EmploymentChek: Simplifying Employment Verification
“The quality of Pathfinder’s work is outstanding. This is the team you want when you’ve got a really tough problem.”
Ray Petta
Chief Operating Officer, Rapid Reporting
Company:
Rapid Reporting is an innovative provider of next-generation tools to combat financial fraud. The privately-held company was founded in 1998 and is currently the leading vendor of borrower verification solutions to the U.S. mortgage industry. Rapid Reporting is renowned for initiating and improving programs with government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration for the private sector. The new product, EmploymentChek, continues this tradition as the first employment verification tool that captures employment information from individual employers, as well as employers who contributed to automated subscription services. In 2007, the company was named as the winner of Mortgage Technology magazine’s prestigious annual Fix-It Award.
Challenge:
Employment income is usually the primary means for an individual to repay a personal loan. Industry analysts estimate that 64% of all mortgage fraud is income- or identity-related. In order to combat instances of fraud, Rapid Reporting needed another tool to allow lenders to quickly and conclusively verify the details of a loan applicant’s employment. This tool had to work seamlessly with Rapid Reporting’s existing tools, IncomeChek and DirectChek, to provide issuers of credit with information to assess the risks associated with an application. It also had to implement a modular framework which allows for easy switch out of data vendors, without the need for rewriting the application.
Solution:
Rapid Reporting tapped Pathfinder to co-create EmploymentChek, an addition to their existing web portal developed in Ruby on Rails. EmploymentChek combines phone interviews by trained investigators with proprietary queries to data partners, which allows issuers of credit to verify a borrower’s employment details and ensure the validity of a borrower’s employer. This risk assessment assists the customer’s approval decision on the loan application and follows the application to mortgage buyers on the secondary market in an effort to reiterate the safety of the loan as an investment vehicle.
Impact:
Working within Rapid Reporting’s existing Ruby on Rails environment, Pathfinder’s team delivered this highly-robust, first-of-breed solution in just over four months. EmploymentChek enforces anti-fraud best practices and delivers extremely detailed reports including: extended public records findings and risk flags, responses to each interview question, interviewer’s subjective impressions, and detailed logging of unsuccessful interview attempts.
During development of EmploymentChek, the mortgage industry went through a period of downturn, which shifted priorities for the application. Pathfinder’s use of the Agile development process, which allows on-the-fly prioritization and reimagination of scope and features, allowed us the flexibility to meet the client’s changing needs in a volatile economic climate.
In addition, EmploymentChek’s service-oriented architecture allows for data vendors to be easily swapped out. This modular framework maximizes flexibility and eliminates the need for retooling the application when switching vendors, which saves time and money.