Client Bulletin 3/14/22

Key Takeaways from our March 4 Call

Thanks to all of you who were able to attend our March 4 call with Cenlar leadership. If you missed it, here are the key takeaways.

Risk Infrastructure and Culture

Our efforts to protect you and your homeowners are of the utmost importance. We’re giving this area significant attention, grounded in our three lines of defense: business units and controls, risk management and internal audit.

We’re making improvements to our business controls across the organization. In Core Operations, we’ve centralized servicing analytics and reporting, which enables meaningful changes to our monthly operational review. At this monthly review, the most vital metrics will be placed in front of a cross-section of senior leadership and Cenlar’s board in order to develop a plan of action. This also ensures our leaders are constantly thinking about risk, stress and building controls in their operation.

Our Default Call Center (DCC) added controls and introduced an enhanced review process in response to a shifting landscape caused by the pandemic and revisions to call frequency and right-party contact regulations. DCC, along with other areas of our business, also worked with the business controls team to do a comprehensive review of its risk and control matrices, performing control effectiveness testing and implementing an updated Risk and Control Self-Assessment.

The pre-foreclosure area of Default Management has begun implementing a review at the end of each month that analyzes the pre-foreclosure processes completed in that period, an addition to our established two-tiered pre-foreclosure review. This new review gives us monthly feedback, providing additional opportunities to identify risks.

Our risk managers have created a heightened understanding that evaluating risks and their impact on the organization has to become business-as-usual.

Homeowner Assistance Fund

We’ve been working hard to map and execute the various HAF programs. Processing is underway, and we continue to work with all jurisdictions as they become ready to start processing HAF applications.

To assist your homeowners, we have gathered all of the available links for the Homeowner Assistance Fund programs in one place on CenNet. They are also available on Cenlar.com, and homeowners can request a link to the page through the IVR.

We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into getting ready to process a high volume of applications for help from HAF. We are diligently working to automate our processes for this program, but there is not a one-size-fits-all approach across all of the states. We’re readying our reporting and our fee for this service later this month.

Investing in the Homeowner Experience

We are working with a new communications management partner that specializes in data solutions and omni-channel delivery. This new partner will help support the management of all our communications — from our document center on the web to production and distribution of emails, letters, statements and more.

We’ve upgraded all aspects of our CI centers. More than 860 agents have been trained on our new telephony platform, and have handled more than 3 million calls on it. Homeowners have self-served 3.25 million transactions, such as payments and payoffs, using our enhanced IVR. Nearly 300,000 live chats have been completed on our new platform, and there have been 482,000 homeowner interactions with our BOT. More than 40,000 homeowners have completed our new quality survey since it launched in September, with scores consistently increasing month-over-month.

We also have created more personalized and proactive communications to assist borrowers during important “Moments of Truth,” like at the start of their loan’s life with us, during escrow analysis and service release and at year-end.

As a result of these efforts, our call volume is down, our complaints are down and we’re seeing more digital activity. We hit new levels of consistency in the CI and DCC centers, saw our call volume drop dramatically and hit new levels of client satisfaction.

We will continue to make investments in areas like the homeowner experience. In 2022, we will upgrade our DCC to a new cloud-based platform. We will continue to tune our IVR to make it easier for borrowers to navigate. We’ll see desktop upgrades with Director 7 and CSD. And we just launched a new personalized escrow shortage video that uses homeowners’ information to walk them through what’s changing with their loan.

We look forward to sharing more as we go forward, and greatly appreciate your partnership. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to your executive client manager.

Cloud Migration Requires Weekend Outages

May 14-15

As part of our ongoing cloud migration effort, we will experience a planned outage of a server that effects our clients during the weekend of Saturday, May 14 at 6 a.m. through Sunday, May 15 at 8 p.m. While this server is offline, several client-facing applications will be impacted, including:

• Global Teller
• NLAI
• CenAccess
• SSO
• XML

June 11-12 and June 25-26

Both our clients and homeowners will be impacted by a planned outage of servers during the weekends of Saturday, June 11 at 6 a.m. through Sunday, June 12 at 8 p.m. and June 25 at 6 a.m. through Sunday, June 26 at 8 p.m. While the servers are offline, several client and homeowner-facing applications will be affected, including:

• Global Teller
• NLAI
• SSO
• XML
• CenNet
• CenNet Forbearance Application

Preparation for this change will involve both whitelisting and client testing. Details on each will be communicated within 60 days of the scheduled June change.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to make these important upgrades to our infrastructure. If you have any questions, please reach out to your client manager.