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DS News November 2021

DSNews delivers stories, ideas, links, companies, people, events, and videos impacting the mortgage default servicing industry.

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25 Usually, the TSA runs for 90 days. During that time frame we will conduct training on systems, get to know the people and they will get to know us. We have an idea of what we want to do from a system perspective, having our own IT department. We have an excellent operating system due to its integrations with nearly all our clients' systems. So, I would say it's a matter of just training and then transitioning the new business onto our operating platform. Our workflow is very centered around the customer—from start to finish, people are managing the property from the very start, all the way through completion. Xome's processes were more of an assembly line: A person completes a piece of the preservation process but is not responsible for managing the property through the lifecycle. It was very segmented. To get their employees now trained on our operating platform is one challenge while ensuring no hiccups with any of the clients. We've got to make this as seamless as possible. Tony Maher, Cyprexx's Director of Business Development, has already reached out to their client base to reassure them and walk through the conversion process. Our operating platform also has some sophisticated reporting. Take for example Fannie Mae, they want a lot of data and analytics and we have we created those capabilities. PennyMac is another data-centric, hands-on client. We believe we can offer some nice reporting that they were probably getting, but now they'll be getting it from different groups with a consolidated view. With the challenges of remote work or hybrid workflows, does that complicate something like this, where you're onboarding people from another company into your systems and culture? It does make it more challenging. People like to sit across the table or site visit to "kick the tires." We haven't seen the office building in Austin. ey have a lot more people working remotely than we do. ey had roughly 60 people in Austin and 10 here in Dallas with the remining spread across the US, working from home. We'll leave that in place until we see how the workflow goes. Cyprexx operations has gone back to a hybrid work environment, working up to three days in office. Work from home and remote-based employees does make training a little bit more challenging. We will use Microsoft Teams, where one of our coordinators using a headset and a mirror image on the trainee screen can speak to how the process is managed, keystrokes used and the trainee can see the system, process, and listen to instructions. e Cyprexx coordinator basically "drives the bus" and when vendors are called the trainee can hear the call. ey'll do that for a day or two, and then I would say to the trainee "now it's your turn." It's a bit like if I drove you to a stadium, you'd kind of remember where I went, but if you drove it the next time around, you'd know exactly where everything is. If you put them all into a conference room and you're showing them a sophisticated system, half of them start drifting away. Most of these folks have been there for several years, so they know the industry, they know the terms, so it shouldn't be as difficult, but it would be nice if we could take four or five of our folks and send them to Austin for a month, so we have everybody in one place to go through it. ankfully, COVID taught us how to use a lot of technologies that we didn't use before. You mentioned trying to speed this process along so you could time the release of the announcement during the Five Star Conference [this past September]. How challenging was that timeline? e challenge was completing the quality of earnings and getting that in such a way that a financial institution could look at and say, yes, I'm prepared to give you funding on this basis because I know it's a sound business model. Another challenge was getting the legal agreements in place. We had financial, legal and HR diligence running concurrently. We had to get all that in place, work on the purchase agreement, and then get an approval process stated with lenders. e lender had a few weeks to pull everything together, and that involves a separate set of legal documents for approval with their own committees and credit officers. We had a very focused, dedicated team that did nothing but this for the past 90 days. ere was a lot of heavy lifting on both sides. We wanted to get it done, so we had a full quarter to get ready for what we believe will be a spike in volume, whether it's the eviction moratoriums being lifted, or if default rates increase from forbearance plans expiring. We wanted to get ourselves in a position where, if and when that volume hit, we could start and not miss a heartbeat. In our case we were trying to get different organizations together on one operating platform, so that was what the rush was. From the seller's point of view, they were also trying to get it done quickly. Mr. Cooper's primary focus right now is to get back to their core. Some M&A transactions can drag on for 120 to 180 days+, and what often happens is, people get "deal fatigue." If you can get a concentrated group that focuses on it, they're not worried about their day-to-day work as that's been picked up by somebody else, it helps. e primary goals for Cyprexx were to get it completed as quickly as possible so that we could integrate, train, and get ready for new clients and a potential increase in defaults. "When we heard in the industry that Xome was looking to sell most of its components, we immediately reached out to their operations folks to let them know we wanted to be involved in the process and have a seat at the table."

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