Valued Essent Customers and Friends,

Essent is monitoring developments regarding the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, including updates and recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control, the health community, and governments of all levels.

Essent is open and maintaining normal operations. COVID-19 has not affected Essent’s ability to deliver products and services, including EssentOne, Compass, SiteBuilder, OrderTrax and others. Fortunately no Essent employee has contracted the virus to date.

As part of the Essent Business Continuity Plan, Essent plans and prepares for mass events, like natural disasters. Although no one expects a pandemic, Essent has planned for the eventuality where employees would need to work from another facility, including home, in the event of a disaster. Our technology and infrastructure allow us to do business, as usual, from remote locations. Commonly staff works from home both for flexibility and to continually test our preparedness. Our data centers are lights out, meaning they can operate without locally staffed administrators, but our facilities are staffed as usual. Essent requires very little in terms of materials and we don’t expect a major supply chain interruption based on our needs, but we do have redundant power/fuel and redundant equipment/parts. We are prepared.

We are moving forward under the guiding principles of keeping employees safe; continuing to serve Essent customers at the highest standards; and doing our part to slow community spread of the virus. We have put in place business continuity measures in accordance with these principles.

Our plan for business continuity includes:

• Following CDC, government, health community, and commonsense recommendations to reduce the chance of infection. This includes permitting certain staff to work from home and encouraging those who are sick to stay home.
• Operating on platforms that allow Essent to shift workload as needed regardless of the physical location of staff, including established designed redundancy on the cloud infrastructure that stores and transmits Essent data and customer data.
• Implementing enhanced preventative measures if defined benchmarks for the spread of the virus are reached in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley region, where Essent is headquartered.

Thank you for your continued relationship with Essent as we all strive to keep colleagues safe, continue to serve customers, and do our parts to slow the spread of the virus in our communities. We hope you and yours good health.

Best Regards,
Eric S. Alessi
President & CEO