CSS built and operates the largest and most advanced mortgage securitization platform in the world, supporting the Uniform Mortgage-Backed Security (UMBS) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Supporting 70% of the mortgage-backed securities in the market, CSS provides best-in-class single-family issuance, bond administration, disclosure, and tax services. We support a broad portfolio of products for our clients with full lifecycle management.
Project Overview/ Challenges:
As part of the Tax Investors Portal initiative, CSS intended to replace the manual process of providing secure tax documents to Agents and Banks. The existing system involved requesting tax documents that trigger are quest to the print vendor who then prints the documents and mails them back to the requester.CSS wanted to provide a solution to the GSEs which provides both financial and service benefits not currently realized or available. This was achieved through the Tax Investors Portal.
● Creation of a GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) Tax Investors Portal, with administration access to both for CSS tax ops. Through separate Portals, they will both have the same functionality and like what CSS has for the Disclosures website.
● Creation of Tax Investor Portal allowing investors, and tax preparers action on behalf of investors, and access to tax forms digitally. Provide users the ability to download tax forms as a PDF or CSV.
● Creation of a Self-Service module for an Authorized Account Administrator (“Super User”) to add and remove authorized users identified by an email address.
● Creation of a Single CSS Administration page to provide authorized CSS personnel the ability to create Super User accounts, update authorized user domains with superuser accounts, and add, update or remove users.
In addition to the existing features, our team was also tasked with building a secure registration/login process, and registered users had access to pages based on their role defined in OKTA to which we added admin and super user functionalities. We also integrated this new app with ServiceNow so that the User/ Admin can directly submit service tickets, in the event of an issue.Also, this project started with a new initiative called Atomas Team which meant there were to be a dev team and a business team, to allow the dev team to broaden the responsibilities with a tight deadline and growing requirements.
Our Solution:
Our team supported CSS with application design and development for the Tax Investor Portal for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide an electronic version of Schedule Q tax forms to registered holders of the Residuals securities.The Portal also has a user management capability (registration, update holders link, etc.) component that allowsCSS users to set up access for GSEs-approved users. The Tax Investor Portal also allows holders and tax preparers access to tax forms digitally.Our solution also provided holders with the ability to download multiple forms at once in either a PDF or CSV document type. Holders have access to forms associated with all REMIC EINs owned and specified during the registration process. Tax preparers can be given access to multiple holders by being granted access by the holder through the self-service user management capabilities. As part of our Agile delivery methodology for design and development, our team was responsible for performing the following activities:
● Daily Standup
● Sprint Planning
● Story grooming
● Meeting with business
● Supporting ongoing testing (Internal/UAT and GSC testing)
Technology Stack:
Java 1.8, AWS JAVA SDK, AWS (SNS/SQS, SSM, SES, ECS, ECR, S3, CloudWatch), Angular, AngularMaterial, NodeJS, Spring, SPLUNK 7.2.3-Redhat (Docker), Python, Shell scripting, bitbucket, tibco, Hibernate,Flyway, STS, JUnit using Mockito and using HSQLDB, JIRA.
Pertinent Results/ Benefits:
● Provided end-to-end solutioning for registration of Banks and Agents and functionalities for searching tax documents and printing/ downloading the same, if required (Single or multiple tax documents in zip).
● Provided solutioning for secure registration process design and development which involved integrating an email system to triggering Lambda with email attachment document that copies to S3 and triggers java code for further processing.
● Automated document management and printing processes for Tax Agents and Banks.