The settings that produced the valuation may no longer exist.
Semafide is exploring how a lender could preserve an inspectable record of which provider-held AVM configuration was in force when a valuation was produced, rather than trying to reconstruct that configuration after it has changed.
A lender gets a number from a provider. Months later the cascade, the confidence thresholds, or the model pin have changed. The lender has the output. The provider has today’s settings. Neither file is the configuration that was in force.
That gap only matters when somebody asks. Income and appraisal-related issues were two of the three leading reasons lenders were forced to repurchase loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at an average of $32,288 a loan.1 Since October 1, 2025 the interagency AVM rule has required institutions using automated models to run control systems that protect against manipulation of the data those models consume.2 Neither requires Semafide. Both arrive after the fact and ask what the system actually had.
Semafide preserves evidence of how an automated decision was configured and recorded at the time it occurred.
It reports what the evidence supports about the execution: whether a commitment appears on the chain before the seal, whether anyone outside the operator observed capture, and which claims stay not established or unchecked.
- Input
- What was submitted. Usually held by the lender.
- Configuration
- The cascade order, thresholds, decision rules, and model pins in force. Usually held by the AVM provider, and often overwritten.
- Output
- The number that came back. The lender still has this.
- Execution
- The specific run that tied those three together, if it was captured at the time.
The lender often retains the input and the output. The provider often retains the configuration that actually shaped the number. If that configuration cannot be exposed at execution time, the proposed product cannot apply.
Secondary
Whether the set was whole is a different question.
Seal five runs, disclose three, and every disclosed record can still verify. That is an examiner’s question about the set, not a fact this instrument reports as Completeness. Completeness in the verifier is whether one supplied chain is whole. Configuration is the lender’s question: they hold an output they cannot explain after the provider’s settings have moved. The investigation starts with configuration.
What Semafide is not
Semafide reports what the evidence establishes about a run. Judgments about the valuation itself belong to the appraiser, the reviewer, and the regulator. It is not a valuation product, not a model explainer, and not a compliance certificate. The AVM rule creates quality-control expectations. It does not require an independent custody product.
A later matching rerun does not prove the original run happened. A chain does not prove every relevant run was captured. A timestamp does not reconstruct the configuration that has since been overwritten.
Where this actually stands
- Built
- A verifier, signed sequenced records, proposition logic, and public specifications. One hundred and ninety-six tests, four formal specifications.
- Thesis
- Operator-controlled logs are weaker under later review than evidence captured at the time and evaluated independently.
- Hypothesis
- Someone who later has to reconstruct a valuation will pay, before the loss, to keep the configuration that produced it.
- Open
- Whether providers can expose a configuration digest at execution. Whether a capture boundary can be established. No production capture. No customers. No mandate. I expect parts of it to fail.
Who
Built by Eli Besser.
The verification core is public. Whether this is a category, or a feature of someone else’s product, is the question I am testing.
- 1 Brad Finkelstein, “The leading drivers and costs of GSE repurchase requests,” National Mortgage News, 6 December 2024, reporting a Reggora and Stratmor study of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac repurchases from April 2023 through October 2024. Average cost $32,288. Income and appraisal-related issues were two of the three leading reasons.
- 2 Quality Control Standards for Automated Valuation Models, 89 Fed. Reg. 64538 (7 August 2024), effective 1 October 2025. Institutions using covered AVMs must maintain control systems designed to protect against the manipulation of data.