Mortgage Cadence’s Joe Camerieri: One System to Rule Them All
Joe Camerieri is Executive Vice President of Sales and Strategy at Mortgage Cadence, an Accenture company, Denver.
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, magical rings come with the promise of great power. In truth, the real power is wrapped up in a single master ring.
In the books and subsequent movie adaptations, this is considered a negative outcome and some hobbits–and others–are employed to rectify the situation. But was it really such a bad thing, having one ring to rule them all?
Consider the technology investments lenders have made over the past few years. So many wonderful new tools have become available, each promising great power and seemingly magical benefits to both the lenders and the borrowers they serve. Lenders have embraced these tools, lured by these promises.
The result has been tech sprawl and towering tech stacks that have added cost and time to the lender’s process, while delivering few, if any, of the original promises.
It’s not that these tools are all bad investments necessarily, but when combined, it results in lenders’ IT departments to seemingly be on the brink of losing control.
If hobbits and other fantastical creatures existed in our world, I don’t think they would waste any time on magical rings. Rather, they would be working to craft a single technology platform that could easily connect to and then efficiently control any other shiny tool the lender wanted to employ.
No Need for Hobbits
Fortunately, we don’t need hobbits to achieve this goal. It exists today in LOS platforms. Single systems of record are unique in the industry for many reasons. Chief among these may be the ease with which systems allow a lender to add any partner to its process with only a single day for integration.
When compared to competing systems that either lock the lenders into a predefined list of partners or take so long and cost so much to integrate a new partner into the platform, well, there is no comparison.
And it’s not just partners that these platforms make easy, it’s also loan products. Forward, reverse, cash-out refinances, fixed-rate second liens and HELOCs are all equally easy to originate on a single platform. The same borrower can take out multiple products of different types without confusing the system.
A Single System to Rule Them All
In both the Lord of the Rings and the mortgage industry, heroes (and lenders) are often pulled off course when they focus on the wrong goal. Friction must be destroyed at all costs. But wait, look at the efficiency we could gain by adding one more layer to our tech stack! This is a trap.
The lender’s goal is to finance the homeowner, in any manner they choose, using the most efficient methods possible while earning a profit. It’s not to shave off five minutes of the process with a new tool that ultimately adds 30 minutes due to integration inefficiencies, additional Q&A requirements or users wasting time swiveling between screens. The goal is certainly not to earn your technology partner more fees by using their chosen partners.
To reach the goal, the lender needs a single system capable of controlling everything they choose to build into their loan origination process. And it needs to put the power into the lender’s hand and no other.
Gandalf didn’t think he was worthy of the power the one ring offered, but what if he was? What could you do with that kind of power?
(Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect policies of the Mortgage Bankers Association, nor do they connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. MBA NewsLink welcomes your submissions. Inquiries can be sent to Editor Michael Tucker or Editorial Manager Anneliese Mahoney.)
