Will The Real Fidelity Please Stand Up?

As you may know, the holdings of Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions have recently been re-branded as LPS Real Estate Group.  Some individuals in the industry instantly labeled the move as a “Fire Sale”, but in reality the situation is really nothing more than a simple name change.  Well, maybe I shouldn’t have spoken so quickly.  “Simple” is misleading, as the advent of LPS has caused a bit of confusion among Real Estate agents and RE tech vendors alike, many of which work with FNRES-now-LPS on a daily basis.

With this confusion in mind, I set out to decipher the Rubix cube that is LPS’ corporate history.  Thankfully, several timelines made my job quite easy; here are my findings:

It all started when Fidelity National Financial (FNF) acquired Chicago Title and Trust Co. in 2000.  Finalized on March 20^th, the acquisition set FNF up to host a “leading market share in excess of 30%”.  A worthy feat, no doubt, but Fidelity neglected to rest on its laurels.  In 2001, a merger with VISTAinfo spawned Fidelity’s Mortgage Information Services (MIS) branch.  MIS promptly announced joint ownership of a leading national real estate database with LexisNexis (a global business information provider), and followed up with what FNF deemed the “best in industry” MLS system and IDX framing solution.  MIS rounded off the year with an acquisition of HomeSeekers’ XMLSweb™ division, a move which carried over into 2002 with MIS’s follow-up acquisition of ISDI and FNF’s acquisition of Eastern Software’s Empower.

Unbeknownst to many, Fidelity National Financial had big, big plans for 2003.  While all of the action listed above was going on, ALLTEL Information Systems had been quietly chugging along, processing roughly 20 million loans in the late ‘90s and slowly but surely acquiring underwriters, data systems, and mortgage software.  2003 broke the seal on a new era for the loan community as FNF acquired ALLTEL’s financial services division and renamed it Fidelity Information Services.  With their loan processing powerhouse in place, FIS was now in a position to make a series of corporate acquisitions that stretched for the next three years.  The list includes such software companies as Hamilton & Sullivan Ltd., Kordoba GmbH & Co., Aurum Technology, Certegy, and Sanchez Computer Associates.

By the end of 2006, Fidelity’s MSP mortgage platform was processing over 28 million loans, had become a publicly traded company, had been named the #1 bank technology firm in America, and had also been named to the S&P 500 index.  FNRES was fast becoming the “go-to” name for loans, financial technology, and MLS software.  FIS launched their Loan Portfolio Solutions division in 2007, and a year later went live with Lender Processing Services as a publicly traded company.  LPS then formed the LPS Real Estate Group to monitor FNRES’ real estate related holdings.  This is how the company stands today, a thriving, complex financial powerhouse.

I hope this synopsis clears up confusion for some of you.  Like many in the industry, we here at Goomzee were thrown for quite a loop when we began hearing buzz about LPS.  Now that we have the names straight, we look forward to working with the LPS Real Estate Group.