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A pioneering tech company: Palisades Technology Partners, a New Jersey-based company of roughly 100 employees, is bringing service-oriented architecture to some big mortgage players.

Article Excerpt
If a lender were able to adopt the perfect technology platform, what would it look like? What features would it have? [??] Carmine Cacciavillani thinks he has a pretty good idea. He's spent the last seven years building a company focused on creating mortgage technology solutions. [??] The company, Palisades Technology Partners, based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, has grown from two people in 1999 to more than 100 employees today. Palisades counts Costa Mesa, California-based ditech.com, New York-based Citicorp Inc. and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Mortgage Corporation among its clients. [??] Cacciavillani's clear vision of what technology can do for mortgage lenders stems from more than 25 years' experience creating mortgage origination and fulfillment systems for both software companies and lenders. [??] In 1980, Cacciavillani founded Input Creations Inc., and under his leadership the company created customized loan origination systems (LOSes) for large lenders, as well as its own Windows[R]-based mortgage loan processing system. In 1996 he sold Input to a public financial software company that was later acquired. [??] From 1980 through 1995, Input Creations developed custom LOSes for several large lenders, including St. Louis-based Citicorp Mortgage Inc. and the former Chemical Bank (now a part of New York-based JPMorgan Chase). In 1995, Input rolled out its own product to the industry--LoanScape, a Windows-based client-server loan origination system. After the acquisition of Input, the product was sold to more than 35 financial institutions, according to Cacciavillani.

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By 1998, he had a hand in building five origination systems and decided to take some time off to start a new company. "I've always been in the mortgage origination business, and I wanted to get to the next level. I saw this as an opportunity to position [Palisades] as one of the pre-eminent software companies going forward," he says.

Cacciavillani started Palisades Technology Partners in 1999 after taking a yearlong hiatus to thoroughly ponder "what the next generation of origination systems should be," he says.

He decided a cutting-edge system should be browser-based, and should be able to address multiple channels of business as well as different lines of business. "I wanted to create a system that would have the capability to eventually handle consumer loans," Cacciavillani says.

Cacciavillani envisioned a system that could grow with a lender's business, and handle non-mortgage transactions such as credit cards and auto loans. He decided a Web-based system leveraging open architecture would be capable of serving multiple mortgage channels and different products, and could be customized for each lender.

Those features formed the basis for Palisade's Impact Mortgage Services Suite, which the company describes as "an end-to-end, Web-based solution that leverages a service-oriented architecture (SOA)."

The Impact solution addresses "full functionality, including public retail and wholesale Web sites, point-of-sale (POS) systems and fulfillment systems," Palisades says. Because Impact is based on an SOA, Palisades is able to extract core functions from the end-to-end solution to create callable services. These callable services provide lending functions such as pricing, fee or compliance functions, and can be implemented individually to solve a discrete problem for a lender, according to the company.

Taking a couple of years off and starting from scratch was critical to the development of Palisades and its suite of technology services, Cacciavillani says. "We had no software--we basically developed the entire application. I think that's one of the things that differentiates us from our competition--we didn't take something that we already had and essentially warm it over," he says.

Not having any clients at first gave Cacciavillani the freedom to architect an origination system with more flexibility, without having to worry whether it would be compatible with older or outdated software, he notes. "We didn't have client pressure to deliver what they wanted," he says. "We took a year off to really work on it--having built five origination systems, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do and to then move forward in doing it."

Palisades' system works well with the existing technology a lender already has in place, Cacciavillani says. "Because we leverage open architecture, we're not as confined as many other vendors. We can run on [IBM WebSphere[R]] or BEA [WebLogic Server[R]], and different workflow or rules engines," he says.

Mortgage domain expertise

Crucial to Palisades' success is its people and the great working relationship among employees, Cacciavillani says. Many are people Cacciavillani had already worked with for years prior to Palisades.

One of his earliest hires was Steve Octaviano in 2001 as chief technology officer (CTO). Before joining Palisades, Octaviano had worked closely with Cacciavillani for more than 10 years at Input Creations, designing and developing mortgage systems for large lenders such as CitiMortgage and Chemical Bank.

John Buscema joined Palisades in 2002 as mortgage practices director. Buscema had been president of Morbank Financial Systems Inc. and also played a key role at the original mortgage.com (now owned by ABN AMRO, Ann Arbor, Michigan).

David Aach was brought on as chief...