time building and more time analyzing. Having timely data on a daily basis allows us to track movements and adapt our business, which is invaluable in our ever-changing environment. This was particularly useful during the COVID-19 pandemic. It enabled us to answer questions on mortgage forbearance issues quickly.”

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