Plaintiff-lender’s loan servicing company had a sufficient relationship with plaintiff to authenticate plaintiff’s business records.

The affidavit from an officer of plaintiff-lender’s loan servicing company established that plaintiff had acquired legal and physical possession of the promissory note before commencing the subject foreclosure proceeding. The original lender had assigned the note and mortgage to plaintiff, but the note had been endorsed in blank with not date. The note therefore did not establish the date that it was assigned to plaintiff. The affidavit of the loan servicing company’s officer stated that before the foreclosure action was commenced, plaintiff had sent the loan documents including the note to the loan servicing company which had scanned the documentation into its own records system and then returned the documents to plaintiff. Based on the dates of these events, the senior VP of the loan servicing company averred that the note had been assigned to plaintiff before plaintiff commenced the foreclosure action.

The Third Department that the loan servicing company’s status as servicer of the loan for plaintiff-assignee of a note and mortgage qualified the loan servicing company’s records as business records of plaintiff. The Third Department rejected defendant’s objection that the records were neither made in the loan servicing company’s regular course of business nor within the officer’s personal knowledge. The Third Department stated that while “the mere filing of papers received from other entities, even if they are retained in the regular course of business, is insufficient to qualify the documents as business records”, such records are nonetheless admissible if the recipient can establish personal knowledge of the maker’s business practices and procedures, or that the records provided by the maker were incorporated into the recipient’s own records or routinely relied upon the recipient in its business. To be admissible, these documents should carry the indicia of reliability ordinarily associated with business records.

Given the loan servicing company’s status as servicer of the loan for plaintiff, the loan servicing company’s records qualified as business records.

Deutsche Bank Natl. Trust Co. v Monica, 2015 Slip Op 06453, 3rd Dept 8-6-15