Seeking to strengthen its mortgage origination, servicing, and secondary market software solutions and services, Wipro, a provider of information technology, consulting and outsourcing to the mortgage industry, is acquiring Opus Capital Markets Consultants (Opus CMC), a provider of mortgage due diligence and risk management services, for about $75 million.
Providing the deal musters the usual regulatory scrutiny, Wipro will benefit from the addition of Opus' proprietary due diligence platform, which encapsulates nearly a decade of business intelligence in loan reviews, as well as the latest in regulatory requirements.
Opus CMC offers operational and loan level due diligence, valuation support, forensic analysis, and advisory services on all classes of mortgage products, residential and commercial, ranging from re-underwriting whole loans to collateral reviews of securitized pools. Its customers include several of the top global banks, mortgage conduits, mortgage investors, and independent mortgage originators.
A company press release does not explicitly say whether Wipro intends to keep the Opus brand intact or bring it into the fold of its own brand. Opus currently has about 490 employees working in five locations spread across the country. More than 300 of those employees work as expert underwriters.
‘We welcome Opus CMC's employees to the Wipro family,’ says Manoj Punja, senior vice president and head of business process outsourcing at Wipro Ltd. ‘This acquisition will help us expand in the high-end mortgage BPO segment, and brings differentiated capability with a platform-based risk management offering.
‘Opus CMC has an experienced management team with a deep understanding of the emerging needs of this business,’ Punja adds. ‘We believe Opus CMC will continue to lead with their innovative offerings and extend these capabilities to Wipro's banking and financial services customers as well. Our vision is to leverage Wipro's offerings with Opus CMC's capabilities and knowledge base to create an end-to-end offering for all mortgage players, with a greater degree of automation and application of analytics.’
Opus officials say the company will ‘continue to be a dominant player in the industry with increased range and scale of offerings for our clients.’ They point out that the mortgage industry ‘is at a pivotal point with the introduction of new mortgage regulations driven by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and government agencies’ and that the combined companies will be in a prime position to ‘assist our clients in navigating this challenging and changing business environment and help build reliable outcomes in mortgage origination and secondary market operations.’
The transaction, which is being handled by Portico Capital Securities, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2014.
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