Astera's Centerprise Data Integrator automates portfolio acquisition for a major mortgage lender

Executive Summary

This case study discusses the deployment of Centerprise Data Integrator to streamline servicing acquisition workflow at a large mortgage servicer in the United States.

Using the point–and–click interface of Centerprise Data Integrator, business groups are able to quickly validate, transform, and profile incoming data files in myriad different formats. Additionally, Centerprise Framework APIs are used to integrate the acquisition workflow with upstream systems.

Overall, the project met and surpassed all of its goals including major productivity increases, considerably shorter lead time to integrate new business partners, and improved data quality.

Introduction

Data transformation is increasingly moving away from an IT task to a business function. It is now common for business users to work with incoming data that must be transformed and imported into their system for onward processing. Examples of such scenarios abound in many industries including financial services, communications, healthcare, energy and utilities, government, and manufacturing. In many instances, data is received from business partners and internal groups in various file types and layouts. These formats constantly change–often without any prior notice. Frequently, data does not conform to predefined and agreed upon layouts, adding to the complexity and delays in validating and processing.

This was one of the challenges faced by the customer, a large mortgage lender. The company's servicing acquisition group is responsible for the entire workflow related to acquiring servicing rights from originating lenders, aggregators, and other business partners. This workflow includes bidding, pricing, conducting due diligence, and boarding loans to servicing management systems.

Given the volume of servicing rights being acquired, the group receives a large number of data files in many different formats including flat files, Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, from numerous business partners. In most of these cases, the data format and layout are unique to the individual business partner, and need to be converted to match the company's internal standards. In the past, each layout transformation was hand–coded in Access databases or Excel spreadsheets. This slowed addition of new data formats, and affected the customer's ability to quickly integrate new business partners. In addition, mapping logic was scattered in a number of Access databases and the difficulties of tracking these databases were posing several risks related to security, regulatory compliance and customer privacy.

Astera worked closely with the customer to design a solution using Centerprise Data Integrator to provide interactive data transformation and cleansing functionality that business group could use without day–to–day involvement of IT resources. The solution also used Centerprise Integration Framework APIs for integration with upstream systems, such as third–party servicing management applications.

Challenges

The customer's servicing acquisition group is responsible for managing the entire workflow of the acquisition process, covering the steps from initial evaluation, bidding, and pricing to data cleansing, due diligence and transmission to servicing management applications.

With large volumes of data entering the servicing acquisition workflow, the key challenges facing the group were:

• Data arrived in different file formats and structures from a multitude of business partners;
• When data files did not conform to predefined layout–as was often the case–programming changes were needed to transform these data files, slowing down the process considerably;
• Frequently, data came from multiple sources throughout the process life cycle and needed to be consolidated and reconciled;
• Data transformation, done in Access databases, caused significant development time to integrate new data formats;
• Long lead times in integrating new data resulted in long lead times in integrating new business partners;
• Large number of Access databases and programs were difficult to track and posed risks related to regulatory compliance and customer data privacy;
• Validation rules were scattered in many different systems making it difficult to consistently enforce these rules.

Objectives and Requirements

Based on the above challenges, Astera worked with the customer's business and technology management to develop key objectives for the solution. Salient objectives included:

• Empowering business users to manage the data transformation process without day–to–day involvement of IT resources;
• Quickly integrating new business partners and achieving drastic reduction in time and effort in defining new maps;
• Providing functionality to adapt to common file format anomalies such as extra fields, missing headers, out of sequence fields, etc.;
• Eliminating the large number of Access databases, programs, and spreadsheets and centralizing all transformation and validation rules in a single repository;
• Providing tools to quickly modify the transformation and validation rules to adjust to incoming data files and internal business policy changes;
• Achieving major productivity gains for the servicing acquisition department.

Solution – Centerprise Data Integrator

Centerprise Data Integrator is a data transformation tool that enables users to manage data transformation, conversion, profiling, and exports. All of the product features are designed to be usable by business users and do not require knowledge of programming or query languages.

In addition, Centerprise's point–and–click query builder was used to define data exports to a number of internal systems and external parties. Due to the easy–to–use query builder interface, business users could quickly create and execute queries without having to write extensive SQL statements.

Data quality improvements were achieved using a combination of Centerprise data validation rules and profiling reports. Data profile XML was used to create deficiency workflow tasks for upstream systems that worked with business partners to correct any data issues. Additionally, the validation rules that were once dispersed in various databases were now combined and stored in Centerprise's centralized repository.

Finally, integration with upstream servicing management systems was accomplished using Centerprise Integration Framework–a suite of APIs based on Microsoft.net platform.

Results

The project was completed on time and within budget, and met or exceeded all the stated project goals including rapid integration of new business partners, major productivity increases for servicing acquisition group, centralized repository of transformation and validation rules, and elimination of Access databases and programs.

Future phases will incorporate new versions of Centerprise Data Integrator to achieve a tighter integration with other systems, pushing data quality management to the front of the process where business partners can validate data before transferring it. Astera is working with the customer to explore leveraging Centerprise's data transformation, validation, and profiling capability to other business areas such as asset acquisition and data integration.