Mortgage servicers are under pressure to take action now to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Many borrowers will be coming off of forbearances later this year and will need permanent solutions for their delinquent mortgages. Before we discuss this problem, and the two main paths ahead for servicers, let’s review how we got to the current situation.
Background
For millions of Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on their ability to make their mortgage payments. The federal government responded by passing the CARES Act, which helped keep people in their homes by allowing borrowers to get forbearances. As…
Our April spotlight of the month goes to Barclay Dunn, Senior Software Engineer. The spotlight recognizes Barclay’s commitment to Brace Software’s Technical and Business Success. She talked to us about how Brace has contributed to her professional growth as well as her impact on Brace.
What is your position and what does that entail?
Senior Software Engineer: While we are primarily a Java shop building REST APIs and a proprietary rules engine, there is plenty of room to get involved in other facets of our technology stack built upon things like Vert.x, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and Elixir, just to name a…
Our March spotlight of the month goes to Mike Schoen, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition . The spotlight recognizes Mike’s commitment to Brace Software’s Technical and Business Success. He talked to us about how Brace has contributed to his professional growth as well as his impact on Brace.
What is your position and what does that entail?
Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition. I lead all Talent and HR functions here at Brace.
Tell me about your career before joining Brace and how you ended up here.
I began my career at an executive recruiting agency called Career Path Group. I worked with…
Our February spotlight of the month goes to Haarthi Sadasivam, Senior Product Manager. The spotlight recognizes Haarthi’s commitment to Brace Software’s Technical and Business Success. She talked to us about how Brace has contributed to her professional growth as well as her impact on Brace.
What is your position and what does that entail?
I’m a product manager here at Brace. I work with our customers and the servicing ecosystem to understand needs that can be solved through technology and help translate that vision into reality.
Tell me about your career before joining Brace and how you ended up here.
…
We are excited to share our press release from earlier today announcing our Series B. We could not be more thrilled to share this moment with you — while we take a moment to recognize this milestone, it’s time to get back to work and continue building a new generation of mortgage servicing software!
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Brace, a digital mortgage-servicing platform, today announced that it raised an additional $15.7M in Series B funding led by Canvas…
Our January spotlight of the month goes to Mike Goodman, Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead. The spotlight recognizes Mike’s commitment to Brace Software’s Engineering Success. He talked to us about how Brace has contributed to his professional growth as well as his impact on Brace.
What is your position and what does that entail? *
I’m a senior backend engineer and technical lead. That means I get to plan, build, and work on a lot of the fun backend systems we have here (like our APIs and loss mitigation rules engine) and to enable everyone else to do the same…
Our December spotlight of the month goes to Alice Erickson, Director of Finance and Accounting. The spotlight recognizes Alice’s commitment to Brace Software’s Financial and Business Success. She talked to us about how Brace has contributed to her professional growth as well as her impact on Brace.
What is your position and what does that entail?
I’m the Director of Finance & Accounting. I’m both the Head of Finance and the Controller, which means I manage almost everything related to money and financial analytics at Brace.
Tell me about your career before joining Brace and how you ended up here.
…
Background
When Congress passed the CARES Act in March 2020, it allowed borrowers of “federally backed” mortgages to ask for a six-month payment forbearance. To date, nearly 7% of outstanding mortgages are now in forbearance versus only 0.25% of loans in forbearance in early March. This number is only expected to increase as more and more Americans file for unemployment and apply for financial assistance. As this crisis unfolds, we see a tidal wave of work in the future for servicers and the need to adopt technology enabled solutions will be crucial.
As a reminder, a forbearance:
Is a temporary…
Banks, lenders, and mortgage servicers are seeing a flood of requests for mortgage payment relief. Average hold times for some of the largest mortgage companies are between three and four hours, according to estimates by Digital Risk as reported by the WSJ. For those customers in dire need of having their payments paused, help cannot come soon enough.
When assistance finally comes, the confusion starts. Banks’ and servicers’ borrower-facing communications are full of legalese and industry terminology, and many of them do not take the time to explain the short-term and long-term options for a borrower in an understandable manner…
What makes you unique in the space? Brace is the first platform aimed at bringing the broader, end-to-end mortgage servicing suite into the 21st Century. Starting with loss mitigation, we’re building software to systematically replace the outmoded, largely paper-based, and legacy systems status quo. We’re building technology with frameworks that have only become available in the last few years — applying lessons from origination and drawing further expertise from well beyond the traditional confines of the mortgage industry.
What this has allowed us to do is something novel, but necessary: design a product that keeps in mind the interest of…
Brace
Software to Revolutionize Mortgage Servicing
