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Corporate Overview
Headquartered in Longwood, Fla., RATA Associates has provided the financial services industry with cost-effective Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) compliance software and geocoding service solutions for more than 23 years.
RATA’s newer Comply Suite software is the industry’s most modern solution for financial institutions to achieve compliance with HMDA, CRA and the Fair Lending Act. Investing nearly $3.5 million in its Comply Suite compliance software over the last five years, RATA designed its suite using Microsoft’s latest .NET and .SQL technology.
Since its initial release in 2004, RATA’s financial institution clients have submitted 100 percent accurate HMDA and CRA data each year using RATA’s Comply Suite software and GeoPlus Geocoding services, validating the quality and performance of the newer Comply Suite software. Since1990, more than 600 financial institutions of all types achieved 100 percent accurate HMDA and CRA submissions using RATA’s previous DOS-based software and RATA’s GeoPlus outsourcing geocoding solution, which has also been completely updated to use modern .NET and .SQL technology. As a result, service geocoding turnaround times are now equal or better than any in-house geocoding mechanism.
Negotiating the complex world of reporting requirements is a challenge for lenders, but RATA’s suite of solutions has helped hundreds of financial institutions submit HDMA/CRA data accurately and efficiently. RATA places the utmost importance on customer service and client satisfaction, offering exceptional hands-on support. In five years, the company has gained many new clients and has not lost a single client to a competitor, further validating RATA’s excellent technology and services.
Regulators emphasize that maintaining HMDA/CRA and Fair Lending compliance begins with accurate data. RATA leads industry standards with its highly accurate GeoPlus geocoding service. By leveraging seven proprietary and commercially available address matching engines and a 13-step process that maximizes each matching engine, coupled with a team of professionals with more than 65 years of combined geocoding experience, RATA has successfully and accurately geocoded more than 35 million addresses in the last five years. Overall since 1990, RATA client institutions have submitted nearly 20 percent of the total number of records submitted by all institutions combined for both HMDA and CRA.
With RATA’s Comply Suite, financial institutions can efficiently collect, edit check, geocode and submit the data to their supervisory agencies. They can also analyze their HMDA/CRA data in a wide variety of ways to help make appropriate underwriting, lending, loan product and marketing decisions. The Level I RATA Comply Fair Lending module includes everything needed for rapid scorecard analysis to flag possible problems, data-mining, side-by-side matched pair analysis, random sampling and more. The optional Level II module makes regression and other advanced statistical analysis techniques available to the more experienced user.
In addition to data collecting, edit checking, geocoding and government submission capabilities, key features of the RATA Comply Suite include custom mapping, extensive reporting capabilities including the ability to produce the official government public disclosure tables before actually submitting the data, produce a wide variety of analysis reports, and optionally perform peer-to-peer (Peer-2-Peer) lending analysis comparisons for both compliance and market analysis and market penetration purposes and more.
With regard to data collection, the Comply Suite software easily integrates with every loan origination system in use by lenders, allowing data already entered in those systems to be exported to Comply and then exported back to the origination system after corrections have been made and geocoding values have been added.
Finally, RATA’s comply suite is easily scalable to meet the needs of financial institutions of all sizes, whether at one location or at many locations. It can run as a stand-alone system at smaller institutions but can also be used as an enterprise-wide solution to service a network of branches and/or affiliates using a single .SQL database at a central location easily and efficiently. With minimal assistance from RATA’s expert staff, a cost-effective solution can be designed for any type of institution of any size quickly and with little or no end-user training required.
RATA’s volume-scaled pricing for both software and geocoding makes the RATA Comply Suite a highly cost-effective HMDA, CRA and Fair Lending solution for institutions that process more than 200 reportable records per year. The majority of RATA’s clients submit between 1,000 and two million records per year.
RATA continues to build upon its foundation, enhancing its recognized industry-leading position as the premier provider of outsourced geocoding solutions and establishing its compliance software dominance. The company has the breadth of a large-scale software provider, but the commitment of an agile, service-driven organization, and is recognized among all regulatory agencies as an experienced, trusted and highly professional software and services company.
