WE’RE HEARING…I love the MBA’s tech show. And this year, it’s in my hometown of Fort Lauderdale at the Westin Diplomat hotel. This venue has a long and illustrious history full of typical South Florida highlights, including being the first location in Florida where Lawrence Welk filmed his TV show (how swinging!), and where Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr. and Bob Hope played over the years (more swinging!).
Financial difficulties nearly gutted it, much like the mortgage business. And in a final irony, it was rescued by financing from the Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters in the late 1990s, a group known for their excellent use of tools and their inability to keep their pants up while trying to keep the rest of us from getting all wet.
So, now that you know more about the history of the hotel, let me tell you why I am so excited about the conference. The big reason is that this is where you get to see the best new solutions to the industry’s toughest problems.
Of course, the last few years have seen more problems than solutions, but part of that is because no one was clear about what all the new rules would be. Even as we get more clarity about rules, we also know that we will never have perfect clarity when trying to build out new technologies.
Something is always subject to change. It would be like a plumber fixing a toilet and then trying to tell you that you cannot throw foreign objects in it. That instruction might work on airplanes, but we all know that nasty stuff goes into the toilet, and we also know it’s going to break again someday.
So, I will be at tech show with four of my colleagues from Stratmor. After all, we evaluate over 25 LOS systems as part of our practice, so we are used to looking at a lot of dirty plumbing. Some of it old and rusty, some of the plumbing is the nice new white PVC stuff that is much easier to work with. Of course, in an old house (or old system) at some point the old stuff and the new stuff has to be hooked up, and that is often where the leaks occur.
So, no technology is perfect, but here is what I hope to find in the technologies we see:
1) They'll be flexible and respond well to business rules that are easy to set and reset.
2) They'll be easy to integrate and play well with other tools—no matter who makes them.
3) They'll come from vendors who are secure enough in their understanding of the regulatory landscape that they share the risk.
4) They’ll come from vendors with the strength to remain in the industry in the future—they won’t be the plumbers of the past but the plumbing engineers of the future.
I'm not sure what I'll find in Fort Lauderdale next week. I'll be looking for a perfect world, but I won't be holding my breath (just in case the toilet gets stopped up). I know my colleagues and I are strapping on our tool belts and pulling up our pants (way up!) while we check out all the new tools. Like a plumber, hopefully the view for all of us will be better looking forward that it has been from behind.
Garth Graham is a partner with Stratmor Group, and has over 25 years of mortgage experience, from Fortune 500 companies to startups, including management of two of the most successful mortgage e-commerce platforms. He was formerly with Chase Manhattan Mortgage and ABN Amro, where he was a senior executive during the sale of its mortgage group to Citigroup.
