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77 barrage of industry challenges. However, with business continuity in question, and what may be a near total absence of manpower, default servicing is in for its greatest challenge yet. Default servicers need to help borrowers rebuild and recover. To do so, servicers will need to effectively bridge gaps in changing relief regulation, investor guidelines, and program offerings. e key to bridging these gaps is automation. e mortgage industry prides itself on embracing digital technology. Yet, even with clearly defined strategies, areas within mortgage servicing can be left with significant gaps in innovation. at includes default servicing, which has not been much of a priority in recent years. During the financial crisis, an enormous amount of attention was given to delinquency, foreclosure, and bankruptcy. With today's record low foreclosure rates, however, default servicing has thinned out with the exception of disaster relief. Yet, success in the mortgage servicing industry has always meant taking a responsive, flexible, cost-effective approach to business. Despite the forthcoming systemic stress on default servicing, the demands remain the same. Servicers must create operational efficiency, minimize costs, manage risk, and both innovate and improve the customer experience and retention. Servicing operations must commit to avoiding further breakdown in processes, uniformity, and efficiency. In other words, they must stop resorting to reactive approaches to issues, which typically leads to manual processes and spreadsheets. e smarter approach is for servicers to take what precious time and budget resources they have and invest them in automated workflows built on today's technologies. By doing so, they will be able to create a sophisticated, flexible, and transparent approach to business processes and decisioning created for today's digital framework. As manpower becomes stretched to capacity, automation allows services to place control in the hands of their operations team, who are the "boots on the ground" during disaster relief efforts. e operations team is best suited to understanding existing processes, rules, and decisioning, and best equipped to add another iteration of changing requirements and circumstances. ey don't have the time to wait for IT development to help them out, but existing automated workflow technology can help them immediately. e other crucial step for servicers is to identify a vendor partner that deeply understands the servicing business down to every detail and has a proven commitment to the industry. Equally as important, the vendor must have an established track record for rapid requirement development and deployment. Ideally, this will involve a SaaS application that stores complex rules and leverages dynamic decisioning and AI to understand data captured throughout the loan lifecycle. A servicer's automated workflow application should be able to access data that supports subsequent processes and is able to make determinations, define exceptions, and create alerts. It should also be able to guide users through various tasks, scenarios, and decision paths to yield required results. Most importantly, it should enable customer self-service, so that borrowers who need help immediately are able to get it. If current disasters—including the coronavirus—have taught us anything, it's that servicing needs can change drastically on a dime. at means technologies that servicers depend on must be flexible enough to handle rapid shifts in default servicing. At the end of the day, workflow automation and the help of an experienced business partner is really the only option for addressing today's disaster relief challenges. We may never be able to prevent disasters, but we can always improve the ways we respond to them. Jane Mason is CEO and founder of Clarifire and the original architect behind CLARIFIRE, an application that brings all parties within mortgage servicing operations together onto one secure platform and is a recognized leader in technology solutions for the financial services and mortgage industries. With over 15 years' experience in financial services technology, Mason started her career in business operations, quickly becoming an executive of an international law firm. As an entrepreneur and innovator, Mason has received numerous awards and accolades for her service in local business and the national mortgage stage. If current disasters— including the coronavirus— have taught us anything, it's that servicing needs can change drastically on a dime. That means technologies that servicers depend on must be flexible enough to handle rapid shifts in default servicing.