The process of moving mortgages to a more digital approach introduces the potential for headaches—but an industry standards body is hoping to ease the pain.

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association, is working on steps to enhance the digital verification process and is putting together a new working group to help figure out the details of this process. The MISMO Version 3 Verifiable Profile SMART Doc Development Workgroup, as it will be called, will aim to build a verifiable, trust-driven process to ensure loan documents are legitimate and remain unaltered.

The mortgage industry has struggled with the trust issue around digital documents, due to inconsistencies that cropped up during the process. MISMO, which maintains the SMART Doc digital document standard, has been working on clarifying the issue in recent years. For example, it offered implementation guidance to the industry last year. The workgroup takes MISMO’s work a step further, by plotting out a technical framework to help automate the process.

Charlie Epperson, the chief information officer of the mortgage outsourcing provider MRN3, noted that the updated specification, once implemented, “will accelerate digital transformation efforts and enable organizations to further automate document and other compliance processes.”

“MISMO provides a tremendous forum for mortgage industry collaboration and innovation through which we can enhance the standards and bring these capabilities to the industry,” he added in the news release.

The association will be accepting applicants to the new working group through April 20.

(mizar_21984/iStock/Getty Images Plus)