Over the past three weeks now I’ve been bringing you this individual’s thoughts on a slew of recent conferences that I’ve attended over the past month. In this edition I’d like to talk about the MBA Annual. Was it worth the time? Was attendance really as down as some were predicting? Were there any new ideas to help lenders survive this downturn? My answer: yes and no.
I’m happy that I attended the show. If nothing else, there is value in getting together with industry experts to discuss what’s really going on. I think those vendors and lenders that opted not to attend for a variety of reasons made the wrong decision. Overall attendance was down. It was somewhere around 2,500.
However, for me, 2,500 was a good number. I expected far less given attendance at most industry shows this year. Surely, the industry didn’t show up in force, but it didn’t cower away either. I’d call attendance strong given market conditions. I was impressed.
The one area where I was disappointed was in the area of new ideas. I attended the technology sessions and there weren’t any new ideas that I could see. The session on data management dubbed “Enterprise Data Management: The Key to Improved Data Quality and Liquidity” was very well done. The white paper that the MBA released over the summer on managing risk and the follow up being done by the MBA Residential Technology Providers Forum is both welcome and needed.
I’m sure it’s very gratifying for those innovators like Roger Gudobba who have consistently spoke out about the need for the industry to rely more heavily on data and to ensure that it’s quality data to see these sessions. A lot of the problems still plaguing the industry around fraud could have been prevented had the industry been more concerned with getting at the data and embracing data. Also, servicers dealing with all these defaults would have a much better time of it if they were dealing with electronic documents over paper documents. So, this was a nice-to-hear session, but I left thinking: It’s about time the mortgage industry starts to better manage risk and deal with trusted data over error-prone paper.
As someone who speaks often about electronic closings, I was excited to attend the “Taking The Mystery Out of eClosing” session. In my opinion, the mortgage industry makes e-closings much more difficult then they are in actuality. It’s not rocket science. It’s not some futuristic technology at all. Borrowers are very comfortable e-signing, it’s lenders that have been the stumbling block because they’re reluctant to change their process because we all know change has to be bad, after all just ask the mainstream media and Barack Obama.
It was a bit disappointing to me that limited power of attorney closings were lumped into the electronic closing session though. LPOA isn’t electronic at all. The borrower still has to wet sign a legal document signing away their right to be present at closing and get that document notarized. And from there while the borrower may be taken through the other documents electronically and clicks agree, all the actual documents are being printed and wet signed and shipped out the old fashioned way.
What these sessions did more then anything is reinforce the validity of what I would consider old technology concepts that have not been adopted because lenders are slow to adopt anything and everything, really. So, while these ideas weren’t new to me, maybe they were to the lenders sitting in the audience. And even if they weren’t new to attendees there either, they were still topics that need to be talked about in order for the mortgage industry to wake up, get with it and move into this century.
However, I did expect some new ideas from vendors exhibiting. There’s usually at least one or two revealing announcements that make me say, “Wow, that’s really innovative.” Not this year. I found that the lenders in attendance were serious and were looking for technology solutions. I think vendors that opted not to exhibit missed out. But the vendors didn’t give those lenders anything new to think about per se. It was more of the same.
Vendors in the mortgage space have been so far ahead of their lender clients that they really didn’t have to show anything new to get attention. They were just hoping that this time lenders actually pay attention. I hope so too.
