Critigen

Sector: Financial

Genworth Financial Canada

Background 

Genworth Financial Canada, one of the largest private suppliers of mortgage default insurance in Canada, helps make home ownership more accessible throughout the country. 

Challenge

Genworth operates a highly transactional business—they manage and update fourteen million property records every month. Not surprisingly, they experienced challenges related to working with so many property records. Genworth wanted help to:

• Meet demand for near-immediate turnaround to lenders on application decisions.
• Address the often fragmented and imprecise address data used to support automated collateral decision-making. 
• Integrate accurate and reliable data on changing housing markets into their decision-making process.
• Resolve some of their challenges with accurately scrubbing their database by postal address on a multidimensional level, and thereby alleviate the resulting manual intervention and more costly and time-consuming property appraisals.

Solution

Genworth chose to use DMTI Spatial’s Location Hub software as its property module. DMTI Spatial enlisted Critigen to help design the highly collaborative hardware platform for Genworth. DMTI Spatial also contracted with Critigen to provide project management office capability to Genworth. Critigen’s responsibilities were to develop the upfront services such as analysis, design and build management; integrate management services, including project control and administration, work order negotiation and administration, reporting and cost control; and provide back office services such as recruiting and resource management. 

Result

The partnership between DMTI Spatial and Critigen allowed Genworth to:

• Realize over a 20% improvement in property matching against automated valuation model data.
• Make better decisions by integrating more robust datasets into its property valuation decision-making processes.
• Improve automated collateral decision-making to reduce turnaround times, lower manual underwriting costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Access greater insight into insurance risk through its new platform for portfolio profiling and volume tracking. 
• Integrate property rules and guidelines.

The project is scoped to take two years to complete. The first phase is complete, and has received high marks from Genworth. “We are benefiting from improved address scrubbing, and also exploring the ability we now have to easily access the full value of integrated location intelligence,” said Stuart Levings, Genworth’s Chief Risk Officer. “Ultimately, this is going to keep us ahead of the curve and make us more successful.”

Critigen and DMTI Spatial are currently in the project’s second development phase, which includes design and implementation of Genworth’s property hub and collateral risk management system. This phase will enable Genworth to store, use, analyze and visualize all of their portfolio/property data and help them to identify new decision criteria at an individual property level.

Critigen designed the second phase platform, and has played a key role in the design and development of the geospatial-mapping interface for this phase. As a result of its success, Critigen has been asked to implement and manage the development, quality assurance, and productions systems for Genworth’s Oakville office.