Freddie Mac Boosts Home Lending Efficiency as Demand for Mortgages Grows

Single-Family is Freddie Mac’s largest business unit. With more than 11 million active loans and a balance sheet of over $2.9 trillion, Single-Family generates approximately two-thirds of the company’s data stores. Like any institution handling personally identifiable information (PII), Freddie Mac’s data policies stipulate that the GSE know where PII is stored, who has access to it, and how to protect it. These data practices are critical not only to meet the requirements set forth by its regulator, the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency, but also to minimize exposure risk as the organization moves data to the cloud.

“Our stakeholders need to trust that their data is being protected,” says Aravind “Jag” Jagannathan, Vice President and Chief Data Officer at Freddie Mac Single-Family.

Regularly scanning Freddie Mac’s huge volumes of data for PII traditionally required a team of dedicated experts who had to search a vast data landscape distributed across many different systems. “Although the manual process worked and successfully prevented adverse incidents, we needed to find ways to operate more efficiently, automate the discovery of PII wherever it’s located, and free our teams to be more innovative and take on new business challenges,” says Jagannathan.

This vision to drive scale and efficiency would prove invaluable, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused an unexpected surge in mortgage volumes which led to an increased demand for high performance mortgage data processing and reporting.

“Informatica has always been a great partner in our data journey,” says Jagannathan. “Having an honest dialogue and a trusted partnership creates a strong engagement model, allowing us to move forward and meet our business objectives.”

As mortgage volumes increased, so did Freddie Mac’s data processing and reporting demands. Hence, the data team automated discovery of PII with Informatica Data Privacy Management. Using predefined workflows to identify, analyze, and remediate data risk, the team successfully scanned close to 80 terabytes of information, 256,000 columns of data, 65,000 tables, and more than a trillion rows of data.

“Now we can scan an extremely large set of databases and file storage locations to find, classify, and identify PII,” says Marvin J. P. Boyd, Director, Data Management Technologies at Freddie Mac. “By automating previously manual processes, confidence levels in data across the business and team productivity rose significantly.”

Automating scans also provides the data management team with greater visibility into files and apps that aren’t directly related to data privacy or PII. Having awareness of these additional data types helps the team communicate with stakeholders about their data and ultimately improves the organization’s decision-making.

By reducing exposure risk and automating manual tasks, Jagannathan’s team gains the flexibility to take on new business challenges—such as managing the influx of data processing and reporting that came along with increased mortgage demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although Freddie Mac’s primary goal has been increased efficiency, these initiatives also make it easier to comply with privacy laws such as the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) and emerging legislation in other states such as Virginia.

“We’re able to avoid risk rather than having to respond to it,” adds Fred Krimmelbein, Data Strategy and Governance Manager at Freddie Mac. “Informatica helps our teams be much more efficient. We can meet demand with the same number of resources, even when data volumes increase dramatically.”

“Informatica is a key partner in how we manage and protect our data ecosystem,” says Jagannathan. “We know we can trust our data and locate sensitive information, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud. That’s critical as we continue our AWS and data modernization journey.”

Using Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, the Single-Family team keeps master records current, even as IT deploys new cloud applications like Salesforce. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services also helps synchronize contact data across multiple platforms and domains, ensuring that cloud-based workflows are infused with the same trusted data.