Accenture Augments Mortgage Offerings With Mortgage Cadence Acquisition

Accenture says the acquisition will help clients cut cycle time and costs while increasing flexibility to comply quickly with new regulations.

Accenture is acquiring loan origination software provider Mortgage Cadence in a move aimed at creating efficiencies and cost reductions in clients’ mortgage operations, according to an Accenture statement released yesterday.

Mortgage Cadence will be integrated into Accenture Credit Services and will be used as a core origination platform to process mortgages for Accenture’s outsourcing clients, the statement said.

Changes in the mortgage market played a major factor in the acquisition, Terry Moore, the global managing director of Accenture Credit Services, said. Low interest rates and the refinancing market they have generated have masked inefficiencies in the way most mortgage services providers do business in recent years, Moore remarked. With refinance opportunities expected to drop in the near future, mortgage originators and servicers that have relied heavily on those opportunities for their business are going to have to change their technology and processes, he reasoned.

“There is a systemic need to deal with technology differently to cut costs and through efficiencies,” he said.

To get an idea of what kind of efficiencies can be created in the mortgage business, Moore pointed out that getting a mortgage is frequently one of the worst buying experiences a customer goes through.

Moore noted that Mortgage Cadence’s technology will help by combining the loan origination software and document management capability as one package to produce highly accurate loans and documentation. The technology also reduces the loan origination cycle by enabling staff to work on multiple steps in the process in parallel rather than working on each step one at a time. Lastly the Mortgage Cadence platform works in a configuration environment rather than a coding environment, Moore said, creating increased speed-to-market and flexibility in making changes to comply with new regulations.

With these capabilities mortgage businesses will be able to do their work faster, cheaper and more accurately, and differentiate themselves with their customer experience, Moore added.

Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio