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59 playing field with competitors, Vella said. "If you don't have proper workflow, exception- based reporting, and rules engines with all of the different nuances, you will not be effective." Borrowers, especially those who are behind in their payments, could most likely be impacted, Vella added. In the past, they might have looked at refinancing to solve the issue, but rates have already gone up 50 basis points, and will go higher. As such, it will be more difficult to refinance. Add to that the increased cost of groceries, energy, and everything else due to inflation. Servicers need to be nimble to react to borrower circumstances and evolving market situations. Senior leadership will be essential to dealing with the regulatory and other challenges, according to Douglas. "We're hoping that this will resolve itself before it gets to a policy failure of foreclosure. But servicers are going to have borrowers who haven't been paying in years and who are not going to be able to pay. Some of them are going to end up needing to go through a property disposition option. Contractor delays are another issue that will need to be resolved." Holzmeister advised that servicers should position themselves so that they don't have delays they then have to explain to regulators. "e question kind of pivots to, what can I do to be prepared to hit those timelines? You have to use EVAs and file for your extensions to make sure you're getting every opportunity and day that you can get. You have to look at your portfolio ahead of time for those with their last payments coming due." Holzmeister also advised servicers to have contingency plans to attempt to avoid penalties. Vella added that subservicers should deal with loss mitigation on a portfolio-by- portfolio basis, not on a pool basis, tailoring their decisions toward their investors while also doing everything they can to work out a solution acceptable to the borrower. THE TECHNOLOGICAL LEARNING CURVE Early in the pandemic, servicers' remote workers had to contend with lack of equipment, noisy home environments, unfamiliar technology, lack of tech support, lack of bandwidth, and similar issues. While many of those issues have eased (e.g., tech and bandwidth have improved for many, children are back in school in most areas), there are times when a lack of tech support is still an issue, according to Holzmeister. During the webinar, Vella ticked off some critical areas of technology that servicers should be investing in to surmount these hurdles, including self-servicing apps for borrowers, workflow programs, robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI) to help improve efficiencies and manage costs. Using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or similar platforms can help maintain face- to-face contact and personalization, helping bring workers into a servicer's culture. "One of the important points to consider as we're interacting with customers through various technological channels is that we have the ability to do intelligent analytics in tracking the conversation, whether it's email or chat," said Steve Staid, EVP of the Mortgage Practice at Sourcepoint. "e emphasis on intelligent analytics becomes more important than ever, because we need to know more about the mortgages than the people calling us do." Intelligent analytics will put that information at the agent's fingertips, but calls need to be monitored to ensure agents are providing that information to the customers. Vella noted that the end of moratoria and forbearances also means servicers will be moving a large percentage of their employees over from origination work, where many were shifted a couple of years ago, to default servicing duties. Since many of the new and veteran employees will be dealing with relatively new compliance rules, stringent oversight will be necessary. e new employees will need extra help to ensure all I's are dotted and T's crossed. "In today's environment, that's more important than ever," Vella added. ere will be a similar approach for the forbearance exit process as for the loss mitigation process, with regulators looking for outliers, Douglas predicted. He recommended "The emphasis on intelligent analytics becomes more important than ever, because we need to know more about the mortgages than the people calling us do." —Steve Staid, EVP of the Mortgage Practice, Sourcepoint