Mortgage Women Magazine

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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.