Helped a Blue-Chip Investment Bank Minimize Losses on Legacy Whole Loan Pools and Enhance the Quality of New Acquisitions

A major investment bank was losing millions of dollars because loan collateral was in disarray, their diligence process was disorganized, and a third-party vendor had failed to properly clear collateral after each transaction. The portfolio was rife with missing documents, foreclosure holds, and numerous loans that were never transferred to the bank’s name, so they could not be traded. The vendor’s reporting was abysmal, so the bank had minimal visibility into the issues that needed to be fixed. In the meantime, the bank was continuing to bid on whole loan pool opportunities and needed effective diligence and curative expertise to resolve these issues going forward.

SitusAMC began a deep audit into every document in the legacy inventory to identify materiality and curability, prioritizing the riskiest assets. The team quickly discovered that roughly a third of loans with foreclosure holds -- on which the bank was losing money -- were assigned into its name, but no one knew it. The previous vendor had completed the documentation but never filed it with the custodian. While working on the bank’s legacy pool, the investment bank won a bid for a portfolio of 5,000 nonperforming loans and engaged SitusAMC to perform diligence and pre-close collateral review. SitusAMC uploaded the files to its diligence platform and leveraged OCR technology to spot troubled loans based on a list of key words identified by the client. A report was created with the highest-risk loans to be prioritized during collateral review and then these files were run through its collateral management system which automatically generates exceptions and grades curability on a scale.

SitusAMC’s technology removes manual analysis, minimizes human error, compresses turnaround times and gives the client detail reporting at their fingertips. The project was completed in the six-week window, enabling the bank to acquire a higher quality pool of assets with clear reporting on exceptions and based on the quality of work provided, SitusAMC was engaged to conduct the post-close trade management. To ensure proper collateral management going forward SitusAMC created a reporting structure in which loan-level data is viewable at the portfolio level.