Compare-as-a-Service (CfaaS) is a cloud service that helps compare anything in the financial services ranging from mortgages to ancillary services required to fulfill a transaction; CfaaS would provide apps using container-based abstraction. CfaaS being a cloud service makes it highly scalable, available, and configurable with low to – no cost to maintain a protocol across the industry (for instance, using a communication protocol similar to MISMO* but uses JSON to communicate with various real estate service providers seamlessly).

The provider will offer the framework, or the orchestration platform, along with the containers that can be deployed and managed by users for on-prem installations (lenders, real estate service providers, aggregators, and government securitization agencies). Through this orchestration, essential IT functions specific to financial services are automated.

With Compare-as-a-Service, you centralize your data into a single repository, where you can manage it, categorize it, make it available for comparison, search for it, or do whatever you wish with it to facilitate comparison.

Why Compare-as-a-Service (CfaaS)?

The most significant benefit of abstraction by CfaaS means that a user can apportion their processing/computing power between several virtual environments and not have to worry about scalability and integration to new aggregators while allowing the CfaaS provider to carry the burden to do that for the user. Additionally, the user doesn’t have to worry about more recent releases on standards across the industry. (For instance, moving from MISMO 3.6 over to MISMO 4.0 when it is released)

In a nutshell, CfaaS provides reduced time to benefit for the financial services industry, providing no-cost to development and provides plug and play framework for the advancement of existing services or building newer services to meet the demands of Web 3.0

MISMO, Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, which celebrates its 22nd birthday this month (yes, they are above drinking age. Responsible. :) ), has made strides to address electronic commerce issues in the mortgage industry. Through broad industry collaboration, MISMO has created and continues to develop new standards that support solutions to the industry’s toughest business issues, reduce costs, and improve transparency and communications in housing finance. With Compare-as-a-Service (CfaaS), building upon progress MISMO has made smaller players, newer players, and trailblazers all have a real shot at leap-frogging the giant gorillas; big banks.

Why Compare?

The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike … No, I am not going on a tangent. The bottom line is this – humans (persons/beings) became smarter by learning. But they learned by comparing. In the previous sentence, we know about our ancestors; why? Because we are comparing with what we know of them and what we know of ourselves or our environment and we mentally compare to find out quickly the differences between the two. Even most inventions are inventions because they do something different from what already existed, whether a process or a device. If you compared two items and they were both identical, then does the second item still qualify as an invention? You have to compare & find out!

So now imagine the importance of comparison in financial services. There is a treasure trove of use cases for service providers in financial services (appraisal services, title & closing services, inspection services, insurance services, etcetera), but I will focus on borrower use cases for this article. Borrowers can quickly compare insurance providers (auto, life, title), closing services (closing, escrow, attorney, survey/search), inspection services (pest, roof, structural), and the list goes on. One excellent use-case of Compare-as-a-Service (CfaaS) is to see all of the above services being compared and, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, find opportunities for the borrower that are even cheaper than what Lender offers (of the users choice). And last but not least, using Machine Learning to create predictive models to craft a custom mortgage for the users’ financial benefit.

Comparing a financial instrument, however complex it might be, today it is possible but is widely done by experts using different systems and services available in the market. But no organization has done more to develop and perfect the comparison of financial instruments than Confer Inc. By ensuring comparison is contextually relevant and can have multiple goals in the same search, we take the comparison of financial products to the next level.

“MISMO is the Language of Lending” – Mismo.org

* MISMO – Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization

softwareengineering #cloudcomputing #fintech #mortgage

Yatin Karnik.

Founder & CEO,

Confer Inc.