Every time you feel as if you’ve got a handle on the latest tech-nological advances, some upstart shakes up the playing field and makes you feel like a caveman. Being behind the tech power curve is scary enough when it’s just your home appliances at stake, but when your business is on the line, that fear can become a panic.

Yet for all the computer-driven angst and the roller-coaster twists in today’s mortgage market, plan-ning tech solutions for your loan business doesn’t have to be that hard. At least not according to some of the industry’s top technol-ogy providers, who are constantly working to adapt to new market-sensitive trends and solutions, from full document management systems (DMS) to the apps for that phone your nephew loves so much.

Up in the Clouds

Are you ready for a tech talk? If so, you’re doing better than

a lot of your peers, laughs Ron Redmer, CIO of NDeX. “It’s a pretty technical topic out of the gate,” he says. “Even the cloud is hard for a lot of people to get their head around.” But you had better try.

After all, you’ve got nothing to lose but your fear of the future!

Did you catch that term Redmer used? Cloud technology —the hosting of data and software so that users can add to it or ac-cess it from virtually anywhere —is perhaps the most critical characteristic of a solid IT strategy these days, according to our ex-perts. Why’s it so important? It may seem like we’re still in a period of regulatory uncertainty, but that’s not totally true: What’s certain is there’s bound to be more work to do down the road. “Volume is going up,” Redmer says. “Security requirements and retention policies are increasing.”

Which is why Redmer and NDeX just launched a new DMS. “Over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, our clients”—law firms for default servicers—“are being required to provide a grow-ing number of documents and document images to satisfy OCC requirements.” From affidavits to service of process filings to mili-tary search results, that’s a lot of paperwork—and it’s not unusual for a client to need to process 5,000 cases in 48 hours, convert the info into a specific file type, and name the files using exacting

conventions. “That’s a pretty tall order,” Redmer says.

This is where the cloud comes in—specifically, a data technology referred to in the industry as “Soft-ware as a Service” (SaaS). That means the software you use to ac-cess your data is also on the cloud, making for a more agile, update-able, and reliable user experience, usually through a special browser window or application. (It’s often cheaper than the alternatives, too.) “This is now happening with very large companies who would have never considered using SaaS be-fore,” says Sanjeev Malaney, CEO of the San Francisco doc-sharing tech provider Capsilon. “These companies seem to be growing more comfortable with the cloud-based model and working with SaaS providers.”

Securing the Market

For a while, big financial services providers seemed hesitant to

join the cloud, because of security concerns. But putting your info out there isn’t the same as putting your info out there. “There is a common myth that SaaS is unsafe, but this is no longer the case, and the growing adoption of the cloud proves it,” Malaney says. Vendors have raised their game to deliver such a high level of service that this has opened the eyes of larger institutions to embrace and to feel comfortable with the model. Your info is as safe in the cloud as it ever was on another in-house

server. “Even the late adopters in the industry have now adopted,” he adds. “Lenders should no longer consider only on-premises software solutions—the cloud is here to stay.”

With privacy concerns out of the way, you can focus on growth —because cloud technology for data storage isn’t just serving a need today, but potential needs in the future. When choosing a tech upgrade, Redmer says, look for security: a user-friendly web inter-face, generally with drag-and-drop capability for documentation; mobility across computer plat-forms, from desktops to tablets and phones; deduplication of boilerplate docs and phrasings, so they aren’t taking up tons of storage space; and straightfor-ward scanning and indexing, so you can recall any individual doc (or 500,000 of them!) with relative ease.

“We are on a pretty high-end private cloud,” Redmer says of his new DMS. “It’s given us the ability to scale up our capacity. Everything is more dynamic.” If computer and mobile devices go through a bunch of revolutions in the next few years, NDeX will be ready to scale up seamlessly because of the way it stores in-formation now. “With our private cloud, I can go buy hardware, I can run any system I want on that hardware,” Redmer says. And most important: “We can also ingest more clients into our cloud.” n

AUGUST 2012

Mostly Cloudy:Forecasting the Future

of Mortgage TechnologyThe mortgage market’s rapid evolution has technology companies fighting to stay ahead

of the trends, but today’s leading executives are floating on a cloud in spite of the pressure.

By Adam Weinstein

FEATURE

O K, I know how it is: You finally just figured out how to program your satellite TV remote, and your 6-year-old nephew’s over there creating movies on his smartphone, posting

them on the web, and selling enough downloads to put himself through college.

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