Case Studies

Celink Increases Audit Sample by 20% While Doubling Audit Workload using ACES Quality Management

COMPANY

Celink is the nation's leading subservicer of reverse mortgages. Celink is the subservicer of choice for the nation's largest reverse mortgage lenders. Celink's fully scalable servicing platform, ReversServ Elite, supports proprietary reverse mortgage products and the government-insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM). Reverse mortgages are home-equity products that help older homeowners stay in their homes and enjoy fulfilling retirements. Celink maintains an SQ2 rating as a primary servicer of reverse mortgage loans from Moody's.

CHALLENGE

When Compliance Program Director Wesley Klepfer joined Celink in 2020, he inherited a QC program hindered by its relationship with a third-party vendor. Celink needed a reliable QC program. Klepfer's first order of business was to determine how Celink's QC processes could be streamlined and improved. The solution was to bring quality control in-house.

SOLUTION

When deciding to bring QC operations in-house at Celink, Klepfer turned to a known and trusted provider – ACES Quality Management.

"I used ACES at two organizations prior to Celink," Klepfer said. "When I was looking to bring this in-house, there was really no question for me."

Despite his trust in and familiarity with ACES, Klepfer did his due diligence during the decision-making process, vetting vendors for both in-house and outsourced operations. Ultimately, Klepfer's and his team decided ACES was the best choice.

"When we were trying to decide to bring QC in-house or to continue outsourcing, the level of comfort that I have with ACES and the ability to implement ACES quickly was something that was very, very high on our priority list," stated Klepfer. "Not to mention, of all of the systems and vendors we vetted, ACES had the best program for what we needed to accomplish from start to finish with our transactional QC testing."

"One of the things I like about ACES the most is its full start-to-finish quality control servicing, from us uploading the data, ACES creating the audits and then all the way through any kind of action plans or other remediation that we require," Klepfer continued. "None of the other vendors or applications could offer that, and any that were close did not have a comparable user interface perspective."

As the largest reverse mortgage subservicer, Celink utilizes the following features and functionality to deliver high-quality QC services:

  • ACES REVIEW – Increase loan review speed while reducing defects using ACES Managed Questionnaires, customized question sets or both.
  • ACES REPORTING – Leverage standard or customized templates to produce executive-level reports in minutes v. days and gain real-time insights to make more informed business decisions
  • ACES CONNECT™ – Collaborate securely to monitor key data and metrics, review audit activity, remediate defects and manage corrective actions

RESULTS

Implementation

Once Celink had made its decision, it was able to onboard and implement ACES Quality Management & Control® software in under two months.

"We implemented ACES in 45 days, while other vendors quoted implementation timelines of 90 to 180 days," Klepfer said. "This included a full rewrite of the data we were using to formulate a new report, which turned into five separate reports because it was so massive. Creating that report, mapping it and getting the data uploaded into the customized ACES system in 45 days was absolutely phenomenal."

"Going live with ACES could not have gone better," Klepfer continued. "ACES prepared us very well, so we knew what to expect. We were perfectly on schedule and were able to completely replace our former QC vendor within that first month."

Increased Efficiency

After using ACES, Celink has experienced a vast improvement from its previous QC vendor while also generating additional efficiencies and reducing redundancies, thanks to several ACES features.

"The biggest benefit that we have with ACES is we're able to spend half of what we were spending with our previous vendor and doubled our audit workload at the same time," Klepfer said. "With ACES, we have three people working full-time on audits and programmatic testing as well as access to better resources."

Communication

Additionally, with ACES CONNECT, Celink can communicate with the business units it's auditing and provide a complete picture of what was expected in the audit and what the audit uncovered.

Through ACES CONNECT, Celink has also seen a reduction in turn time from its business unit responses and receives quicker and more informed responses, which allows the analysts to spend more time auditing and remediation.

High-Level Compliance

In addition, Celink has improved its ability to audit to federal and state level regulations thanks to the ACES' customizable managed question sets.

"Having the ACES questionnaires allowed us to identify the questions we needed from a servicing perspective and then also provided us the state-level questionnaires that we otherwise would never have had," said Klepfer.

Support

In addition to the features offered by the ACES system, Celink receives top-notch support from the ACES team, and as a long-time ACES client, Klepfer finds the QC services to be unrivaled.

"The ACES team is phenomenal. I know that if I need anything, it's just an email away, and if it is not an easy solution, then there'll be a phone call probably the same day," Klepfer stated. "I would recommend ACES for any kind of quality control testing that would be needed. I only have experience on the servicing side, but the ability that ACES gives us to increase our workload while not increasing the amount of time we're spending on the questionnaires is unmatched."

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