First American Financial Corporation announced that its FraudGuard®? fraud risk detection and decisioning tool now includes enhancements that help lenders reduce home equity lending and compliance risk, and further improve loan quality and increase efficiency. The new features include the integration of the First American Procision™?

AVM suite and the additions of a senior-lien review module designed for home equity lending and a military status verification module. FraudGuard's integration with the Procision AVM suite provides users access to automated property values to help expedite lending functions, such as underwriting and collateral reviews for first and second mortgages, as well as home equity lines of credit. The Procision AVM suite uses a blended ensemble modeling approach to deliver an exceptional level of accuracy.

First American Data & Analytics runs Procision AVMvaluations on every residential property in the U.S. every day and the company also updates the underlying data that fuels the Procision AVM suite daily. An automated surveillance system constantly monitors both data and valuation quality, and performs extensive testing to validate the accuracy of the valuations produced by the Procision AVM suite for various property types in various geographic markets. Designed to support home equity lending, the senior-lien review module identifies ineligible first liens that could prevent a lender from moving forward with a second lien.

For example, the new feature will alert a lender to a private mortgage originated within the last 12 months, first mortgages with negative amortization, balloon loans with a due date before the second lien, or a reverse mortgage. The module can also identify payment deferrals and loans in forbearance. The military status module verifies an applicant's status - active, retired or a survivor of military personnel - under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA).

In addition to mortgage lending, the new module can be leveraged in credit and automobile lending. Both the senior-lien review and military status modules are available as standalone API integrations.