Thinking ahead.

Technology has come of age in the mortgage banking business. It is now fairly common to see a senior executive position in the more sophisticated firms with a title of chief information officer or something to that effect.

The Mortgage Bankers Association of America has its own dedicated committee to cover significant developments involving automation and systems. And finally, technology has entered the area of industry lobbying, and when mortgage bankers assess pending proposals by HUD, or the secondary market agencies, or new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requirements - one of the first questions raised is how much will cost to retrofit the system to comply with the new requirement. The key development here is that finally an effort is being made to shape new rules around systems realities - this is a breakthrough. Now, finally, the recognition is there that all rulemaking has operational implications - and operations now hinge around major systems and technology of many different types.

But perhaps more importantly for the long-term, the visionaries in the business have actually begun to plot the steps needed to move the origination side into a purely electronic environment, where paper is no longer the vehicle for carrying barrower information and where human underwriters are saved for the more dicey credit judgments. Furthermore, this is not all on someone's mental blackboard - serious steps already have been taken to integrate expert systems into underwriting and to move credit reports, loan applications and appraisals into an electronic delivery format. Still there is much more to come before there can be a seamless electronic universe for communicating among the many sud-industries involved in mortgage lending. In this issue our authors explore the different fronts where progress is being made to create this future common electronic medium for exchanging mortgage data.

Finally, there is the topic of what technology is doing for us today. thereare plenty of answer to that question, as technology become the workhorse in the business that has allowed both servicers and originators to handle volume like never before. the added productivity engendered by technology is certainly being put to the test in these wild times.

This is only a glimpse of what technology is doing to change the business but clearly the industry is in the midst of some prophetic changes that will make yesterday's ways of doing business seem primitive indeed.