The 2011 Innovations Award Winners Are …

Over 100 mortgage executives representing lenders, servicers, investors, top researchers, technology providers, service providers, journalists and marketing and public relations experts all gathered to attend PROGRESS in Lending’s industry game-changing Innovations 2010 Event. Global DMS was the Gold Sponsor and Motivity Solutions was the Silver Sponsor. PROGRESS in Lending is very grateful to our sponsors and attendees for making this event an unqualified success.

Why did the industry support this event? Because it matters. As part of this event we named the top five innovations of 2010. In addition, we hosted a roundtable with top mortgage industry leaders that discussed how to move the industry closer to recovery.

Why was Innovations 2010 so successful? Because true innovation is alive and well in the mortgage space. On this night, PROGRESS in Lending gave out the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to the top five industry innovations introduced into the mortgage market between January 2010 and December 2010 that truly changed the market for the better.

Our executive team is made up of six mortgage professionals that combined have over 100 years of mortgage experience. They know the mortgage space and you probably know them, too. All applications were scored on a weighted scale by all six members of our executive team. We were looking for the innovation’s overall industry significance, the originality of the innovation, the positive change the innovation made possible, the intangible efficiencies gained as a result of the innovation, and the hard cost and time savings that the innovation enables industry participants to achieve.

And in our first year we received over 30 applications. Certainly the decisions made were tough. According to the executive team the top five innovations of 2010 are:

Property preservation companies have struggled with how to quickly, easily an accurately document completed work orders in the field. Assurant FAS knew they needed to leverage the intelligence of a smart phone to solve this industry problem. So, FAS developed an application on the Android-based phone that would directly tie into the camera to capture photos in addition to the GPS, date and time information, and then relay this information directly to a web server to securely store the data.

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The unfortunate reality that the mortgage servicing segment has neglected to innovate its core technology over the years is now coming back to haunt not just servicing, but the entire industry. When the crisis hit, the private sector, led by DRI, helped fill the workflow gap with increasingly sophisticated default management systems that were integrated with the main servicing platforms. This innovation provided much-needed technology for an area of the business that had taken a budgetary back seat since the late 1970s.

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The MISMO Version 3 Architecture and reference model have seen a consolidation of favorable opinions during 2010. FHFA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have adopted it and have published a schedule for adoption by all lenders that deliver loans to them. The idea of a single industry-wide data standard is not new. However, it has only been through the dedicated work of hundreds of participants that MISMO has been able to reconcile into a single model all the concepts used in origination and loan delivery, to name just two.

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The Movation technology provided by Motivity Solutions speaks directly to industry needs like ensuring transparency, data quality, executive insight, total insight into the entire mortgage operation, etc. The Movation Enterprise Platform is a business management platform that combines the user’s existing systems to fill the gaps, optimize the organization and simplify the business. By connecting fragmented technology and plugging in existing systems, Movation actually is able to maximize the user’s insight and control over the entire mortgage business.

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The patented BIOWRAP file encryption and management solution developed by NATION Technologies allows companies and individuals to easily certify, secure, manage and track electronic information at rest as well as in motion. BIOWRAP customers are capable of encrypting any electronic information, designating retention rights and specifying precisely who is authorized to gain access. Certificate authentication supports digital an hardware tokens to create BIOWRAP encrypted files. It allows for encryption for any electronic information. Encrypted files are always protected and can be delivered by any electronic means.

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In addition to honoring the top five innovations of 2010, the PROGRESS in Lending Executive Team, the top innovators and all the event attendees engaged in a discussion on the state of innovation, how innovation would be impacted by the loss of the GSEs, how Dodd-Frank would impact innovation and what innovation was needed to bring about industry recovery. It was a true sharing of ideas. All of the elements described came together to craft what truly was a one-of-a-kind industry event.