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Diversity is part of Freddie Mac’s charter
MBE InScope Solutions has worked for the mortgage company for five years.
The relationship has been growing from the beginning and continually enriched
 'The overarching and governing reason for supplier diversity at Freddie Mac is our charter,” says Bunni Young, manager for supplier diversity. “Our charter directs us to have a bona fide minority outreach program.” This, she notes, was mandated by Congress in the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act.
In other words, supplier diversity at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp (Freddie Mac, McLean, VA) is not a “feel good program” or simply the right thing to do. “It is part of our charter, mandated by Congress in 1991.
“With our enterprise-wide effort we reach out to every business area within the corporation, and also in the contracting processes, to encourage the incorporation of minority vendors,” Young explains.
Young has been at her job since 1994. “I started in contracting and it was a natural progression from there to here. I’ve been here ever since.”
Freddie Mac’s supplier diversity function, she notes, reports to Sergio Ferragut, VP of enterprise quality and procurement. “We work directly with quality and procurement; it’s good positioning for us.”
REO and IT are major components
The largest diverse supplier base serves the real estate owned properties (REO) business. These are “disposed properties” that are restored and put back on the market. The M/WBE suppliers are realtors and service providers that help Freddie Mac restore and sell its real estate owned properties. M/WBEs perform 30 to 40 percent of the work done in this area.
The biggest technical component of Freddie Mac’s enterprise-wide diversity spend goes for IT. “We currently have a pool of staff-augmentation vendors vetted and approved as M/WBEs,” Young notes. This technology pool works in Freddie Mac’s procurement area. “Tier one vendors have more depth, more breadth, more mechanics. The tier two vendors often have niche roles and work for the tier ones.”
Certification
The supplier diversity group requires certification for contractors that come in through the supplier diversity program: NMSDC for MBEs, WBENC for WBEs. Others have SBA 8(a) and sometimes state certifications.
Young herself is on the board of WBENC affiliate WPEO, and Jay Inouye, Freddie Mac’s director of corporate services, is on the boards of NMSDC and the Women’s Business Center, a local business organization in northern Virginia.
Always looking
Freddie Mac, says Young, is always looking for diverse suppliers: “reputable companies that bring solutions and add value.”
On her team, she adds, “We are personally committed to this work.”
Working with InScope
MBE InScope Solutions (Reston, VA) has worked for Freddie Mac for about five years now. “The relationship has been enriched and continually growing from the beginning,” Young remarks.
“We gave them work within the first year of meeting them because of their pedigree and past performance. We began with specific assignments and because of their good performance we soon transitioned to tapping them for our approved technology pool.
“They’ve given us staff augmentation from soup to nuts. They are on a master services agreement, approved to work on positions in IT services. They’ll be expanding their role at Freddie Mac into finance services as well,” Young reports.
Helping them grow
And, while Freddie Mac doesn’t have a formal mentor/protégée program, “We’ve sponsored them for educational opportunities like the minority business program at the Tuck School of Business, the University of Virginia’s Darden School and the Kellogg program.
“Their relationship with us has absolutely helped them grow; we have seen it,” Young declares. “Michael Bruce, their president and CEO, is now an MBE sponsor for regional activities and Virginia business opportunities. He’s been able to do that for the last three years because his company has grown financially through its relation with Freddie Mac; that means he can staff the operation with additional people at a senior level.”
Michael Bruce: “a wonderful country”
InScope’s Michael Bruce is a first generation U.S. citizen. His parents come from Guyana, South America. “This country has been wonderful to my family,” he says. “I have ten aunts and uncles on one side and seven on the other, and via chain migration almost all of them came here.
“The opportunity this country gave us was tremendous. My father worked as a design engineer, my mother is an RN. I grew up with a desire to give something back.”
Education was stressed in the Bruce family. His brother, Bruce notes with a smile, got the first BS degree in the family, “but I got the first masters.”
He did undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA), and completed an MS in information networking at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA).
He held jobs with several companies in a technical/business capacity, and worked up to running a small e-commerce company.
Launching Inscope
“On 9/11,” Bruce recalls, “I and millions of other Americans were horrified, angry and concerned. I decided I wanted to do something about it, and although I knew little about federal contracts, I decided to try to use my business background to help our country.”
He spent most of his spare time in 2002 formulating plans, talking to people and “getting smarter,” he says. “I saw that to enter the federal marketplace you need to have past performance, so we gained that by acquiring Isavix Corp (Reston, VA), which built the technology engine for an e-commerce company I had run.”
He formed InScope in 2002 and the company entered the market in 2003. Last year it came in around $27 million.
Development and staffing
Most of InScope’s work is in-house development, but the company also offers robust strategic staffing. Aneet Kumar, VP for commercial accounts, notes that 38 percent of the business is staffing and 62 percent is involved with areas like project delivery and project outsourcing.
“We do cooperative outsourcing,” she says. This basically means that part of the team works from the InScope office and some work at the client, while clients like Freddie Mac also have some of their own people involved. “We have full visibility of each other’s deliverables and work on development together. It’s a model we’ve more or less pioneered, and it’s been very successful.
“Of course,” she notes, “we can also do the work in house and deliver it to the client, or we can have our whole team working at the client site.”
Bruce finds that many enterprise clients favor the co-sourcing idea. “They want some oversight. They want a small team at their place and, for space issues, the rest back at our office.” InScope has more than 150 employees on call for its clients.
Moving with Freddie
InScope started co-sourcing four years ago, Bruce explains. “When Freddie Mac expanded the model from project delivery to in-house development we moved with them, staffing aggressively for their projects.”
InScope is one of just seven companies working for Freddie Mac’s technology services division on that level, Kumar notes. “It was their decision based on our past performance, and our capability to deliver on initiatives they will be moving to over the next few years.”
This year, she reveals, “We acquired a financial services company whose principal had been with Freddie Mac for years. The company had worked in their front, middle and back office and knew the process of how they do investments and manage financials.”
Acquiring the company “created a new niche for us to play in. We now offer integrated business/technology rather than just IT.”
Kumar has always made business and technology her career. She began with Indian Telephone Industries, doing work that included onsite work in Unix and Cobol, “but the major part of my experience is in business development, selling hardware, software solutions and training,” she says. She ran her own business in India for nine years before coming to the U.S. in 1999. “I worked for another company for six years, which sponsored me to go to Darden in 2005. Mike and I met there, and a year later I joined InScope.”
InScope certifications
Although created by the government, Freddie Mac is not technically a federal agency. “We consider them the best of what commercial and federal entities have to offer,” Bruce remarks.
InScope professional certifications include VMSDC, CMMI, PMP, CISSP, Six Sigma, Sun Developer and Microsoft Gold partner.
The company provides solutions through its four practices: financial services, optimized computing, decision management and enterprise software. “We have acquired several companies, and rather than try to absorb them into our operations we typically form a practice around the new company and its specialties,” Bruce explains.
“For example, the firm we recently acquired now forms the core of our financial services group.”
In fact, “All four of our practices are essentially the result of acquisition either of top talent or of an entire company,” he discloses.
Supplier diversity at InScope
InScope’s own supplier diversity program was highlighted in a recent Freddie Mac bid, Bruce says. “We easily acceded to all the areas where they asked for supplier diversity minimums. A majority of the contractors we work with are women-owned or minority-owned.
“We run a United Nations here because we know that diversity means new ideas, new thinking and new perspectives, not just hitting numbers. We live and breathe it!”
Freddie Mac, he adds, is a “large organization with incredibly complex needs and I want to bring the best to bear for my client.”
InScope has lots of other clients, including AARP, FINRA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Navy and Army and even the IRS. “Freddie Mac is our largest client and among the most important to us,” Bruce says.
“They are not an easy client but they are a worthwhile client. They make us better, they say what is on their mind and they are a model organization for handling diversity.
“We value them,” Bruce concludes.
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