Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services Inc. as usual is showing off new customers at its annual user conference, re:Invent 2021, and first up is Federal National Mortgage Association.

Better known as Fannie Mae, the mortgage giant is using AWS as its long-term “strategic cloud provider” as it bids to solve some of the biggest challenges in the U.S. housing industry.

Fannie Mae has a lot of challenges on its plate. It’s mandated to make mortgages available to low- and moderate-income buyers, but that’s a tough ask at present. U.S. housing costs have soared over the past year, with homes selling at record median prices, rents skyrocketing nationwide and unprecedented demand for homes.

That explains the reasoning behind its decision to use AWS. Fannie Mae said it is in the process of migrating the majority of its computing infrastructure to AWS, including mission-critical and customer-facing workloads. The organization said it will shut down its on-premises data centers to reduce information technology infrastructure expenses “significantly.”

Fannie Mae said it will be able to tap advanced capabilities around machine learning, data analytics, and high-performance and serverless computing. It’s hoped that by using such services, Fannie Mae will be able to automate more processes and create innovative new services to help people access homeownership and affordable rentals.

To do this, Fannie Mae explained it will use Amazon Kinesis, a managed, real-time scalable platform for streaming data, and Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database. By doing so, it will be able to ingest, process and analyze greater volumes of data faster than before, with the end goal being to accelerate the launch of new services to meet the unprecedented demand it’s facing.

Fannie Mae also plans to tap AWS analytics services such as Amazon EMR to generate real-time insights on data to identify historically underserved populations, with the end goal of expanding access to mortgage finance to those groups.

Based on these insights, Fannie Mae launched a new feature in Desktop Underwriter, an automated underwriting engine that helps lenders efficiently complete credit risk assessments to establish home loan eligibility, to incorporate consumers’ timely rent payments in the mortgage underwriting process, thereby helping more first-time homebuyers qualify for a mortgage.

Fannie Mae has also built a data lake on the Amazon Simple Storage Service that supports more than 3,000 datasets and more than 100 applications. That data is analyzed with Amazon Redshift to help Fannie Mae better understand housing market trends and indicators.

One of the advantages of using Amazon’s cloud is its speed, Fannie Mae said. Using AWS, Fannie Mae was able to deploy its forbearance program into production in a matter of weeks rather than months.

Fannie Mae Chief Operating Officer Kimberly Johnson said the move to AWS will help to make lending simpler for both lenders and borrowers.

Photo: Fannie Mae