Cloud Expo on Ulitzer

Dorado Corporation has released its predictions for major trends and developments likely to shape residential mortgage lending and mortgage technology in 2010. They are:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption will reach critical mass in mortgage originator use, with more than 30% of all originations in North America occurring in the cloud.
• Loan volume will fall below 2009 levels, primarily as a result of reduced FHA originations and an expectation that refinancing levels will soon peak. However, the drop will be mitigated by several factors: continued low interest rates for at least the first half of the year, employment stabilization, the continued high supply of affordable homes, and proactive lender marketing driven by advances in lead capture technology and new entrants such as Google into the lead generation space.
• Regulatory compliance will become a competitive advantage, as those lenders that adopt turnkey approaches to updating their systems and processes take market share away from those institutions mired in human error, penalties, operational disruptions, and customer complaints.
• New integrations and interoperability capabilities will provide banks and their borrowers alike with unprecedented choice in external services, driving the cost of these services downwards.
• Requirements for lenders to maintain a greater financial interest in the loans sent to the secondary markets will further drive a trend towards clean, error-free loans and increased transparency in the creation and handling of loan file information.
• The demarcation between originators and servicers will continue to blur, related to the increased exposure of lenders to the pools that they feed, and an increased level of pre-close analytics and other safeguards instituted in the origination process to minimize risk.
• The mid-tier group of banks from 2009 will begin to differentiate themselves, with a handful of aggressive, volume-focused lenders using technology and new ways of doing business to capture market share. The result is a breakout group of “super regionals” that will force former mid-level players further down the food chain.

“The unprecedented turmoil of the last two years is giving way to a period of tremendous innovation in the mortgage industry,” said Dain Ehring, chief executive officer at Dorado. “The outline of what the not-so-distant future industry will look like is now starting to emerge.

“We believe 2010 will be a year in which both growth-oriented lenders and the leading banks will continue to differentiate themselves based on the adoption of software-as-a-service and other cloud computing processes to improve workflow efficiency and enhance customer service. The key will be to have in place intelligent systems with the flexibility and agility to operate without disruption in a continually changing economic and regulatory environment,” Ehring said.