Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. (TBW), based in Ocala, Fla., has grown rapidly from a small-town retail mortgage firm to a top 10 national wholesale mortgage lender. Founded in 1982, TBW today loans more than $25 billion to community banks and independent mortgage brokers across the United States annually and has nearly $5 billion in assets. Technological innovation, including an expanding state-of-the-art data capture system built with Datacap Taskmaster, has contributed to TBW’s leadership reputation and propelled its rise. Staying ahead of the technology curve also has helped TBW bolster customer service and strategic partnerships. |
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TBW has faced a series of document management challenges stemming from two major factors: 1) mounting paper volumes, due to business growth and increasing record retention regulations; and 2) geographic expansion, creating a coast-to-coast footprint. Overwhelming document quantities, along with the need to digitize and track data more efficiently and accurately, pushed the company to its first bottleneck in 2000. Until then, employees at TBW’s central processing facility in Ocala had scanned and manually indexed all loan documents the company handled. The documents came from field employees by overnight mail and from customers – banks and brokers – by fax. TBW currently processes 250,000 to 300,000 pages of loan documents a day, with a 200-page average per loan. Within a mortgage, there could be as many as 200 different document types. Records include credit reports, bank and income statements, and all papers signed at a real estate closing. In four years, data storage has jumped 10-fold, to 30 terabytes. Increasingly dispersed document origination has posed other hurdles. By 2003, TBW’s IT leaders recognized that copying and shipping documents from the firm’s branches to Ocala was consuming substantial financial and staff resources, causing document loss, and delaying loan approvals. Since then, TBW’s regional presence has grown from 12 offices to 30 locations. In addition, rising volumes of customer faxes, via two toll-free telephone numbers and an XMediusFAX Server, have strained the Ocala center, creating a higher regional capture load.
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“Our Datacap solution has grown with us and enabled us to grow,” says Greg Farmer, TBW senior systems engineer, who manages development, operation and administration of the Datacap system. The story of TBW’s capture system parallels developments in imaging and capture in the past 7 years.
In 2000, TBW installed Datacap Taskmaster in Ocala and configured it to automate indexing. Initially, when mail was sorted, each document received a paper separator sheet with two bar codes – one with the loan number and the other specifying document type. TBW has since converted to electronic separator pages for most kinds of documents. After scanning, Taskmaster recognizes bar codes and assigns the proper document index value as it populates TBW’s proprietary data management system.
When Datacap released Taskmaster Web, its browser-based scanning solution, TBW saw an opportunity to augment Ocala scanning operations as volumes continued to rise. The firm launched its distributed capture application in 2003 beginning with five regional offices. Today, 13 offices scan and index about 25 percent of loan documents. In all, the regional offices and the Ocala Center use 29 Kodak 3500 or i610 high-speed scanners.
Remote capture decreases costs and speeds loan approvals by eliminating costly, time-consuming copying and shipping. Administrating TBW’s nationwide Datacap Taskmaster network is simple, with no need for capture software in regional offices.
To further augment decentralized scanning and online document access, TBW has begun deploying Datacap Taskmaster Web with Visioneer OneTouch links software and Xerox DocuMate scanners for simplified remote scanning and indexing with a browser.
TBW's capture designers have also customized the Datacap system to include automated business rules for handling various types of documents, as well as unique features for such functions as document monitoring and communications among loan partners.
With the vast amount of document images generated since TBW began scanning, the company has several storage platforms in use. TBW currently stores 20 terabytes on an EMC Centera and 10 terabytes of older data on SAN/Optical Storage. In a recent storage system redesign, the company has opted to retain EMC Centera and DocuTREEV software and related hardware for archives, but is migrating to the Hitachi Content Archive Platform for mortgage processing.
"Our Datacap system has accommodated every demand we’ve thrown at it, and the technical support has been awesome,” Farmer says. “The system is flexible, scalable and robust. It easily incorporates our instructions and has helped us greatly increase efficiency and accuracy.”
The Datacap distributed capture system has enabled TBW to cut cycle time to one or two days for most loans – down from at least a week and often two weeks. Swifter, error-free processing means higher customer satisfaction plus capacity to take on more business.
TBW estimates remote capture with Datacap is saving more than $600,000 a year in paper and shipping costs alone, not including reduced copier-lease expenses or heightened productivity.
"Our company’s success hinges on the ability to leverage technology," says Lee Farkas, CEO of TBW. "Our customized Datacap solution helps us handle increasing demand cost-effectively while improving customer service. Fast turnarounds, as well as easy tracking and communications, enable our customers to serve their customers better – and that's good business."