mented correctly.
Michael Whitbeck is the seasoned underwriter
behind the design of Überwriter. He grew up in
the metro Detroit area and served for four years
as a field artillery spotter in the U.S. Army in the
82nd Airborne Division. After serving in the Army,
he returned to Michigan and began working in the
mortgage banking field starting off in sales in 1994
and transitioning to underwriting in 2000. Michael has
personally underwritten hundreds of millions of dollars in conventional loans as well as managing teams
of up to 40 underwriters.
David Stamm is the CTO of Überwriter and focuses on the cloud computing and website portion of
the business. David is a 20-year engineering veteran
working primarily in software development. Prior
to Überwriter, David was the Chief Engineer at a
software company developing safety critical software
solutions for the automotive and defense industries.
According to Michael Whitbeck, their initial goal
was to replace Excel spreadsheets so common in the
industry for income calculations. It seemed like every
company had their own ‘spreadsheet engineer’ who
would issue new versions when a guideline changed.
Certainly, this was not a good use of an underwriter’s
time and developing one central tool that was maintained to the latest guidelines was a better solution.
The vision of Überwriter is to get underwriters back
to focusing on the elements of underwriting that only
a human can do such as fraud and appraisal analysis.
Leveraging automation and providing standardization
to the way income is determined became the fundamental goal of Überwriter.
They have since gone beyond what can be done
in a spreadsheet by leveraging the capability available
in a web-based cloud application adding in warnings,
income plotting, income trends, PDF reports, and
more.
The biggest savings are realized when complex
income scenarios such as multiple self-employed businesses and multiple real estate income sources. These
types of files would take a typical underwriter 45
minutes or more to determine the income, but takes
Überwriter less than five minutes.
As important as the time savings is with Überwrit-
er, it also lowers the barrier to junior underwriters or
loan officers to tackle the most complex income situ-
ations. No longer does one need to bottleneck your
operations with complex files needing to be sent to a
senior underwriter to determine income calculations.
The other aspect of savings that Überwriter
provides comes from the elimination of human errors
in the income analysis process. The error rate due to
missing a guideline, or a math error, or not checking
for income variation is eliminated with Überwriter.
Überwriter covers most income types including
declining income, part time employment, and variable
income.
Überwriter guarantees their calculations. At this
time, Überwriter has done thousands of income reviews and has had zero calculation errors.
During the on-boarding process for their enterprise clients, Überwriter works closely with the
company’s QC teams to create audit files to evaluate
each income situation Überwriter supports. Files are
fully audited with the client during the on-boarding
process to ensure the client QC team agrees with the
calculations. Überwriter has strict change management of the portion of the software controlling the
actual calculations. When guideline changes are introduced that would impact the software, they first work
with key clients to audit and rollout these updates,
then roll it out to their full client base.
Überwriter is introducing a new product, FirstLook, in 2016 which will be an outsourcing version of
performing the income analysis. Rather than the user
entering data into Überwriter directly, clients upload
the tax and payroll documents to secure encrypted
servers and an internal underwriting staff uses Überwriter to perform the income calculations for the
client. The output is the same as Überwriter in that
they provide an income analysis report. FirstLook is
best suited for loan officers. The development on
FirstLook began in late 2015 out of feedback from
loan officers using Überwriter. While they are comfortable using the tool, many loan officers would
rather outsource that task to allow them to focus on
their borrower.
You may find out more about Überwriter through
their website at uber-writer.com.
A.R. Smith is CEO/President of AR Consulting Partners
LLC. A.R. can be reached at arsmith@arconsultingpart-
ners.com.