JPMorgan Mortgage Capital (JPMMC) is a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the world’s largest financial services organizations. JPMMC is a leading provider of commercial mortgage loans for U.S. clients; services include providing quotes, committing to loans, closing, and servicing loans in the name of the JPMorgan parent company. JPMMC, which is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and has branch offices around the United States, manages loans ranging from U.S.$500,000 to $1 billion. The loans are used in an array of construction projects such as office buildings, apartment complexes, hotels, mobile home parks, nursing homes, and retail shopping malls.
About four years ago, JPMMC began taking initial steps toward transforming its business processes—which consisted of a host of paper forms and isolated loan software applications—into a cohesive system using Web-based processes and technologies. The goal was to streamline work procedures and provide brokers with real-time quotes over the Internet.
Working with RDA, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, JPMMC implemented the JPMorgan Electronic Mortgage System (JEMS), an intranet based on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system, Microsoft SQL ServerTM Enterprise Edition version 7.0, Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. The JEMS solution delivered a number of benefits to the company, including an increase in customer loan applications without a corresponding increase in the number of staff members required to review them. With this new streamlined approach to loan processing, JPMMC executives estimated that loans were approved about 20 percent faster than with the previous, fragmented approach.
Because the first system overhaul was delivering great benefits, including reduced loan-decision turnaround time and better customer service, JPMMC managers reviewed the JEMS solution again recently. Their goal was to extend and enhance the system to extract even more benefits from newer technologies.
Although the initial JEMS project had met its goals, the growth of the business through the company’s branch offices meant that JPMMC needed to give the branches greater control over parts of the loan process that had previously been handled at headquarters. In response to this growth, JPMMC executives wanted to find even better, more integrated technologies that could help branch locations operate more effectively yet would ensure that security and data access requirements were maintained.
The goal was to upgrade the JEMS solution so that it would automate much of the company’s loan business processes, handling a loan application from its inception through its final closing and securitization. Additionally, JPMMC managers wanted to implement technology that would help them assimilate the systems of other organizations following mergers and acquisitions.
Working again with RDA, JPMorgan Mortgage Capital redesigned the JEMS solution on a service-oriented architecture whose highly scalable and flexible intranet helps automate the company’s loan process, from the initial loan application to funds dispersal and loan administration.
The solution uses the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003, Standard Edition, operating system; Microsoft SQL Server 2000; Microsoft Exchange Server 2003; and Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2002—all part of Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software. It was developed using technology and tools in the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 and the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system. The .NET Framework is an integral component of Windows that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
The new JEMS system improves communications and data exchanges between the branches and the main office through Web services and .NET Remoting. The new smart client technology in the .NET Framework enabled JPMMC to implement a new, richer client user interface for JEMS that can be distributed to the branch offices over the company network. In this way, JPMMC can empower the branch locations with the same kind of powerful business tools that are available at headquarters.
BizTalk Server enables the new solution to access data residing in a legacy loan application that JPMMC does not plan to upgrade. In addition, BizTalk Server is being used to automate various business processes such as report generation and exporting data to various formats.
Through the new JEMS client, JPMMC users can access data, remote file storage, and Exchange Server services—functionality that is largely based on Web services hosted in Internet Information Services version 6.0. JEMS also uses Microsoft MapPoint® 2003 business mapping software to provide maps and directions for employees who need to conduct real estate inspections prior to loan approvals.
The solution takes advantage of Web services used in conjunction with customized spreadsheets in Microsoft Office Excel 2003. Web service–based communications let users save their spreadsheet information directly into the JEMS system from within Excel. Users can edit their spreadsheets offline and save to their local disk. Once they are on the network with JEMS, they have the option to click a button within Excel to upload their spreadsheet data back to the JEMS system. At the same time that the data is being saved from a spreadsheet into JEMS, Excel can download current statistics and data elements into the spreadsheet to keep it up-to-date.
The efficiencies of the new services-oriented solution help JPMMC process a greater volume of loans with the same number of staff people. At the same time, the firm has reduced the average time required to fund a loan, from initial application to sending the money, by about 31 percent. The solution has increased the quality and speed of reporting, which helps JPMMC managers make better business decisions. What’s more, the solution provides a platform for integrating with third parties such as large institutional investors, and it reduces the amount of time that the IT staff spends on routine tasks.
“The latest evolution of our JEMS system has had a great impact on our overall efficiency when it comes to loan processing, especially in the process of securing a loan,” Saman says. “We’re confident that the Microsoft technologies used in the new solution have had a large impact on the overall success of the solution.”
In the past, Saman says, the average loan took about 80 days to process, from the time that JPMCC received the initial application all the way through to funding, or securitization.
“Right now, we are averaging about 55 days. This decrease in our turnaround time is a huge benefit for brokers and borrowers,” he says. The decrease of about 31 percent in the time it takes to get a loan through the system means that JPMMC can process more loans with the same number of people. “In the past year, we have doubled the number of loans that have gone through securitization—and three of them were done simultaneously, which was unheard of before. All of this is because we are able to very efficiently extract data out of our system with this new solution.”
“In the past, the process of securitization would have required a lot of employees to go through data and pull out the relevant information, determine what data was valid and what was missing, and then produce reports manually,” Saman says. “Once the reports were done, employees would then convert the reports into Adobe PDF [Portable Document Format] files and transfer numbers to large Excel spreadsheets. The process was cumbersome and time-consuming.
“Now, with the new system, we have much more sophisticated data validation that is done in the beginning of the loan process with automated business rules,” Saman continues, explaining that now JPMMC can respond more quickly as the competitive or regulatory environment changes. “We’ve created a business logic layer in which we can change the business rules without having to bring in a developer to recompile and redeploy the code. In the past, if we had 100 reports to produce, it might have taken us a week or more to get them done. Now it takes between 5 and 10 minutes.”
“One component of JEMS is designed to be used by third-party partners who help us service the loans that have been funded,” Saman says. “Using BizTalk Server, we now have better communications capabilities with third-party systems, even if our partners’ IT systems do not use the same data formats that we have."
JPMMC also uses BizTalk Server to automate the periodic distribution of data to users within the company. In this way, BizTalk Server enables JPMMC to adapt more quickly to changing business needs.
“In terms of efficiency, the JPMMC IT department also has benefited from streamlined procedures."
“By using smart clients with the .NET Framework, we can provide end users with very rich functionality, yet we gain the flexibility of performing many functions within the Internet Explorer Web browser,” Saman says. “We probably release an update that delivers a new feature or addresses a user issue at least once every two months. Up to 150 people use JEMS daily, and, in the past, it would take the IT department several days to physically visit seven locations to make the changes to the client desktops.”
“Now the updates happen automatically—it is push-button deployment, with the changes delivered over the intranet during the night,” he says. “When a user arrives in the morning and starts the application, it takes about 30 seconds to install the update. Our deployment cycle has decreased dramatically, which allows us to present changes and updates to users at an accelerated rate. This is increasingly important in our competitive and ever-changing industry. The solution has allowed us to take business process improvements that were considered a fantasy and turn them into a reality.”
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NET and Web services, please visit these Web sites:
www.microsoft.com/net msdn.microsoft.com/webserviceThe Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.
For more information about the Microsoft .NET Framework, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework
For more information about RDA products and services, visit the Web site at: www.rdacorp.com
For more information about JPMorgan Mortgage Capital products and services, visit the Web site at: www.jpmorgan.com
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