The typical residential lender can spend years refining its individual lending policies and procedures. And I can tell you that like snowflakes, no two are alike. A good loan origination system will be able to adapt to your way of doing business using workflows, defaults and custom fields. And not tie you to the software vendor’s limits that dictate how your business should be done.
A good loan origination system will be able to adapt to your way of doing business – not the mortgage software vendor’s way it feels business should be done. Every vendor will tell you they will try but some mortgage software companies with legacy systems simply can’t change as much as they might like to due to the software’s code and architecture. They get around this – or try to – by providing access to more third-party software vendors than you’ll ever need, conversion software that appears to make the change, custom Excel work sheets, just about anything without actually changing. Usually (not always) the newer the software, the easier it is to change as web-browser based software requires more of an open source structure.
This leads us to security so let’s get a few myths out of the way. First, the term “proprietary software” usually translates into “software code so antiquated and convoluted only we can change it.” There’s a successful mortgage software vendor that develops its software in a software language written 50 years ago and hasn’t been taught in schools in 30 years. Guess how much they charge to make a change? Second, there’s nothing’s more important to a credit union, community bank or mortgage lender than protecting the personal information of their members/customers.