MISMO

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, (MISMO) is a US not-for-profit subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). It is a developer of technology standards for both residential and commercial property transactions in US markets. By promoting improved data consistency, MISMO aims to reduce costs and increase transparency while promoting confidence in mortgages as an asset class for investors. Ultimately MISMO standards should deliver cost savings to consumers.

Background

More than 150 subscriber organizations,^[1] including mortgage bankers, lenders, servicers, vendors and service providers, support MISMO’s efforts. MISMO’s board of directors, advised by a governance committee elected from a cross section of the industry, provides oversight for MISMO's administration and policy development. MISMO has working agreements with other major data standards development organizations and has developed a repository of industry data elements stored in a common data dictionary used to create all MISMO transactions. MISMO supports free and open access to the final releases of its standards, which enables companies to begin integrating MISMO standards into everyday business practices immediately.

MISMO follows a democratic approach to the development and maintenance of a comprehensive set of standards and data points for all stages of the mortgage loan life cycle. Published specifications support the following processes:

• Underwriting,
• Mortgage insurance application,
• Credit reporting,
• Flood and title insurance,
• Property appraisal,
• Loan delivery,
• Product and pricing,
• Loan Servicing, and
• Secondary mortgage market investor reporting.

Many members use software that takes a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach^[2]

Why MISMO is Needed

Historically, information stored in documents (typically word-processor document or PDF) has been difficult to extract and transport into other applications or for other uses. Mortgage originators have had to copy and paste or transcribe information from third-party reports into their internal-review documents, spreadsheets, forms or internal systems. These efforts could be described as manual, error-prone and tedious. This slows down the process tremendously.

MISMO constructs a standard approach using XML whereby two business-related firms can streamline shared data contained in forms or reports.

As a point of clarification, MISMO does not dictate what kind of software to use or even the appearance of loan-documentation forms. Rather, it dictates how to format data sent to another party. This allows all parties to develop, run and maintain their own platforms while having uniform efficiency. MISMO provides the framework; it is up to the firms using the standards to decide which fields they will need and populate.^[3]

XML Standards Approach

MISMO has identified two deliverables that will enable the mortgage industry to share data among trading partners.

1. An XML architecture that encompasses loan origination, secondary market and servicing data

2. A data dictionary to provide business definitions and corresponding architecture data element tag names

It has been estimated that nearly 10,000 fields of data may be available within the Logical Data Model previously known as the Property Information Dictionary^[4] when the MISMO effort is complete.

Affiliations and Related Bodies

MISMO has affiliations with The Appraisal Institute,^[5] The Property Records Industry Association,^[6] CRE Finance Council^[7] and a number of other entities to build standards for both residential and commercial property transactions.

Parent

MISMO is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association.^[8]

See also

• LIXI - Australian counterpart

References