SERVICES
HMDA / CRA
Geocoding
The regulations implementing the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) require financial institutions to report the geographic location of their loan applications or collateral for residential and/or commercial mortgages, other consumer loans, small business loans and small farm loans. To comply with these requirements, commercial and mortgage banks use a process known as geocoding to convert or translate ordinary street addresses into a series of alphanumeric codes representing the corresponding Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) State and County codes, and the applicable decennial U.S. Census' census tract codes. For example, the geocode for RATA's offices at 1916 Boothe Circle, Longwood, FL, 32750 is:
36740 12 117 0215.04
where "36740" is the MSA code for Orlando, "12" is the FIPS state code for Florida, "117" is FIPS county code for Seminole County, and "0215.04" is the census tract code for our Lake Mary neighborhood.
Regardless of whether a HMDA or CRA reporting institution chooses to geocode its lending data using an internal solution, a fully outsourced solution, or a combination of internal and external processing, the federal and state supervisory agencies to whom these data are reported are very demanding in their standards for the accuracy and completeness of the geocoded data submitted to them. In working with these regulators over the years, RATA has coined the term, Compliance-grade™ geocoding, to reflect the high geocoding standards of these agencies. Address files geocoded to Compliance-grade standards will:
- Reflect data definitions for the current reporting year only
- Contain geocode results for every address record processed
- Have no detectable errors
- Have a verifiable precision level of 95% or greater
- Contain geocode results that are traceable to the address matching engine and reference file used to produce them
RATA offers two Compliance-grade geocoding products: GeoPlus and Residual Address Matching (RAM). GeoPlus is RATA's premier geocoding product and is best suited to those financial institutions that prefer to fully outsource their geocoding needs. RAM, in contrast, is best suited to those institutions that prefer to internally geocode a portion of their lending data, but that do not have the resources to resolve the unmatched addresses that a single-source desktop geocoder typically produces. Please see our GeoPlus and RAM product information for more details.
We hope you agree that you won't find a better geocoding value for your institution anywhere. For Geocoding pricing and ordering information, please contact our Geocoding Services department.
