Axway Secure Client simplifies secure file management for FTP, SFTP, and HTTP connections. Real-time actionable insights help Fannie Mae instrument the customer experience.
Fannie Mae operates at the heart of the largest capital market in the world, which is how you finance American houses to own or to rent. We do the job of taking the mortgages that lenders provide to borrowers and turning them into securities that we sell in the world. It's a very large dollar value—many trillions of dollars—and we make billions of dollars in payments every month on those kinds of securities.
The mortgage market in the U.S. has been static for many years. Everyone who's applied for a mortgage here will know it's a very paper-based process and very intense, and it can take a long time to complete a mortgage. But like so many aspects of the financial services market, we've been experiencing our own disruption recently, and that's leading to a much more real-time and dynamic market. As our lender partners change the consumer experience for people, they expect Fannie Mae to be there to support them with real-time analytics, real-time ability to process and underwrite the mortgages they sell, and to bring them into our securities.
We've been seeing our market go from a static, almost multi-month transactional process into a less than 10-day experience for people, where the market is speeding up generally. The Actway product suite was one that we selected because of its long history of looking at real-time process dynamics, process numbers, process intelligence, and the ability to make it really all about the business process. We had a lot of the technical monitors that you'd expect an IT shop to have, but we were having a hard time connecting them with the underlying business process, and that's a business process that extends from our customers all the way into our shop.
The metrics we've selected are ones that, for the most part, come out of the box because what you're looking for is whether today looks like yesterday, if there are any differences in what you're seeing, what is abnormal behavior, and so on. So, the training of the tool, the ingestion of large volumes of data to create these patterns—what does good look like—was an important starting point. From that, we track just about everything: how quickly our customers are getting served, how quickly our partners are serving us, and we go all the way down to the individual server and process level by aggregating data from those lower-level technical monitors. This way, we can see and drill down from the business experience to the underlying systems and processes.
It's helped enormously. I mean, we used to take maybe an hour at the beginning of an incident just to triage where the problem might be. With the dashboard now and how we track, we can very quickly get to the part of the infrastructure we think is the problem. In terms of looking forward, the vision for us is one of customer centricity, and I think that's where we get our main simplifying principle of adopting a tool like Actway. With its focus on real-time operational intelligence, institutions can be filled with look-back dashboards, lots of MI, and lots of monitoring tools. But if you focus in more on what's really important, which is the customer, and look at operational intelligence as a way to view the whole customer experience, it becomes fairly obvious that what you want to do is start from the customer and drill back into your infrastructure and processes. From that, you gain real insights into what matters, which is how your customers are experiencing your systems.
So, that's really the heart of our next step. We've deployed Actway on a number of specific processes, but our customers touch many processes. The next step is to aggregate that together into a single customer view that ultimately will be shared with them. They'll be able to see what they are experiencing with Fannie Mae in real-time through these dashboards.
