Hilltop iSolutions (iSolutions) can assist your company with enhancing the deployment, controls and efficiency of your technology and data applications. Hilltop iSolutions provides technology consulting services to all types and sizes of companies. iSolutions has four lines of business which include the following:
- aligning a client’s business strategy with its deployed technology and helping consider new technologies (specialized applications, eNotes, MERS, MISMO data standards, workflow, machine learning/Big Data, blockchain, etc.),
- identifying and implementing the right technology solutions for your business (compliance, accounting, lending, modeling, loan portfolio analytics, fraud, secondary marketing, loan servicing, other “add on” applications, etc.),
- integrating business processes, applications and data (ensuring that the right integration resources and tools are being used) and testing the results (assessing the opportunity for cost savings by using different technology or the same technology in a more efficient approach),
- helping with assessing and mitigating IT and data risks (iSolutions is the right independent review firm to help assess your data and IT controls using our IT audit skills).
Our differentiator is that iSolutions’ technology consulting services blend our business and technology perspectives to enable our clients to be more effective and efficient, while maintaining strong controls and being in compliance. Our delivery teams include both industry experienced business and technology consultants. We are independent consulting firm (i.e. no affiliations with a software or database provider) and can assist with making an “unbiased” decision.
Aligning a client’s strategy with its deployed and future technology applications must be completed in order to ensure that your technology applications will support your business and provide cost savings. iSolutions can help a client with assessing whether a corporate business strategy can be supported by either its’ current or potential offerings for technology applications. Our efforts here are focused on whether the technology support exists or would need to be built/custom coded. Once it is determined that the technology exists or can be built – the next set of efforts to define the business requirements begins.
Identifying and implementing the right technology solutions for your business is a critical step to avoiding mistakes that require material amounts of time and expense to rectify such. Hilltop believes that it starts with a strategy and is followed by a complete assessment of business requirements for such strategy. iSolutions can assist with completing the requirements, creating the RFP, managing the RFP distribution and vendor selection process, helping with application implementation and changing operating/financial processes to maximize the new system’s capabilities. Hilltop’s industry experience is important when a client is selecting particular systems that target regulatory compliance, accounting, lending, modeling, loan portfolio analytics, fraud detection, secondary marketing, loan servicing, etc. iSolutions can also assess a client’s usage of available technology/data applications such as MERS, MISMO, eNotes, workflow, data analytics, GSE tools, etc.
Integrating Applications, Data & Business Processes is critical to the automation of the process and the success of the technology application. Integration is not just about coding so that applications can “talk to each other”. iSolutions defines “integration” as integrating a client’s applications, data and processes to create an efficient and effective business transaction (beginning to end).
Here are several “integration” engagements that iSolutions and other Hilltop companies have helped clients and vendors with:
- implementing the new GSEs’ applications (Day One Certainty and the Loan Advisor Suite),
- adding real workflow (not document flow) to origination processes to help identify riskier loans and process such differently, to streamline less risky loans, to limit the staff’s own work steps that are not part of the client’s approved process, to identify compliance or control exceptions, etc.
- helping reduce the number of QC or Compliance personnel by adding effective tools to identify exceptions as they occur (not at a later point in the cycle),
- using eMortgage technology more aggressively to eliminate paper, and
- clarifying the responsibility for data quality and implementing tools to assess overall data integrity and safety/privacy.
Assessing and mitigating IT and data risks is an on-going effort for both new and existing applications. Our IT and Data controls auditors are independent and can provide an unbiased view of the IT and data risks that exist, mitigating factors and possible exposures. Our CISA/IT auditors often assist Internal Audit teams with ongoing audits of general and application controls (especially if the application is lending or servicing specific and requires an understanding of the input, throughput and output to be expected. iSolutions helps clients with assessing and mitigating risks as follows:
- Data controls (design, implementation, testing and remediation) relating to data integrity, governance, privacy compliance, regulatory requirements, etc.,
- IT general and application controls (design, implementation, testing and remediation),
- Cyber security and Fraud vulnerability (design, implementation, testing and remediation),
- Business Continuity Planning (design, implementation, testing and remediation).
Risk management typically involves the “three lines of defense”. A company’s IT department should do testing of controls to provide “the first line of defense”. iSolutions can provide either the “second line of defense” (a QC type role) and/or assist your External or Internal Audit teams in performing the “third line of defense” efforts.
Our Services are described in more detail in that section of our website. Please contact Hilltop if there is a need that you have that is not listed as we may be able to assist.