When it comes to technology, the mortgage origination space is holding out for what a panel at National Mortgage News' Mortgage Technology conference in Miami called "the Holy Grail." But lenders shouldn't hold their collective breathes, the presenters agreed.
As early as 1992, Lexus was able to build 300 luxury sedans a day with 310 robotic machines and 66 humans, with the people there mainly for quality control, David Zugheri, president of Envoy Mortgage, Houston, pointed out.
Fast forward to 2011, nearly two decades later, and it takes Envoy, a retail-only lender licensed in 42 states, more than three times that many human beings to produce 36 mortgages a day, said Zugheri, adding that the industry average of 52 days is "unacceptable to most consumers and I'm on their side."
The Texas mortgage banker listed a number of reasons why it is harder to build a mortgage file than a car, chief among them the fact that most vendors still don't talk to each other.
Representing the default sector of the servicing side, Ingrid Beckles, now of the Beckles Collective but formerly head of default management at Freddie Mac, said lenders are unwilling to spend the same kind of money to save distressed assets as they do on originations and servicing.
"It's not just about getting loans in the door, it's also about keeping them inside," Beckles reminded the 200 attendees. Servicing problem loans "must be considered the same as the front office; it requires the same skill set and the same infrastructure."
She also said lenders should not expect one platform to meet all needs, a point also stressed by Nancy Alley, vice president and general manager at Xerox Mortgage Services, who told the conference that while technology is changing, the industry isn't keeping up. And the chief reason for that is that the kids "don't play well together."
"We're all in the same sandbox; we just don't like to share our shovels and buckets," Alley said, bemoaning, as did Zugheri, the lack of open sources among vendors. "We need to be able to tie documents and data together," she said. "It's not just about taking paper out of the process. It's about collaborating on it."
