Bank of America Acquires Mortgage Platform Also Used By Washington Mutual

In late January, Bank of America acquired Framework, a Tarrytown, N.Y.-based software vendor it has used since 2000. Now, the management at Framework, which remains virtually unchanged as a result of the change in ownership, plans to take the show on the road.

Washington Mutual also became a Framework customer in 2000. "Bank of America and Washington Mutual have worked with us very closely to convert all their mortgage business onto this system of record," said Dan McClure, CEO and co-founder of Framework. "We thought it was very important to take a year or two and get those two lenders into production before we really went out and signed up any more."

McClure compares his company's mortgage platform, Lendware, to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as SAP and Baan, in that both are designed for customization using standard objects. Built using ANSI-standard SQL (Structured Query Language), Lendware operates on any major database platform, including DB2, Sybase and SQL Server. However, both Bank of America and Washington Mutual use Oracle databases for their mortgage applications, hosted in-house.

Lendware includes a relatively simple scripting language for accessing its toolbox of standard processes and functions. "You can access all of our objects, all of our data, and essentially write these automations which can do the lion's share of the menial tasks that a human would have done in the past," said McClure.

Applications for the scripting language include automatically sending high-value loans to a risk manager, skills-based routing of incoming calls to the appropriate sales agent, and finding the best way to share the work in a large organization. "We offer tools to help a lender load-balance the work across teams and across sites, and actually build rules to do that automatically," said McClure. "Not only are we technologically scalable, but we're operationally scalable."

Lendware also includes a vendor management component that connects to settlement service providers, either directly or through hubs operated by RealEC Technologies, a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Solutions, Santa Barbara, Calif., or RealTrans, operated by Ocwen Financial Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla.

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