Mortgage Compliance Magazine by Phil McCall | April 2, 2019
One of the more pressing initiatives over the past year relates to the updates to the Uniform Residential Loan Application (URLA) and the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset (ULDD). For the first time in about 20 years, the URLA is getting a major overhaul and it isn’t just cosmetic. The URLA has a whole new format, with new fields, data points and requirements. With the initiatives going into effect in February 2020, it’s high time that lenders take a look at how they will impact the industry’s approach to loan quality going forward.
ULDD and URLA: Why and Why Now?
Before we jump into the implications of these two initiatives, let’s do a quick review of the whats and whys. The URLA has seen virtually no changes for the past 20 or so years. Why is it being changed now? Good question. In short, it’s because this should have happened a long time ago. This change was inevitable. We can’t go on conducting business the way we did 20 years ago, when our industry has changed so dramatically and technology has evolved so much. Think about what personal computing was 20 years ago, and where we were with data collection and analysis. We’re capable of so much more. Our industry needs to start implementing a way to leverage the technological capabilities that are now at our fingertips. And the ULDD and URLA help us do just that.
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