Product Review - Bluewire

It used to be that the sale of a commercial property created an avalanche of paper. In fact, the sale and resale of a substantial property like Rockefeller Center probably generated enough paperwork to fill a small room, say some observers.

No more, claims Heather Shively, CEO and cofounder of CapitalThinking. It is possible, says she, to store all the documents of a commercial real estate deal on your computer (with the original documents shelved somewhere in a back-office on a low-rent site.) Today, with a Web browser and a few clicks of the mouse, a mortgager can summon up all the necessary documents he or she needs for a transaction.

That, at any rate, is the aim of Bluewire, the Web-based software created by CapitalThinking to streamline loan management. Bluewire outlines the steps to get the loan approved, tracking the deal each step of the way, starting with origination and quoting loans to document production, deal management, underwriting, due diligence, closing and post-loan monitoring. These steps are customized by Bluewire to follow each company's procedures.

"When a deal first comes in to the firm, the originator or an analyst sets it up on Bluewire software," explains Samuel Solie, CapitalThinking's VP of sales and marketing (a banker before joining the firm). "They add on the people who have to review it, they put the team together, they put in some preliminary information about the deal. As they move ahead in the transaction, there are specific fields that they need to fill out before they can move to a new status. It can't progress until certain pieces of information are filled out."

All this is done on Web-based software so that the loan procedure can be carried out collaboratively as authorized participants--mortgage banker, lender, third parties, servicers or investors--access the loan pipeline.

All kinds of documents can be added to the loan track, say the folks of CapitalThinking--legal, financial, appraisal, engineering or environmental. They can be pulled as needed from word processors, spreadsheets, internal databases, client/server systems or intranets, allowing the mortgager to add to the loan pipeline such information as operating statements, rent rolls, market demographics, market comps or mapping.

"Every time an appraisal comes in, it's stored on Bluewire and updated and versioned in the files," says Shively. "You can go back and look at the old versions if you wish to."

In short, Bluewire is designed to track the entire loan process, containing all the elements of the loan in one central storage bank where all the participants can see its progress, monitor the advance of the loan, fill in the blanks and hasten it on its way.

This reporter found the system to be easily navigable, logical and probably long overdue in the mortgage finance business. In fact, blue-chip clientele J.P. Morgan Chase, PNC Bank, GE Capital, and most recently, Salomon Smith Barney-have all jumped on the Bluewire bandwagon.

Shively, a former mortgage banker herself (many in the 45-person CapitalThinking team are experienced mortgage bankers, which they say helps them to understand what the software users require) claims that the Bluewire allows a mortgage company to process information more efficiently at a lower cost, reduces the minutiae and burden of work on their underwriters, and cuts the costs of documentation and data entry.

Even more important, Shively adds, "it allows mortgagers to aggregate information in ways that just weren't possible in the past."

"Our goal is that you should enter the information only one time," adds Sam Solie. "Most people look for the information somewhere else and then enter it into the system in which they're working. That's a waste of time and creates a lot of errors because people re-key information in the wrong line by accident."

Because Bluewire is a Web-based platform that runs off of servers deployed globally, one of its major benefits, says Shively, is collaboration in the deal process. "Anyone with a Web address and appropriate password and authorization can now access that system from wherever they are.

Another benefit of being Web-based is that the system can be upgraded cost-effectively on a server. "We don't have to upgrade it at every point of use," says Shively.

But what about security, this reporter asked, since hackers have been known to breach the Web. Responds Shively: "A company's security can actually be enhanced on a system like this. Consider the borrower's concern about where this information is going. Well, where it's not going is across faxes or showing up in an in-box somewhere. It's not being shipped to the wrong address, and it's not lying on a desktop. It's going to go where it's supposed to go and it's stored and saved in a secure environment. Very likely, fewer eyes rather than more are looking at what can be very sensitive information, certainly, from a borrower's perspective."

Readers can contact the writer at jeverhart@globest.com