"Is Anyone Out There?!" -- Another Missed Opportunity -- April 2, 2006
For those of us that attended the MBA's National Technology Conference, I'm wondering if anyone else was surprised by the number of booths and discussions centered on loan origination systems (LOS)? What struck me as odd for a market in transition was the lack of a servicing, credit quality, and risk mitigation approaches being offered for real products and services.
It seems that as an industry, we continually face vendors that "jump-on-the-bandwagon" rather than anticipating the market conditions. Or in more traditional terms, there is a lack of market analysis and segmentation driving future product offerings. While we should expect changes in the future conferences (i.e., October 2006), it's shocking the herd mentality that continues to haunt the mortgage industry.
The lack of servicing solutions for the ever-growing complex products being offered to consumers in times of decreasing margins and higher risks, presents a burden unseen in recent times. As evident from the exhibitors, the lack of forethought for services has been instead replaced by debates about service oriented architectures, MISMO versus Adobe, and wireless solutions.
The real challenge and market opportunity resides with the "hard-stuff" -- global workforces with servicing system impediments, continual work-around's due to the lack of an affordable enterprise-class system, and the lack of CDI solutions for end-to-end information integration of disparate internal and third-party data sources.
On the surface it appears that we will be waiting, yet again, for the vendors to release workable products to meet the needs of a market that the rest of us saw forthcoming...
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