Rick Grant & Associates

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The Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual convention wrapped yesterday in San Francisco and the bankers that were brave enough to push through the protestors and had the travel budget are on their way home now. We’ll be reaching out to many of our friends who were at the show and bringing you some news that might not have made it into the papers. Watch the site over the next few weeks or subscribe with one of the buttons in the sidebar.

Of course, plenty of news finds its way to the traditional outlets during this time of year. We provide you with a roundup of some of the stories we’ve seen and why we think they are important.
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It wasn’t that long ago that Doug Duncan, then chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, was telling audiences how awful the U.S. financial services industry was at spending money on technology. He was right at the time, with banks spending much less than other industries and mortgage bankers spending, on average, about one-tenth as much as other business sectors. But times are changing.

In its examination of IT spending habits in the nation’s top 10 industries, Informationweek has concluded that banks are the new promised land for those who want to sell technology, especially if that tech is related to security.
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Back in the late 90s I interviewed some mortgage technologists who believed that the future of mortgage loan origination would not lie with mortgage brokers or even mortgage bankers, but with third party advisers. Financial planners, accountants and insurance agents would be the new originators, I was told, and the company–which is now out of business–showed me the platform it hoped they would use to write new business. Sometimes, new offerings are ahead of their time.

Recently, I visited with the CEO of a Web-based loan origination system (LOS) that was perfect for insurance agents interested in originating mortgage loans. The company had rolled it out to a bank owned by an insurance company, which had deployed it to its national network of agents. Nothing. But today, I saw some news that told me we might be getting there.
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Costa Mesa, Calif.-based PriceMyLoan (PML) has integrated its Point of Sale automated eligibility and pricing tool with Freddie Mac’s Loan Prospector, the company said. The integration allows originators to obtain decisions from Loan Prospector from within the PML system. Originators query PML’s web-based engine to determine which products their borrowers qualify for and to obtain current pricing for those products.
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In this blog, we do our best to focus on the positive, to provide executives who are intent on driving their companies to success with the information they can use to be more successful. Success depends upon our ability to fully comprehend the environment we’re competing in so that we can make the best possible decisions. With the bailout plan nearing its final planning stages, now is a good time to pause and review. While I’ve been known to endorse the Ready, Fire, Aim methodology, this might be a time to step back and take a closer look at the evolving situation in the U.S. economy.
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While I can’t say that I knew that Lehman Brothers would be the next Wall Street firm to fall, there were plenty of pundits who had been saying that the other shoe had yet to drop. Watching the dust swirl after this weekend’s announcements, it appears that this might actually be part two of the double bottom Mark Dangelo has been talking about for months. Dangelo and others are talking today about going back to the old models for U.S. banking.

That seems reasonable. Wall Street will go back to selling shares of public companies and depository institutions will again become leaders in the home finance business. Monoline mortgage banks will become departments within other banks, like Countrywide and Bank of America.

But what about the other players that were, to some degree, the children of Wall Street’s real estate empire? (more…)