It was 30 years ago that Lester Dominick founded MortgageFlex Systems Inc. And to prepare for the future, the company is moving into a new environmental-friendly headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.
Dominick, who is the president of the company, commented on the differences between then and now. "Three decades ago, we were talking about DOS, CPM and UNIX green screens and now we're into the dot-net era." He added that every 10 years or so "the industry has monumental shifts that require vendors to redesign" their products and themselves.
"Every decade, we seem to hit one of these major bottoms. The first time you experience one you are shell-shocked, but by the third one, it's 'shame on you' if you're not prepared," he said only half-joking.
As for the new building, Dominick said it follows U.S Green Building Council, LEED standards. "We're building out the space to use low-VOC products, with a data center running VMware and LED lighting that is very 'green' from a power perspective."
MortgageFlex spent the last four years rewriting its systems, Dominick explained, with every line of code based on Microsoft dot-net. Its competition "decided to put a dot-net layer on the top [of their systems], but that's a faulty, short-term strategy. Ours was not the cheapest or the most expedient approach, but we think it gives us a leg up."
He continued, "The key is to transition to new technology while not abandoning existing system capabilities."
The new configuration features components that are deployed in browsers over the Web, Dominick explains, and has "opened up the back-office end. In some interesting ways, we're back to 30 years ago with centralized servers and data storage." However, he added, "Today, we're deploying all the new segments in a cloud environment that we manage with VMware."
Dominick took the occasion to expound on some other topics of interest for the mortgage industry.
"What looks good right now are credit unions and community banks that have an interest in originating loans because of the great margins. They can get cloud and VMware to host an origination and servicing platform so they don't have to sell the loans they originate. We plan to deliver a packaged application that offers technology to originate, service, and securitize loans using a single sign-on," he said.
Another area where technology is important is in the revisions to the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. Dominick commented, "Some vendors have not done a good job on upgrading their products for this change so lenders have been going with a manual mode to override that and there have been problems with calculations.
"From an implementation standpoint, some originators are getting hammered by fees and things they don't know about. Guys who are really stuck on the GFE issue were the ones in toolkit based LOS systems and they had to do it themselves and were shut down."
