From John Haring, Wilqo’s Head of Compliance:
Over the years, more than a few CEOs have confessed to me that Compliance is their boogeyman — the creature lurking under the bed, keeping them awake at night. And honestly, I can’t blame them. For the past 25 years, I’ve been on a mission to face that monster head-on — flashlight in hand and tech tools at the ready — to prove that the compliance boogeyman can be tamed.
My own haunted house of compliance began in a modest mortgage broker shop before expanding into the sprawling mansion of a multi-state independent mortgage banker. Each room had its own ghosts — Federal, State, and Agency requirements — and the trick was finding the right combination of technology, workflows, and safeguards to keep them from turning into full-blown nightmares.
The three main beasts I had to exorcise were familiar to anyone in the business:
- Disclosure Demons — ensuring disclosures were accurate and delivered on time without summoning High Cost or Higher Priced Mortgage penalties.
- Policy Poltergeists — enforcing rules so that loan officers only took applications where they were authorized, and ensuring procedures didn’t vanish into thin air.
- Reporting Revenants — conjuring up the right reports (HMDA, NMLS MCR, and the many state filings) that regulators demanded, often at the most frightful moments.
And this was before the Dodd-Frank Act cast its long shadow across the industry. Just as we’d started to get a handle on the Mortgage Disclosure Improvement Act (MDIA), RESPA reform (remember the 2010 GFE?), and state licensing, along came the next wave of beasts: ATR/QM, TRID, and the ever-updating HOEPA, HPML, and HMDA rules. Each new regulation rose from the grave just as we’d finished burying the last one.
These changes consumed the roadmaps of mortgage technology providers, forcing originators to migrate to whichever system seemed least likely to bite. But even then, the story of compliance was far from over. Implementing all those changes often felt like performing surgery with Frankenstein’s tools — doing the best we could with the tech we had. Some mandates appeared without warning, like ghosts through the wall — NMLS Mortgage Call Report changes, or the infamous North Carolina quarterly filings that haunted lenders with non-standardized data.
Meanwhile, compliance testing itself became its own haunted maze. Tests were useful for spotting problems, but without being tied into workflows, they sometimes let cursed loans slip through the cracks — closing and selling with active compliance failures that no one saw until it was too late.
That brings us to today — and to Charlie.
With a modern tech stack and architecture, Charlie isn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, it shines a light into every corner of compliance, driving the monsters back under the bed where they belong.
Here’s how Charlie slays the compliance boogeyman:
- Smart Workflows: Compliance test feedback doesn’t vanish into the ether; it spawns clear, actionable tasks that help lenders resolve issues with consistency and confidence.
- Built-in Insight: Native BI tools act like crystal balls, giving lenders visibility into their data without having to dig through every single loan.
- Agile Adaptation: Frequent release cycles mean we can respond to regulatory changes — even those that appear from the mist with little to no warning — faster than ever before.
At the end of the day, this is what all CEOs and compliance managers crave: a peaceful night’s sleep. With Charlie, the compliance boogeyman finally stays in the closet — and the only thing left to be afraid of on Halloween night is running out of candy. 🍬
