When the SRS back-office support team of Xtend, Inc., the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based multi-owned cooperative CUSO, was asked two years ago by fellow CUSO CU*Answers, Inc. to build a core competency in mortgage servicing, they anticipated a relatively steady demand for those services based on the success of previous joint efforts between the two CUSOs.  What they did not expect was a twenty percent (20%) growth almost overnight.  Yet that is precisely what occurred during the month of February when a credit union partner moved part of their back office servicing to the CUSOs.

In early February, Springfield, IL-based Heartland Credit Union ($207M; 24K members) gave the green light for Xtend’s mortgage servicing team to handle the daily settlement work for their portfolio of loans.  Those loans represented a volume increase of nearly twenty-two (22%) percent for the Xtend team.  “When Heartland asked us to help support their growing mortgage business we were pretty excited,” says Xtend President Scott Collins.  “Our team had been working with them from a consultative standpoint off and on since last fall, so we were familiar with their team and their procedures.  During that time, I think that our team demonstrated that we could be a trusted partner in this critical piece of their business.  We worked with CU*Answers and HCU to break out a support structure and pricing that made sense to all parties, then rolled up our sleeves and went to work.”

The mortgages are serviced using tools native to the CU*BASE core data processing suite from CU*Answers.  Currently Xtend provides back office mortgage servicing support for twenty-four CU*Answers credit unions in five (5) states throughout the Midwest, overseeing a total portfolio of nearly 4,000 mortgage loans with a staff of two specialists.