Most fraud vendor demos look the same. Every platform screens watchlists, every platform finds liens, and every platform shows you a dashboard with a number on it. The differences only appear later, usually in an audit finding or a repurchase demand.
These are eight questions worth asking before you sign. They are the ones whose answers you will be living with.
Who wrote this. PitchPoint Solutions is a vendor in this category, so weigh this guide accordingly. It names no competitor and makes no claim about any other company’s product. Every question below is one we think a buyer should ask any vendor, including us.
Your rules encode what you told your investors you check. When an overlay changes mid-quarter, you need to know whether that is a configuration change you make on Tuesday or a support ticket with a release date — and who has to approve it.
A weak answer describes a risk score you can tune. A strong one describes rules you author, and shows you where.
Your rule set is not just an internal setting. It is a record of what you told your investors you check, so a mid-quarter change quietly changes that representation. The loans already sold were underwritten against the old rules.
Ask the vendor how they handle a rule change on a book of loans already funded, and who at your shop has to sign off. A vendor who treats rule changes as a self-service toggle has not thought about the loans behind you.
An LOS migration is when fraud controls quietly break. Rules get rebuilt from memory. Loans keep closing while a replacement vendor is qualified. The gap is what a post-purchase review finds a year later, when the loan is no longer yours to fix.
A vendor built around a single loan origination system cannot answer this well. Ask which systems the workflow runs in today, and what your team has to redo if you move.
A severity is not an instruction. Your underwriters need to see the data that triggered the flag and the step that clears it, on the file in front of them, without asking a colleague who has seen this one before.
If clearing a finding depends on who picked up the file, the file is not defensible. Ask to see the remediation text an underwriter actually reads.
A transposed digit and a synthetic identity are not the same problem. If both arrive as “review required,” your queue is noise, and a queue that is mostly noise gets ignored by the third week.
Ask what each returns, specifically. Distinct outcomes with distinct severities are what keep a review queue worth reading.
A first-party tool can be the right choice. But ask what happens to pricing and roadmap when your fraud vendor and your origination system share a profit and loss statement.
This is a question to ask before signing rather than at renewal. There is no wrong answer, only an unexamined one.
Ask specifically: undisclosed liens in MERS, judgments and bankruptcies in civil court records, occupancy and property-transfer history, and whether the stated employer is a real business at a plausible distance from the subject property.
These are the findings a post-purchase review surfaces later. Running them before funding is the difference between a condition and a repurchase demand.
Ask for the artifact, not the dashboard. You need a record showing what was checked, what came back, how severe it was, and who cleared it — on a named loan, eighteen months on.
If the answer is a screenshot, it will not survive an audit. Ask what the report looks like when an investor asks for it.
Ask all eight of any vendor you are considering, and ask them in a demo rather than an RFP response. The answers are more revealing when someone has to show you the screen.
If you want to see how one vendor answers them, our Application Data Verification page covers the rules engine, the graded findings and the loan origination systems it runs in.