Weekly Real Estate News
Insurance payments technology company One Inc is extending its network into mortgage servicing, launching a system designed to connect escrow payments, homeowners-insurance verification and mortgagee updates through a single integration.
One Inc announced Unified Lender Connectivity Oct. 1. The company says the network connects mortgage lenders, servicers, insurance carriers and insurance-tracking providers.
The target is a stubbornly manual servicing workflow
Mortgage servicers collect homeowners-insurance premiums through escrow accounts and remit those funds to insurers. At the same time, servicers must track whether borrowers maintain required coverage and whether the lender is correctly identified on the policy.
One Inc says significant parts of that process still depend on paper checks, separately transmitted remittance information and manual requests for evidence of insurance, mortgagee changes, lapse notices and cancellation information.
Unified Lender Connectivity combines account-to-account escrow payments with policy-level remittance data, real-time coverage verification and digital mortgagee-data exchange.
The system is designed to let participating servicers retrieve evidence-of-insurance documents and declarations pages, submit mortgagee-clause corrections and exchange renewal, billing, lapse and cancellation notices electronically.
Insurance data has become a mortgage-servicing issue
The launch comes as homeowners insurance has become a more consequential part of mortgage servicing. Rising premiums, carrier withdrawals in some markets and coverage disruptions can affect escrow balances, borrower payments and the collateral securing a mortgage.
For servicers, the operational risk is not limited to the cost of insurance. Incorrect policy information, delayed premium posting or a lapse in coverage can generate borrower complaints and force additional servicing work.
One Inc says its platform currently serves more than 320 insurance carriers and has more than $230 billion in annual payment volume under contract. Those figures are company-reported.
The new product’s value to mortgage companies will depend on carrier participation and integration into existing servicing and insurance-tracking systems. One Inc is positioning the network as bidirectional infrastructure rather than a one-way data feed, with payment and policy information synchronized between insurers and servicers.
That puts the company into an increasingly important intersection of housing finance: the systems connecting mortgage servicing with a homeowners-insurance market that has become more expensive and operationally complex.
