Freddie Mac is buying and integrating third-party technology applications and systems to help it speed mortgage products to the market faster than its long-standing practice of going it alone, company officials said.
“Speed to market is paramount,” said Ed Albrigo, vice president of the enterprise program office at Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. home funding company, reports said.
“This major shift is moving us to an environment where we’re looking to buy and integrate all of the components we need front to back of the company,” Abrigo said, according to reports.
The aim is “to get products into the market faster to support our mission, in particular as we start looking at a broader diversity of loans that we want to potentially buy and securitize,” Albrigo said, according to Reuters.
Albrigo and other Freddie Mac officials spoke to reporters at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Technology in Mortgage Banking conference.
Freddie Mac, like Fannie Mae, is a government-sponsored enterprise charged with adding liquidity into the U.S. housing market. It does this by buying mortgages and packaging them as securities for resale to investors or for its own investment.
Both mortgage giants have been rocked by accounting scandals. In December 2004, Fannie Mae replaced Franklin Raines, its chairman and CEO, who announced he was taking early retirement, and Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer, Timothy Howard, resigned Dec. 21.
