A Vice Capital Markets client since 2009, American Mortgage had come to rely on the partnership and expertise Vice Capital provides to fuel its long-term growth strategy. In 2020, American Mortgage met the billion-dollar volume milestone for the first time in company history, recording $1.3 billion in closed loan volume. However, on the journey to reaching that milestone, American Mortgage realized that its existing loan origination system (LOS) left the company wanting in some key areas.

“What drove our decision to switch was a lack of support from our previous LOS platform and the need for a system that could integrate with other services and provide open APIs,” said Norma Scott, senior vice president at American Mortgage.

After conducting an extensive search, American Mortgage determined that MeridianLink Mortgage (formerly known as LendingQB) met all of its requirements and, therefore, would be the company’s new LOS of record. Thanks to the availability of open APIs to the MeridianLink platform, Vice Capital was able to quickly connect its internal hedging platform to the LOS to ensure the flow of critical loan pipeline information needed to execute American Mortgage’s hedging strategy. Vice Capital also created a daily writeback feature that directly updates loan data in the LOS while providing robust reporting on processes and any potential errors to give a secure simplified solution.

“Working directly with the teams at Meridian Link and American Mortgage, we were able to create a custom solution to obtain all the data necessary to effectively manage the hedge and accurately sell and update loans directly from the LOS integration,” said Troy Baars, president at Vice Capital.

To ensure minimal disruption to its existing pipeline and map out the process for a complete transition, American Mortgage determined a phased approach conducted in tandem with Vice Capital would be the best course of action.

“We launched MeridianLink Mortgage in just one branch so that we could work out all the kinks before transitioning the rest of our branches,” said Scott. “As you can imagine, there was a lot of trial and error going on during that time, and Vice played a huge role in helping us make the switch. I can’t imagine having done this without them because they helped drive this transition. They were not only a big help in working out the kinks, but also in building the process with us.”

Part of that process included having American Mortgage run its outgoing LOS and MeridianLink Mortgage simultaneously. With dual systems and processes running, the chances for error increased significantly. As American Mortgage’s partner during the transition, Vice Capital was able serve as a failsafe in the review process.

“Vice Capital was always there for us, and their response time is great,” Scott added. “When you’re dealing with something high risk like this, a fast response time is very important. If you have one loan fall off, that can be pretty detrimental, but Vice Capital was on top of it.”

Vice Capital also worked with MeridianLink to provide access to custom fields within the LOS to calculate the cost basis for American Mortgage’s pipeline, which is used in the daily report to establish the mark to market. In addition to the automated overnight report, Vice Capital leverages its API with MeridianLink Mortgage to pull data throughout the day and provide real-time updates to the hedge position. Thanks to this automation, the loan sale process has been reduced by 20%, thus enabling American Mortgage to ship files on average 1.5 days earlier and help improve and speed up its execution into the secondary market.

“We would send Vice Capital two different data exports each day and purposely did not merge them so that they could compare the datasets and let us know when our team overlooked a step or information was missing,” Scott explained. “The integration Vice Capital built to MeridianLink Mortgage also allows them to upload their allocations for us. With our previous LOS, we had to manually enter that information. Now, Vice Capital is able to use the API to go directly into the LOS and automatically update the data as loans are sold. It does not require any input, intervention or action from our side. For us, that’s perfect because it saves time and people’s sanity by eliminating the effort and risk for human error that comes with manual data entry.”

“This is a great example of how the MeridianLink Mortgage API-centric approach enables customers to work with a network of partners to deliver innovative solutions to their customers,” said Ian Goldsmith, MeridianLink Senior Vice President of Product. “Reducing time to process loans by 20% is a huge win for American Mortgage and Vice Capital, and we are excited to be part of the solution.”