Bank benefits from monoline partnership

TD was asked how it can offer 24 hour approvals and still properly scrutinize each deal during the approval process, and says the First National deal helps them to excel in both areas.

“What we've changed in the last little while is we entered into an outsourcing relationship with First National, and they have a very dedicated senior lending team,” Tim Hockey, group head of Canadian banking and wealth management at TD, said during the company’s quarterly conference call last week. “What we do is we've basically outsourced our adjudication and our funding of the mortgages. They are writing to our specifications.”

That answer was in response to a question about how the bank diligently assesses files while still offering 24 hour approval turnaround.

Many of the big banks were questioned about their credit verifications during quarterly calls last week, and they each defended their respective practices.

TD was also asked to explain how turnaround times aren’t being affected by strict underwriting.

“There is no auto-adjudication, which to your question, might, impact your turnaround times, but we've negotiated as part of our pricing the ability to actually get those approval rates back and quickly,” Hockey said. “And we've seen a substantial improvement in the turnaround times to the brokers, which is one of the reasons why we're up strongly in real estate secured lending.”

TD, of course, has partnered with First National on broker originated deals since the beginning of the year. That deal means First National provides underwriting and fulfilment processing to the big bank, and brokers note better service levels since that announcement.

“I have seen faster turnaround times from TD for sure; in the past their broker services didn’t offer a dedicated underwriter and approvals could take longer than 48 hours,” Edgar Rivera of MorCan Financial told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “Now I’ve got a dedicated underwriter who gets back to me often within 24 hours.”

MBN