Bringing controls to mortgage document inventory

The situation

Multi-state audit findings pointed at a basic problem: nobody could say which mortgage documents were authoritative. Documents lived in inboxes, personal drives and desktops. There was no version control, no way to verify that a document was current or matched a state and loan type, and finding the right one depended on long-tenured employees.

My role

I investigated the findings, led the cross-functional work with Operations, Legal and Compliance, and owned research, design and project delivery. I built the solution to enterprise IT standards rather than waiting in the IT queue, and handed administration and development capability to internal teams so the bank could own it afterward.

What I did

• Audited the population. Reviewed 5,000+ records to find the real set of controlled documents, validating each finding with compliance, operations and administration.
• Designed the control model. Role-based access by job and operational need; metadata for loan type, state applicability and version; a standard versioning schema with archiving so only current documents stay active.
• Built it without code. Delivered the repository in SharePoint and InfoPath, including filtering by state, loan type and compliance role.
• Modeled mortgage scenarios. Determined which documents are required for a given state, loan amount and other factors. The model supported internal and third-party audits.

Outcome

Every in-scope document was validated and versioned, so only current documents entered loan processing. The inventory shrank by roughly 90%, retrieval got faster, and audit conversations got easier because the answer to “which version is authoritative?” was now a lookup instead of a debate. Administration moved to internal teams, which kept the controls alive after the project ended.