Managing Multiple Licenses

The transition to the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System (NMLS) has many mortgage banker and broker companies who hold licenses in more than one state frustrated over the need to keep track of many new license requirements with different deadlines. Many owners had grown used to the different licensing requirements that the different banking departments used to require but now the rules have all changed.

The SAFE Act was the catalyst to get the state legislators to look at their licensing statutes and tweaking their existing requirements on top of adding the requirements necessitated by the SAFE Act. Some of the states did change their requirements, adding new categories of licensees, eliminating categories of licensees, or changing the qualifications. Even if you had completed some of the requirements, you had to again get your fingerprints taken, provide credit reports, and obtain larger surety bonds. In addition, you now had to license all of your loan officers (not previously required in every state). Each state set its own deadline for when all licensing conditions needed to be completed.

How do you ensure that not only you, but all of your loan officers are in compliance with all licensing requirements? If you run a small company or branch office, you may be the one person who wears all the hats other than originating loans. Therefore, you may be the one who must keep track of all of the requirements, all of the loan officers, and all of the deadlines. Or perhaps you have an administrative assistant who can juggle this task along with her other job responsibilities. It is probably better if one person coordinates for your entire office. You don’t want each loan officer to wing it on his own. You should have that one person in charge of this task create a spreadsheet of loan originators, states in which they must be licensed, requirements of licensing, dates by which each requirement must be completed and dates by which each requirement is completed. The spreadsheet should be reviewed maybe once a week to ensure that action is being taken on a timely basis. None of the loan officers should be allowed to wait until the last minute to complete their requirements as this can leave you with half of your staff taking the 20 hours of pre-licensing education when you need them to help clear stipulations. This once a week review must be mandatory, otherwise you will find that you are getting to it whenever you can get around to it. And that, of course, means that it will be left to the last minute.

If you do not have time to do it yourself and there is no one in your office who can do it, outsource this job. Let an outside company do the tracking of the requirements and the deadlines. You won’t have to spend the time on this detail-oriented task so you can concentrate on the activities that make you money.

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