This is an excerpt from a recent interview of our CEO, Harry Beisswenger, on JobTalk with Dean Logan. This is the first part of a multi-part series about the history of NetDirector, our staff, our mission, and our future. Enjoy!
Dean: So let’s talk about some of the services that you actually provide there. What is NetExtract?
Harry: So along with moving foreclosure files, which we call milestone events, there are events that are updated by an attorney or completed by an attorney and they have to update a servicer system. Each step along the way, as well, there are a lot of documents that go back and forth. One of those documents, or some of those documents, have legal descriptions. Those legal descriptions are very lengthy and have a lot of formatting on them, like lenght/depth, the size of the property, so there are various symbols that are used. So what we do for the attorneys is that their normal process would be that they have a processor actually review the document and they are keying the legal description into their case system. That could take 30 minutes to an hour and it has to be proofed multiple times. What we do is we get the mortgage note electronically from the servicer. We use OCR technology to extract that data and format it into structured information that can be imported right into the attorney’s case system. Also, one of the things that we added, since some of these documents can be of poor quality when they’re scanned multiple times and they are not legible, we actually have secondary resources that are on our staff that compare our document and make sure that it gets to 100% accuracy, so if the OCR doesn’t pick up some of the data elements correctly, we actually resolve those and then send the information to the attorney. So we are actually saving them 30 minutes to an hour per document and reducing a lot of those data keying mistakes that can potentially happen.
Dean: That’s a lot of time.
Harry: Yes, so it’s a significant value to our customers.
Dean: Let’s also talk about, what’s a military search? What do you do in that regard?
Harry: Yes, so within the mortgage banking sector, there’s SCRA, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, that protects active-duty military from being foreclosed on, or being evicted from properties. So what we do there is we do searches throughout the life of a foreclosure to check the department of defense site to make sure the borrower is not active military. That service has exploded over the past 5 years. Initially, when we came out with it, the servicers required one check at that beginning of a foreclosure. Today, some of them require 15 checks, so that is somebody going out to the department of defense site, keying in the social security number, or other pertinent data and then if the person is active duty, they have to key it into their system. They also have to download a certificate that they did the search, for compliance reasons, and potentially a screenshot that they actually did the search. We automate that entire process, in real time. So the attorney will be in their case system and they hit a button, or they have it automated at different processes or timeframes to automatically go out to us, request a search, we can find the individual whether they have a social or not, that’s another nice service. So if they do not have a social, we actually go out, find the social, do the search, bring back the data, the certificate of search as well as the screenshot and populate their case management system automatically. So again, you’re saving about 5 to 10 minutes per search. It’s a significant return on investment. Some of our firms are doing 50,000 searches a month.
Dean: So are these part of your premium services?
Harry: Yes, we have a group of premium services; NetExtract, Military search, we have a Pacer bankruptcy search, which works similar to military, which we’re going out to government sites and figuring out if the borrower is in bankruptcy. We search both regional and national bankruptcy sites, and we bring back multiple documents, bankruptcy dockets and other search results that are required by the servicer.
Dean: And you also do, is it a death search, is that what it is?
Harry: Yes, so part of our value to our customers is we have various person searches. One of those is a death search. You’re not going to want to foreclose on someone that is deceased, so we go out and find out, similar to the other searches, whether that person is deceased. If they’re deceased, they would stop the foreclosure process.
Dean: Great. So it sounds like an interesting market that you’ve worked on, and you’re the leader in that market, aren’t you?
Harry: Yes, in the mortgage banking sector, we have a very good market share and we have 130 attorneys out of probably 250 who use us for their integration services.
Dean: That’s a great reputation, Harry. That’s wonderful. So you also do the same kind of thing with technology and how does technology, how can they use your product.
Harry: The technology is really what’s behind the scenes. We provide a cloud-based system, so what I call zero-footprint for the customer. We do not require them to run any hardware or software at their site. They are just connecting, via the internet, their case system with our data exchange. And then we are handling not only the movement of data, but we also act as a centralized universal translator. So not only do we move the data, we transform it for each customer so they can get the data exactly the way they want it, every time. That’s what I call “set it and forget it.” They map a standard transaction, let’s say a foreclosure file, so they pick the borrower name, address, social security number, birth date, that’s the basic demographic information. They can get the data every time, no matter which mortgage servicer system it’s coming from, they will get it in a standard format. So as we add new servicer systems, they can start sending the client data and the law firm doesn’t have to do anything. Again, “set it and forget it.”
Dean: That’s great. And you just upgraded your infrastructure, in order to expand into the healthcare market and so with that, is there a lot of reliability; is that secure? Can you tell us about that and let people know what it’s like if they were to work with you?
Harry: Yes, one of our biggest priorities is the security of the data. Both as we store it, which we only store messages for 30 days and customers can set it to wipe immediately if necessary. However, we’ve provided multi-layer security in our mortgage banking sectors in levels beyond online banking. We’ve gone above and beyond standard practices and enabled multilayer security, IP verification and other controls to protect the data when it’s en route and when it’s being stored. We comply there by getting a third party audit, to make our customers comfortable, we do a SOC2 Type II audit every year. To make sure that we have the correct processes in place and that we have all the security measures at not only our physical site, but at our data center and with our cloud infrastructure. So for instance, another layer that we put onto our security is security information and event management (SIEM) which tracks anything happening on our network at any time. And that’s one of the reasons we would generally know if there was any kind of probe or breach on our systems, or attempted breach, which we have not had because we would know ahead of time what is going on and be able to stop it. You hear of some of these breaches at some of these big companies for healthcare data and other data, and a lot of times they don’t know for weeks that they had even been hacked and that’s where that security, it’s call, SIEM layer, above our systems provides that extra protections.
Dean: So that’s not going to happen with you.
Harry: No; never say never, but we’ve put every precaution we can in place.
