The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, (MISMO) is a not-for-profit subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). It is a developer of technology standards for both residential and commercial property transactions. By promoting improved data consistency, MISMO aims to reduce costs and increase transparency while promoting confidence in mortgages as an asset class for investors.
MISMO develops and maintains a comprehensive set of standards and data points for all stages of the mortgage loan life cycle. Published specifications support the following processes:
- Underwriting,
- Mortgage insurance application,
- Credit reporting,
- Flood and title insurance,
- Property appraisal,
- Loan delivery,
- Product and pricing,
- Loan Servicing, and
- Secondary mortgage market investor reporting.
Historically, information stored in documents (typically word-processor documents or PDFs) has been difficult to extract and transport into other applications or for other uses. Mortgage originators have had to copy and paste or transcribe information from third-party reports into their internal-review documents, spreadsheets, forms or internal systems. This manual process is error-prone and tedious.
MISMO constructs a standard approach, using XML (Extensible Markup Language), whereby two firms can streamline shared data contained in forms or reports, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) recently completed Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure.
As a point of clarification, MISMO does not dictate what kind of software to use or even the appearance of loan-documentation forms. Rather, it dictates how to format data sent to another party. This allows all parties to develop, run and maintain their own platforms while having uniform efficiency. MISMO provides the framework; it is up to the firms using the standards to decide which fields they will need and populate.
MISMO’s data dictionary provides business definitions and corresponding architecture data element tag names. It has been estimated that thousands of fields of data will be available within the Logical Data Model (the data dictionary) when the MISMO effort is complete.
The CFPB is proposing to use the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset (ULDD) of the MISMO data standards for residential mortgages. The ULDD is the common set of data elements required by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for single-family loan deliveries.
It appears that MISMO will play a major role in the future of HMDA and the banks reporting HMDA data to their regulators.