To Whom It May Concern:
My name is Cristian Sturek and I am the Founder and Principal SOA Architect of XWebServices, Inc. As you may already know, all Loan Origination Software (LOS) providers have settled on one de-facto standard for their data import/export support – your Fannie Mae file format (3.2 being the latest version). For anyone not familiar with the file format, the documentation can be found here. At the request of many of our clients, I've tasked my development team to create an export to the Fannie Mae 3.2 format that we would then package absolutely free with the Online 1003 Application – if you browse our XWebServices.com portal, you will notice that our company offers the XWeb1003 Web Service, an XML/SOAP based Web Service which provides integration and management of the Uniform Residential Mortgage Loan Application (Form 1003) to client applications, and the accompanying Online 1003 SOA Solution, a demo and complete source code of which can be found here.
I'm writing this open letter to you because I am puzzled by your lack of support for today's technological initiatives and standards. While many companies have embraced technologies such as XML, XSD, SOAP, WSDL, Web Services, your company continues to roll out text based on a proprietary layout formats, formats whose popularity has greatly diminished over the last 10 years. Perhaps a new initiative has already been started within Fannie Mae to accommodate today's technologies, but if one has not, your team can get a great head start by modeling something after what we have already created. For example, we have already represented the entire Uniform Residential Loan Application (Form 1003) in XML and a validating XSD schema can be found online:
http://ws.xwebservices.com/XWeb1003/V2/XWeb1003.xsd
I'm not asking that you adopt what we have done verbatim. But by accepting the data in an XML format and providing an XSD schema would simplify life not only for us but for everyone out there, including our competition, that has to read the 49 pages of documentation for your current text-based format and try to fit their data into your proprietary layout. If you need any assistance, our SOA Consulting group would be more than happy to help you embrace XML, SOAP, WSDL and Web Services.
Sincerely,
Cristian Sturek
Principal SOA Architect
http://www.xwebservices.com
http://www.soahub.com
