Logicalis

Logicalis helps Marix Servicing get a jump on competition with an innovative Portfolio Management Reporting Solution.

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Marix Servicing LLC of Phoenix, AZ, was founded by a team of leading loan service executives in response to distress in the sub-prime mortgage market. A rising tide of delinquencies and $700 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgage loans scheduled to re-price in 2008 were creating a strong demand for loan servicing with an emphasis on loss mitigation for the investors who held the loans.

Innovative technology was one of the key differentiators the founders of Marix wanted to distinguish their company from other loan servicing organizations rushing into this market. Marix planned to provide investors with a comprehensive Portfolio Management Reporting Solution that would show the status of all loans managed by Marix, and allow investors to create custom reports within a secure portal investors could access from any Internet-connected computer.

Before Marix could present all the loan data to investors, it needed to develop an application that could extract that data from the very diverse collection of databases and other applications where it was stored.

As Chief Technology Officer for Marix, Glen Banta developed the solution that would realize this key piece of the Marix vision. Glen looked for talented help from several third-party technology firms in the Phoenix area. A rigorous selection process convinced him that Logicalis was the right company to have on his team.

Management and Communications
“Their experience came through,” Banta says. “They did an excellent job questioning me to find out what was needed and demonstrated their skills for completing a task of this nature. Technology is technology. What it really comes down to is the ability to manage and communicate.”

“Once Logicalis was on board,” Banta says, “we had a very aggressive timeline to complete the company’s vision. There was a lot to do in very little time.”

“Some companies have subject matter experts and business analysts who put together requirements on reporting for an existing reporting platform, so you know more exactly what needs to be created,” Banta says. “In my situation, I didn’t have those experts or those systems. We had to build a brand-new software reporting application using a standard commercial software development lifecycle process.”

Logicalis wasted no time. Barely 120 days after their selection, they had identified the business requirements, designed, developed, tested, and implemented a reporting solution that extracted data from a variety of sources, and consolidated everything into a full-featured relational data warehouse that serves as the backbone for the Portfolio Management Reporting Solution.

With Logicalis building the foundational data and reporting infrastructure, Marix IT staff was able to work concurrently to develop “Investor Central,” a full-featured portal that provides reports, dashboards, and loan-level detail reporting, as well as an ad-hoc tool that allows investors to independently research and create their own custom reports. The reporting solution is accessible from the Marix corporate website at http://www.marixservicing.com/.

Systems Analysis
One of the challenges that had to be overcome along the way was extracting just the right information from the core System of Record, a mainframe system that contained several thousand data elements used in the mortgage servicing process.

“It’s easy if you just need everything,” Banta quips, “but we really only needed a few thousand data elements. We had to determine which data elements were required to provide the necessary robust reporting desired. There was some very heavy systems analysis involved,” he notes.

There were also a lot of late nights and weekends. Banta says Logicalis Managing Director Blair Kenney expected to be involved just long enough to get the project started but ended up seeing it all the way through to the end.

“Logicalis provided a quote, and they stayed committed to it,” Banta adds. “They spent the extra time required to complete the complex tasks required to get the job done. That says a lot about the kind of company they are.”

The end result is everything Banta expected, and significantly, more than any of Marix’s competitors are able to offer investors.

“A lot of competitors have separate reporting databases,” Banta adds. “Their staff sees one set of data and the investors typically see another set, and not infrequently, the two data sets are hard to match up or compare for accuracy, adding delays to investor’s requests and needs. The beauty of our system is that it’s all one system with two portals: Marix Central for internal users and Investor Central for investors. But it’s all the same core data from the same core system, which prevents discrepancies and errors in the reporting.”

“The response from investors has been excellent,” Banta says. “They love it. They can conduct their own ad-hoc queries. They can click through loan-level detail and pull their own reports. No one else offers this complete level of flexibility.”