DIMONT provides insurance claims services to mortgage servicers to help protect the property collateral behind mortgages against natural disasters and default. The company uses an automated property data pre-fill from ATTOM Data Solutions to streamline the insurance claims services and other services it provides to mortgage servicers.
“Today we’re still the largest of our kind, and our clients are really outsourcing a very niche type of process,” said DIMONT CEO Denis Brosnan, referring to the insurance claims process. “Employees are hard to find, they’re expensive … outsourcing works because they are converting fixed costs to variable. … A lot of our clients are rushing to that sort of solution.”
A recession or spate of natural disasters like that seen in 2017 could increase business for DIMONT, but the company isn’t depending on hard-to-predict swings in the weather or housing market to fuel its growth.
“We would expect defaults to go up in a recession and so we would expect our volumes to go up dramatically. It’s a significantly positive thing for volumes to grow … DIMONT did very well in the early stages of the last recession,” Brosnan said.
How Property Data Pre-Fill Can Save Servicers Millions
In the meantime, mortgage foreclosure volumes are hovering at historically low levels except for some regional spikes caused by natural disaster, and DIMONT is continuing to focus on what has helped it succeed in both high default and low default environments: providing its clients with outsourced insurance claims services.
DIMONT is also encouraging its mortgage servicing clients to look ahead to the next recession, whenever that may be, and to implement efficiencies such as property data pre-fill that will quickly multiply into mammoth savings should default volumes spike. One practical example, according to Brosnan, is to adopt best practices learned by lenders during the last recession.
“Maybe those are tactics and tool sets that prime lenders didn’t think were necessary given their lower delinquency rates,” Brosnan explained. “Now is the time to consider those tools because in a recessionary environment the costs you could save with these is tremendous, in the millions of dollars.”
