Agile, a Philadelphia-based fintech company focused on mortgage-backed securities (MBS), announced on Monday the execution of the mortgage industry’s first fully-automated Assignment of Trade (AOT) transaction. AOT transactions involve three counterparties — a mortgage originator, a mortgage investor, and a broker dealer — and are designed to transfer loan collateral and hedge positions to a mortgage investor.
Prior to Agile’s execution of its fully-automated AOT, MCT — a leading mortgage capital markets technology firm — completed automation of the process for loan collateral assignment between mortgage originators and mortgage investors. With this transaction, however, Agile has automated the process for trade assignment between mortgage investors and broker dealers, the company said in a statement.
“The timeliness and effectiveness of Agile’s AOT automation [have] significantly impacted how our traders communicate and execute for our clients,” Thomas McHugh, managing director and head of mortgage group and agency MBS trading for J.V.B. Financial Group, said. “From a back-office vantage point, the Agile system’s ease of implementation and straight-through trade processing has made this a seamless integration into our firm’s daily processes.”
Agile said its new automated process replaces the manual legacy practices that are typically employed by broker dealers and mortgage investors, including printing, executing, and faxing tri-party agreements.
All parties operating on the Agile trades database of record can enable an assignment process that the company says is “more seamless.” Dealer-to-dealer assignments are also electronically executed on Agile’s platform.
“As a mortgage investor, Village Capital is always looking for ways to integrate technology to improve the price and efficiency for our lenders,” said Brandon Knudson, VP of national correspondent sales at Village Capital. Agile’s full automation of the AOT process allows us to pass along improved execution to our customers as well as improve the efficiency of processing the AOTs. Since everyone is using the same database of record, it greatly reduces any potential errors and speeds up the process of acceptance.”
AOT functionality is currently available to all Agile platform users.