Canadian Title Insurer Creates Customizable Portal To Aid Lenders, Partners

In the highly competitive world of mortgage services, companies can gain a keen competitive advantage among lenders, other partners, and prospective property buyers simply by making it easier to do business. That’s one of two big reasons why First Canadian Title (FCT), a major provider of real estate title insurance, decided to implement a Web portal based on the latest technology from Microsoft and systems integrator Avanade.

But FCT’s new portal, known as the Integrated Lending Solution, will also cut costs by paring down the amount of time spent on business process transactions, according to Sam Dotson, chief information officer of the Mississauga, Ontario-based firm.

With these two objectives in mind, FCT teamed up with Avanade a little over a year ago to build a systems architecture aimed at greater flexibility, not just for internal users but also for outside constituencies ranging from banks and credit unions to appraisal specialists.

FCT, a pioneer of the concept of title insurance in Canada, will cut time spent on business process transactions through its new Web portal.

FCT provides insurance geared to protecting buyers and lenders from omissions or errors in property titles.

“We already had a Web interface. People could use our system to enter their transactions, from title insurance to the closing of a real estate deal. That’s how most companies in our industry do business these days,” Dotson recalls. “But our earlier site wasn’t that customizable. Often, people had to translate in their minds between our terminology and methodologies and their own.”

At a technical level, FCT’s new portal uses Microsoft’s Web services-based .NET Framework in conjunction with Avanade Connected Architectures for .NET (ACA.NET). The portal also goes hand-in-hand with a new administration tool, produced with ACA.NET and Microsoft’s ASP.NET in the C# development language.

“But although this technology is great in and of itself, its main purpose really is to help the business to succeed,” points out Jeff Zado, senior product manager for developer tools at Microsoft Canada. “End users will see only the results. They won’t even realize that the foundation, walls, and everything else were built on top of .NET.”

Essentially, FCT’s new architecture leverages XML and other SOA services to improve integration with partners’ existing workflow and business rules, adding up to more options for doing business.

“Now, people can format things in a way that makes sense to them. This exponentially changes the functionality we can deliver,” Dotson elaborates.

If a lender or some other partner finds that the portal still doesn’t meet its needs, the new portal administration tool can be used to reconfigure the interface in roughly one day, without the need for custom coding each time around.

“Companies can enter whatever information they want, and upload documents they’ve created into the system. When a mortgage gets created, they can download that document, or print it out. They can also track information at a very detailed level. If they want to see what’s been done on a transaction today, or this month, they can easily find that out,” Dotson says. Not insignificantly, since Canada is a bilingual country, FCT also supplies the interface in both English and French.

On the security side, the portal uses authentication together with role-based permissions, enabling FCT to provide views that are deemed appropriate to specific personnel, such as branch or regional managers at banks and other lending firms.

FCT hasn’t conducted a formal quantitative analysis yet. But based on initial responses from internal and external users, the system streamlining effort seems to be already carrying competitive and cost advantages for FCT and lenders alike, according to the CIO.

“We’re allowing branch and regional managers to be more efficient at performing their jobs,” Dotson says.

Consequently, lending firms can come up with answers for their own customers more quickly, a scenario that can’t help but be a competitive plus in the mortgage financing arena, where many real estate buyers are able to pick and choose among a variety of lenders.

“And we’ve done all of this in a way that enables more of the portal management to be done by business administrators, as opposed to developers,” Dotson contends.

Also with its new portal, FCT is averting the repetition inherent in a two-step process associated with its previous Web interface, in which some companies needed to try to re-enter information on the Web site after their initial submission of data in electronic form.

How did the portal come about? After making a decision to upgrade its system, long-time Windows customer FCT contacted Microsoft Canada to get a short list of integrators with the appropriate skill sets – not to mention an adequate number of developers – to take on the project.

“We realized that technology changes quickly. We didn’t have all of the up-to-date expertise inhouse. We used Microsoft’s recommendations to help find the right integrator, but we also did our own due diligence,” according to Dotson. Ultimately, Avanade got the nod.

Also, at the outset of the project FCT conducted extensive talks with internal and external users. “A lot of companies go ahead in building a system without talking to customers. But that can be a big mistake. We wanted to get a full understanding of the real requirements,” Dotson says.

Some of FCT’s internal users work for firms acquired over the years by FCT. In 2006, for example, FCT acquired a controlling interest in DRN Commerce Inc., a London, Ontario-based company specializing in delivering secure Internet-based debt recovery solutions.

In first announcing the DRN acquisition, FCT emphasized its interest in using DRN’s technology as a foundation for product integration and for the development of a more comprehensive set of services for lenders.

To gain the desired efficiencies as soon as possible, as well as to keep costs down, FCT opted to squeeze initial portal development into a one-year period. As a result, anywhere from 50 to 100 people – mainly from Avanade, but also from FCT – worked on the project at any given time.

The collaborative team included not just hands-on .NET developers, but business analysts and database professionals. Most of the development took place on site at FCT, although some of the less complex work got offshored to facilities in India.

FCT’s development roadmap panned out well, on the whole. “We were able to compress two to three years of development time into a single year,” according to Dotson. Beyond sheer people power, Dotson credits Microsoft’s .NET and Avanade’s ACA.NET technologies as major contributors to rapid development.

“.NET creates a terrific underlying development platform, allowing customers to get new applications out to hundreds of thousands of users quite quickly. Meanwhile, customers can concentrate on what is unique to their businesses. It wouldn’t make sense for most customers to have to rewrite security algorithms, for instance,” concurs Microsoft Canada’s Zado.

As described by Zado, ACA.NET is a “superset of technology for fast tracking the development process.” In FCT’s experience, ACA.NET saved additional time by replacing traditional methods of developing forms and screens in .NET with even faster approaches.

“ACA.NET also helped us to build a lot of component re-use into our system,” Dotson observes.

ACA.NET comprises training, tools support, sample applications, and documentation built into Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET tool set. Now in version 4.0, the technology includes Microsoft’s Enterprise Library tools as a core for lower-level application development. ACA.NET also supports a variety of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) transports – including In-process, ASMX, WSE2, and .NET Remoting, for example – with plans in the works to adopt Microsoft’s Indigo communications infrastructure.

Early in the development cycle for its new portal, FCT also brought in Deloitte & Touche (D&T) as another consultant, to make sure the new system would live up to industry best practices around adhering to regulatory requirements. D&T made a reappearance toward the end of initial development, to carry out a vulnerability assessment.

“Regulatory compliance is becoming more and more important throughout the finance industry. FCT’s architecture provides the logs and other tracing tools necessary for achieving compliance,” according to Zado.

The initial portal launched early this year supports business processes in the fulfillment area. The portal is co-located with Canadian telecommunication provider Telus, using a mirrored infrastructure for business continuity.

“But this is just the first step. Eventually, we plan to integrate business processes for all of our products, all the way from loan origination to recovery,” according to Dotson.

The company has already prototyped a set of tools for closing and appraisal, which have undergone testing with lending customers. “Let’s say a customer comes into a branch office for refinancing. About 80 percent of the time, we can get a valuation from the Canadian Mortgage Acceptance Corp. (CMAC). When that happens, we can drop it into our system, run it through, and apply our insurance to it,” he illustrates.

As a next step, FCT expects to integrate loan origination processes into its new portal architecture. “When a customer wants a loan or mortgage, the information is put into a loan origination system. If we can capture that data early on, we’ll have it readily available for additional servicing once the money gets to the client,” Dotson elaborates.

Dotson heartily looks forward to the future, when the company’s Integrated Loan Solution will be able to handle the entire mortgage servicing process on a truly end-to-end basis. So far, time has posed the largest hurdle to reaching this vision.

“We’d like to be even farther along with all of this than we are already. But there just aren’t enough hours in a 24-hour day,” Dotson quips.

By Jacqueline Emigh

www.firstcanadiantitle.com

www.avanade.com