The year was 1983 and many of us remember some of the highlights from that year. Ronald Reagan was president. The cost of a gallon of gas was about $1.25. The Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl. And, oh yes, that year Ginnie Mae unveiled its technology platform—the one it still uses and will keep in operation to insure mortgage loans until Dec. 14—when it’s new platform comes on board.
So like clockwork every 30 years, steady and reliable Ginnie Mae revamps its technology whether it needs to or not. It’s a schedule most vendors would envy, and would try to imitate—except they face practical considerations—bills to pay, client promises to satisfy, and a need to build a brand around on-time delivery.
Ginnie Mae doesn’t face those concerns.
The development cycles I’m familiar with are much shorter than that. But that’s really not the point. After all, it’s not as though if Ginnie Mae builds a better mousetrap, lenders will come. Build it, don’t build it, lenders will come. They have to because it’s the only game in town. Ginnie Mae pretty much plays by its own rules.
Just what product managers at Ginnie Mae do to keep themselves busy, to occupy their time, if not to keep them engaged, is unclear. I do suspect, however, it’s tough to stay busy cleaning your desk for three decades. It must be excruciatingly difficult to spend much time worrying about meeting a deadline that’s 30 years in the future.
To be sure, the development cycle is not one that I can remember seeing before or relate to very well. Maybe this is a case of practice makes perfect—Ginnie Mae wanting to get the kinks out—and presumably there were many of them before releasing the technology to clients.
After all, just because a well-honed technology has a little age on it, is hardly reason enough to replace it, so perhaps that realization or rationalization, drove the decision to maintain the technological status quo for all these decades.
Without question, 1983 was a fine year for technology. Perhaps Ginnie Mae sees itself as having developed a system for the ages, one so well designed, one so easy to use, that the platform is considered timeless. Or, it may have been driven by one overriding fact: Lenders have nowhere else to go for the Ginnie Mae imprimatur. The agency’s lenders may not like the technology, it may be old, past its useful life, inefficient—but it’s the only one available to them at least until the middle of December.
I’d like to think executives at Ginnie Mae feel about its technology the way a vintner of fine wine feels about a favorite Malbec: He likes a certain year and the grapes that produced it. The amount of rain was just right; the temperature was perfect, the soil conditions superb, and the result was an incredible wine, one to be savored.
He doesn’t throw it out after a few years, for that would be gross gastronomical heresy. Instead, he serves it with pride, knowing it’s a one-of-a-kind wine, one for the ages, the palate pleaser of palate pleasers.
Likewise, Ginnie Mae doesn’t discard a technology that has the ingredients of a winner, one that has staying power, was well engineered, and has supported the agency for years.
The platform has gotten a bit older, features anachronistic green screens, runs on DOS, and it’s been like that for a long time. DOS, after all, gave way to Windows in the mid-1990s. That’s the platform’s charm, a romantic notion of technology that’s like going for a horse and buggy ride through Central Park at the holidays. To be sure, the existing platform is one of a kind, though not exactly in the same way the vintner’s stellar Malbec is.
At Ginnie Mae, it’s no technology before it’s time.
Matt Strickberger is the managing partner of OnPoint PR and Consulting LLC, a public relations firm that represents lenders, servicers, technology companies and others. He was editor of Mortgage Technology magazine from 1997-2000. If you have comments or suggestions for future columns, email him at mstrickberger@onpoint-pr.com.
