When it comes to networking opportunities, those of us working in the home finance industry have it good. Whether you’re on the mortgage origination or the servicing side of the business, there are a number of industry conferences each year you can attend to get caught up on important industry issues and to network with other industry professionals.
In a good year, these events will draw thousands of industry professionals together to discuss the most important issues facing the business.
This, apparently, is not a good year.
Don’t get me wrong, we were part of some very good conversations at this year’s spring conferences, but there were some topics that just didn’t get the coverage they should have.
What was on the menu this spring?
Every time we send a team to an industry conference, we plan out in advance who we hope to see and what we want to discuss. Here are a few of the topics we had the opportunity to discuss with our friends in the industry this spring.
Collaboration and Partnerships
You can pretty much count on there being at least as many vendors at a mortgage conference as there are lenders or servicers. That’s just the pattern our industry has followed and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
We always want to catch up with our partners, making sure that they are able to serve their clients well through our origination and servicing platforms and to make sure that we’re all up to date on the latest data security protocols.
We also use these shows to find and begin vetting new vendor relationships. Our platforms are constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of our lender and servicer clients and so these discussions are always on the menu.
Ethics and Responsibility
In our industry, this pretty much falls under the category of compliance and it’s a top concern for everyone we deal with on both the client and vendor partner sides of the business. This is a zero tolerance part of our business and so we use part of our conference time to make sure we’re up to date on changes coming down from our regulators.
As we work to add more advanced technology to our platforms, such as AI and machine learning, we’re beginning to have more conversations about how best to deploy these tools to ensure that we don’t propagate unintended bias and avoid compliance errors.
Diversity and Inclusion
Thanks to the hard work of so many in the industry, we’re having more conversations about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Our business has done better than many about welcoming diversity into our operations and we welcome any conversation that allows us to show how important this is to our operation, and always has been.
Industry Forecasting
More than in most industries, executives in home finance are always trying to get a feel for what’s coming next. Our business is so complex that forecasting is incredibly difficult. We’re fortunate to have good economists working throughout our industry and especially in our major trade associations, but it’s still very hard to predict our future.
Naturally, this is an underlying issue in many of the conversations, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the conversation that could have the most information about the future didn’t make it onto the agenda at this year’s spring conferences.
No one wanted to talk about industry disruption.
What we should have been discussing
Of all the things that should have been high on the list of topics this year, innovation and disruption just didn’t get the attention they should have.
We think there are a number of reasons for this. First, after years of outside fintech firms coming into the space with promises of widespread industry disruption, only to offer poorly architected software built with little understanding of our compliance requirements or existing ecosystem of partner relationships, lenders are tired of the idea.
But more important than this is the fact that so much marketing noise over the past few years has left many unsure of what industry disruption even looks like. In our next post, we’ll tell you exactly what it looks like and why it’s what the industry needs more than ever right now.
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For more information about the way MortgageFlex views disruption in the mortgage servicing industry, see Craig’s recent article in ACUMA’s Pipeline publication. You can download the entire issue here: https://acuma.org/pipeline/acuma-2023-summer-pipeline/