City Bank Mortgage Increases Commission Accuracy With DMD’s DataTrac Commissions
Company
City Bank Mortgage, the mortgage banking business unit of $1.8 billion City Bank Texas, has 10 branches and 29 originators offering conventional, USDA, FHA and VA products.
Challenge
With 2009 year-to-date lending volume at approximately $400 million by early November, 2009, City Bank Mortgage saw an almost 50 percent increase over its total 2008 volume of $285 million. As originator productivity and loan volume reached record levels in 2009, maintaining accuracy around commissions and accountability for RESPA-related fee compliance became equally untenable for City Bank Mortgage.
After discovering multiple instances of misallocated fees and commission over-payments, the lender realized it had risk and scalability issues that needed to be addressed.
Solution
City Bank Mortgage was already using the Del Mar DataTrac (DMD) back-office solution, paperless electronic document management tool and originator web portal. Adding DMD’s commission management tool made sense as it was already fully integrated to CityBank’s workflow system.
Results
Within the first few days of implementing the DMD Commissions calculating and tracking solution, City Bank Mortgage identified a $10,000 commission payout error resulting from several misallocations.
"During our implementation process we tested the system by running our plans against historic numbers and found all sorts of places where we overpaid commissions. DataTrac Commissions nearly paid for itself just catching these old mistakes,” said City Bank Mortgage secondary marketing manager Tom Couture.
According to its president Norma Edwards, City Bank Mortgage reflects the values of its parent bank, placing the highest value on its employee team, and has made a major investment in hiring its front line originators with ten or more years of experience.
“Using the DataTrac Commissions, we are now able to provide our invaluable origination professionals with total commission transparency. They can access their commission pipeline 14 hours a day, every day of the week through this slick web-based system,” said Edwards. “As the word gets out in the industry that we empower our originators with such a powerful tool that is all about paying them accurately and quickly, we expect to attract other talented personnel.”
The tool has also allowed the lender to set up fee floors in compliance with RESPA and enabled it to catch pricing mistakes before it is too late to correct them, according to director of operations John Carter.
“One of the most exciting things about DataTrac Commissions is that we can now test ‘what if’ scenarios around our compensation plans and see exactly how much more (or less) money we would have paid out if we were tweak to our plans,” said Carter. “This type of analysis used to be so complicated that it was never done.”
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