I met with the members of our sister publication Mortgage Technology's advisory board during the recent SourceMedia Mortgage Technology Conference in Miami. I was interested in what they thought the next year would bring to the technology niche.
The most interesting response was also the most terrifying—the specter of a bifurcated mortgage business split between those too big to fail and those too small to comply.
There may be an element of paranoia in this, but board member after board member hit on similar themes—the elevation of the importance of the risk officer, financial reform, uncertainty, specialty servicing, compliance, compliance, compliance.
There was some pessimism on the keynote panel I moderated at the MTC, but not as much. Ingrid Beckles, founder and CEO of The Beckles Collective, and a former longtime manager at Freddie Mac, said the robo-signing scandal may have set back the e-note process by as much as 20 years.
She also advised lenders to put as many resources into the servicing end of the business as they have traditionally on the originations side.
In other words, they should consider the servicing side the front office and originations the back office, not the other way around.
Nancy Alley, vice president and general manager at Xerox Mortgage Services (and our Steve Frasier Visionary Award winner this year), admitted the end-to-end paperless mortgage she has worked towards for the last two decades is not here yet.
But she is confident it will be realized in the next three to seven years.
David Zughieri, president of Envoy Mortgage and a member of the Mortgage Technology advisory board, said that government initiatives could aid one million underwater borrowers, but that the total is six million. Asked if he thought government initiatives would in fact aid one million borrowers, he said no.
The MTC in Miami, which National Mortgage News co-sponsored, had many more interesting viewpoints like these revealed. We had to halt the MTC for a couple of years during the recession, and it is hardly ever possible to revive a conference which has suffered an interruption like this, but the evidence is that the MTC is back and on track.
All told, we have sponsored a total of 20 technology conferences over the years, and hope to continue doing so into 2012 and beyond.
