a la mode announced that use of its Mercury Network cloud-based appraisal vendor management platform (VMP) has doubled appraisal transaction volume from 10,000 appraisal transactions a day to more than 20,000 a day in just 16 months.
“The rapid growth, especially in a comparatively slow overall mortgage market, is testament to the value Mercury Network brings to lenders and AMCs across the country,” said Jennifer Miller, president of a la mode’s mortgage solutions division. “Many of the industry’s leaders have chosen Mercury Network over the past 16 months, including Xerox Mortgage Services, StreetLinks, Academy Mortgage, LPS, CoreLogic, WR Starkey, JVI and more, and they have helped us grow beyond our expectations.”
a la mode's Mercury Network is the nation's premiere online VMP allowing lenders and AMCs to manage their entire appraisal workflow while being compliant with all appraisal independence standards and banking security regulations. Mercury combines a cloud-based SaaS core with a robust appraiser desktop plugin architecture that automates the appraiser's data flow to and from clients.
Mercury's permission-based MercuryDirect software plugins work with appraisal files from a la mode's WinTOTAL software as well as the offerings from other software vendors, making it a one-stop shop for automating appraisal workflow. Lenders and AMCs use the software not only to deliver order data and manage status updates and quality control rules, but they also supply the appraiser's original data file back to the client as "first-generation XML,” eliminating the expensive and error-prone alternative of OCR extraction.
Mercury can be used as a complete retail appraisal solution, offering everything from web-based front ends for loan officers and compliance staff to file and status management front ends for field appraisal vendors, or the software can be deployed as an interfaceless "black box" service snapping directly into a larger operation's existing proprietary system using a variety of robust APIs and custom plugins.
The software is used in both capacities by a lengthy roster of the nation's largest lenders and AMCs, as well as by numerous community banks, credit unions, wholesale and correspondent lenders, and mortgage brokers. It’s been used by more than 200,000 mortgage professionals since 2002 to completely automate the full “round trip” of tens of millions of appraisals.