New National Wholesale Lender, StoneWater Mortgage, Selects Guardian Mortgage Documents to Provide Automated Document Preparation Services

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new national wholesale lender, StoneWater Mortgage, is introducing a new footprint to the mortgage industry and has selected Guardian Mortgage Documents (GMD) as its partner for providing an automated document preparation system and related professional services. The StoneWater executive teams’ extensive industry knowledge will enable the company to quickly introduce national services and build a successful future.

Management of Tucson, Ariz.-based StoneWater learned from the experience of building First Magnus from a 12-person shop to one that employed 5,000 in retail and wholesale offices across the country and ranked as the ninth largest national residential lender for purchase volume in the first-half of 2007. A-paper First Magnus closed its doors in August 2007 not because it was tangled in the subprime web but because of the lack of liquidity on Wall Street for its non-agency loans. StoneWater, which will focus on building its wholesale division before expanding into retail, is scheduled to begin its new national business operations during the third quarter of 2008.

“We have a great deal of perspective on what it takes to build a solid national company in the mortgage business,” said Karl F.W. Young, president of StoneWater, who has more than two decades of experience in the mortgage and real estate industries. “At First Magnus, we had a tremendous team of people who focused on building a very successful business technology platform using an in-house, build your own mentality. In this vastly different market of today, we have decided to take a different strategic approach, one where we integrate more best-of-breed solutions that are established and proven industry leaders, into our technology platform. Our technology team spent three months comparing various different document technology providers. We looked at the companies’ technical infrastructure and internal quality control policies and Guardian Mortgage Documents was the clear winner both in terms of cost, quality, and infrastructure. I am confident that Guardian will exceed our expectations at StoneWater. They are a professional, experienced, and well run company.”

StoneWater’s proprietary mortgage banking platform, H₂Online^SM, will use Web services to leverage seamless data transfer into GMD’s system for fully automated loan document generation.

“We are aware of the due diligence the StoneWater team put into determining whether they were going to build or buy a system and we are proud to be selected as the document provider,” said Tim Anschutz, vice president of marketing with GMD. “We recognize and respect how successful this group of experienced veterans was with First Magnus. For them to become one of the first companies to build a new national footprint in today’s environment is very significant. Given their past history [in the industry], we fully expect for them to be very successful.”

StoneWater has contracted GMD to generate all of their disclosures and documents for all agency programs, including FHA and all document output will be in PDF format.

One unique feature of the integration is that GMD will return documents to the StoneWater Web site for closing agent access. Another distinct leverage of technology efficiencies includes GMD developing a custom integration with Mavent, Inc., which will provide automated regulatory compliance for all StoneWater loan products. A “hard stop” in the system will mean that no documents will be drawn based on the compliance thresholds and a notice will be sent to the requester that it falls outside of programmed business rules. This level of quality control will help StoneWater and its customers identify issues in loans early in the process, giving the originator an opportunity to address them immediately.

“We have a great deal of respect for the vision StoneWater management has in bringing this offering to fruition and believe it will help to rebuild some confidence in the mortgage industry at this stage of change,” Anschutz said. “What makes this partnership exciting is the fact that we are supporting a new venture that is challenging the approach for how some lending companies will think about building their technology platforms in the future. Historically, lenders have debated on how to most efficiently build their technology platforms. Typically, the strategic options have involved selecting from a triangle made up of three variables: disparate best-of-breed partners vs. end-to-end total solution partners vs. build your own from scratch. Given today’s environment, we’re seeing a trend in our clients that favors leveraging the best-of-breed core competencies with greater thought and resources put into building a much more integrated portal environment for users. While this provides the benefit of leveraging the core competencies of proven domain experts, users never have to leave their familiar corporate platform.”

About StoneWater Mortgage

StoneWater Mortgage Corporation is a new, nationally reaching mortgage banker built upon more than a decade of exceptional operating history with the management team of one of the nation’s former top 15 lenders.

StoneWater will serve the mortgage community with H₂0nline^sm, a new, state-or-the-art technology platform built specifically for the new market environment with a commitment to exceptional customer service, rapid turn times, and cost and operational efficiencies.

StoneWater’s national headquarters and operations center is located in Tucson, Arizona, and will support production offices in 34 major metropolitan areas by the third quarter of 2009.

About Guardian Mortgage Documents

Lakewood, Colorado-based Guardian Mortgage Documents (GMD) is a leading provider of document preparation, professional services and fully customized outsourced solutions to the national financial services industry.

Since 1987, GMD’s products and services have been built on best-of-class technology designed to provide an inventory of scalable and flexible multi-product capabilities, which can be customized to deliver elegant client solutions. From simple document preparation to fully integrated and customized workflow solutions, GMD technology streamlines all processes to increase efficiencies.

GMD has provided document preparation and delivery services to the mortgage industry for more than 20 years and has several top 10 lenders as long-term customers. The company produces millions of documents a year for its customers and has received multiple industry recognition awards. In addition, GMD has received the highest vender performance score from multiple top tier lenders. For general information, visit www.gmd.com or call (800) 275-4885.

Guardian Mortgage Services (GMS), a division of Guardian Mortgage Documents, provides the national lending community with mortgage fulfillment outsource services that focus on back-office operations including: closing coordination, document preparation and post-closing activities. For more information, visit www.gmd.com/gms or contact GMS at (800) 521-3960, or (303) 942-2004.