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Corporate Story

A Company Built on Innovation

Headquartered in Longwood, Fla., RATA Associates, LLC has provided the financial services industry with cost-effective HMDA and CRA compliance software and geocoding service solutions for more than 23 years.

RATA Associates was founded in 1987 by John R. Woloshen, RATA’s current CEO, with the primary goal of providing the financial services industry with a cost-effective PC based software and outsourcing geocoding service solution specifically designed to reduce the time, cost, and compliance burdens associated with regulatory compliance data collection and electronic reporting requirements. 

Prior to 1990, only Thrift institutions had formal HMDA Loan Application Register (LAR) maintenance and annual data submission requirements to their supervisory which agencies, which were the 12 regional Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB’s). RATA's first generation software applications were programmed in DOS for Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) compliance to provide Thrift Institutions with tools to convert loan application data housed on mainframe computers to a format compatible with RATA’s desktop system, export address data to RATA for geocoding, apply the geocoding result file(s) returned by RATA, prepare and edit check all of the-LAR data and electronically submit the data in the electronic format required for submission to the FHLB’s. RATA’s export features also allowed users to update their mainframe systems with corrected data and geocoding values in place.

To develop functionality that met both institution and FHLB needs, over a 3 year period prior to 1990, RATA’s founder worked closely and interactively with FHLB’s located in NY, Boston, Pittsburgh and the main office in Washington, DC to develop software that would allow Thrift Institutions of all sizes to economically collect, edit check, and electronically submit their LAR data.  By early 1989, RATA had 3 Thrift Institutions beta testing the software. The software performed flawlessly at Northeast Savings in Ct,  (Assets $7B), Home Unity Savings, Pa. (assets $700M) and Ambler Savings, Pa, (Assets $70M) and was about to be purchased on a sole-source contract basis by the FHLB’s for use at all Thrift Institutions nationwide (about 4500 total institutions). Unfortunately, the S&L crisis of 1989 prevented that from happening. The FHLB’s lost their regulatory powers and the federal Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) was created and became the new supervisory agency for all Thrift Institutions.

On January 1, 1990, HMDA was expanded to include nearly all financial institutions and Mortgage companies (About 14,000 institutions at that time). In 1990, RATA quickly added the varied data formats for electronic submission to each of the 6 supervisory agencies now involved in the data collection process (OTS, FRB, FDIC, NCUA, OCC and HUD). The entire financial industry was suddenly faced with a new difficult problem with very strict regulatory requirements and potential financial penalties for failure to submit 100 percent accurate data on time each year.  In addition to regulatory submissions, the annual data was published by government for the general public, with certain data elements omitted for confidentiality reasons. Institutions were also required to make their current year YTD data available to the public within 30 days of a request from anyone with interest in the data for any reason. 

Although nearly all of the 50 or so loan origination system vendors commonly used by financial institutions promised to deliver compliance solutions to their customers, all that tried fell far short of the mark. As a result, the industry quickly embraced RATA's HMDA software and Compliance-grade™ service geocoding products. RATA essentially created a new software niche in the financial industry.  RATA’s customer base quickly grew to more than 500 institutions, and RATA was soon recognized as the financial industry's leading provider of both compliance software and outsourced geocoding services. The near perfect results all RATA customers consistently achieved each year also established RATA as experts in the subject of interpreting the regulations and implementing software solutions for often very complex regulatory compliance requirements.  Over the years, with the help of RATA’s user base, RATA also earned the respect of each of the 6 federal supervisory agencies.

The 90's brought more demanding reporting requirements for all HMDA reporting institutions.  RATA kept abreast of these changes, updating its software annually to comply with the modified HMDA and/or CRA reporting requirements and fine-tuning the company’s proprietary geocoding processes by incorporating many technological advances that became available.

In 1995 when formal CRA data collection, geocoding, and reporting requirements were enacted that affected nearly all banks and thrift institutions, RATA added full featured automated processing and electronic CRA reporting capabilities in time for the first required data submission in the year following. All RATA customers achieved 100 percent accurate and complete CRA data submissions the first year as they had been doing with HMDA submissions in all years prior and this will always be the case for RATA Comply Suite users.

Innovation Since the New Millennium

The new millennium brought another new direction for RATA. During the period from 2004 through 2009, RATA migrated 15 years of HMDA and CRA compliance and software knowledge to Microsoft's .NET platform in conjunction with the latest SQL database technology. In addition to the core functionality that was formerly included with RATA’s earlier DOS software, many new and important features have been incorporated into the Comply Suite of products, making RATA the technological leader in the compliance arena. Key new features added to the Comply Suite include Peer-2-Peer analysis, mapping capabilities, and two levels of Fair Lending compliance and analysis modules. The Level one Fair Lending component is very easy to use even by people with very limited knowledge of the underlying statistical methods used within the software. The optional Level two Fair Lending component is designed for the advanced user. It includes regression and other advanced statistical analysis capabilities.    

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 Server 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 Microsoft .NET and SQL Server technology. As a result, service geocoding turnaround times are now equal or better than any in-house geocoding mechanism.

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 Microsoft 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.

Innovation Tomorrow: What’s Ahead for RATA’s Future

RATA’s future looks very bright. In addition to keeping up with frequent regulatory changes and incorporating them into its various software products each year as it has done consistently since 1990, RATA is also exploring a number of areas of future innovation along with adding additional functionality to its products largely based on client feedback on what they want and/or need.

Future innovations being explored include:

  1. Determining ways that Google Earth satellite geography maps might be useful to financial institutions in conjunction with the Comply Suite’s current extensive mapping functionality, and
  2. Considering implementing ‘Cloud Computing’ capabilities for some or all of its products. RATA’s Comply Peer-2-Peer component already uses this technology thus relieving users from having to maintain multiple-year HMDA and CRA public date files on their local systems. Whether financial institutions will want this type of functionality remains to be seen but RATA will evaluate the possibilities here in consultation with its current and steadily growing customer base.

Naturally, RATA intends to always keep up with the very latest technology that becomes available and to explore a wide variety of innovative new ideas in future years that newer technology may make possible. In short, RATA has been the leading innovator in this space since 1990 and intends to continue to hold this position.