Big technology firms that serve complex, highly regulated industries have been responsible for many important innovations over the years, but far fewer in the recent past.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, when compliance is a top concern, there is a lot of pressure for users to remain tethered to something that they know works. That breaks down when compliance rules change rapidly, as they have in the mortgage industry.
The other reason innovation has slowed for larger firms is that the bigger the company becomes, the more difficult it is for executives to take risks that might jeopardize their positions within the company. With too many internal competitors, it’s often easier to wait for someone else to make a mistake.
As a result, we’ve seen some very large companies working to maintain technologies that are decades old. That may have worked in the past, but those days are ending, especially for mortgage servicing.
What mortgage servicers need now
There are plenty of technology developers who are happy to tell you what they think their industry needs now. Perhaps not surprisingly, it generally lines up with what they happen to be developing.
Our views of the industry’s needs come from the customers we serve. They know exactly what they need and if they trust their technology partner, they’ll share those needs in great detail.
The old drivers of new development — customer experience, reduced costs, and full compliance — are just table stakes today. You can’t drive innovation by aiming at these targets. You must think bigger.
Fortunately, the most successful mortgage servicers are already there.
When they tell us what they need now, they talk about the user’s experience, tighter integration with the origination side of the business, and having compliance built in so they don’t have to spend as much time thinking about it.
Another request we’re seeing more often, especially in light of some industry breaches that have made the news and exposed borrower PII, is a solution that encrypts all of their borrower’s information, protecting them even in the event of a security breach.
Aiming at those targets will give you a much better view of the future of the servicing industry.
A broader view of end-to-end mortgage software
Among the many changes that COVID brought to our industry was a realization that mortgage originators need to think more carefully about the servicing asset they are producing and that mortgage servicers need an easier way of profiting from portfolio churn.
The solution to both of those problems lies in redefining the concept of an end-to-end solution.
Back when the first platforms for mortgage servicing were created, they were designed for big firms that only serviced loans for originators. Naturally, older executives will still think of an end-to-end solution for servicers as beginning with loan boarding and ending with loan payoff.
That’s short-sighted.
A true end-to-end solution, the real solution the industry needs today, starts with loan origination, goes through the boarding process to the servicing platform and then, when the borrower is ready for a refinance or new mortgage, comes back through to the LOS.
This kind of Unified Platform did not exist until MortgageFlex built its loan servicing platform. Today, it’s available to any mortgage originator or servicer.
The platform has been well received by the industry, coming as it did at a time when every originator was looking for additional revenue and every servicer was concerned about losing revenue to portfolio churn.
The servicing software is easy for users to adopt, is built on the same code and database as the LOS, and offers full compliance support. We know this is what servicers need now because our users are telling us so. Best of all, it closes the door to the era of a standalone servicing platform and solves the lending problem from end to end.
Isn’t it time you saw the industry’s first and only unified platform for yourself? Reach out to us today by visiting MortgageFlex online or by calling John McCrea at 1-860-460-7418 to schedule a live demo.