ICE, Mortgage Cadence, Floify, Dark Matter upgrade systems

Origination technology providers update systems

March 20, 2025 10:38 AM

Continuous innovation is what providers behind the various loan origination systems and point of sale technology need to do to survive.

While ICE Mortgage Technology announced several upgrades both on the origination and servicing side at its recent conference, another provider, Mortgage Cadence is bringing a new, specialized edition of its LOS to market.

ICE Mortgage Technology described its upgrades as "the chutes" in the children's board game Chutes & Ladders or akin to moving walkways common in many airport terminals.

"We're working to create efficiencies and remove those friction points from point of thought all the way into the secondary market and beyond," said Matt Dowd, vice president, product management at ICE Mortgage Technology.

Tying it together "really drives a better consumer experience," he said.

The pandemic, followed by the fast rise of mortgage rates, exposed the costs to manufacture, said Seth Hooper, chief product officer for Mortgage Cadence.

So managing those are important, but in a highly fragmented industry, customers still want to be able to differentiate themselves.

"When you've got over 4,000 players in the industry, you still need to be able to compete on what you do best," said Hooper. "But, the economics don't work [for some] to have highly custom solutions where you go through and do those things."

New analyzers to help verify data

ICE Mortgage Technology is adding two new mortgage analysis tools into the Encompass ecosystem, ICE Asset Analyzer and ICE Audit Analyzer.

When it comes to the analyzers, after a document is uploaded into the system, all of this data, along with the resulting calculations, needs to be "validated and verified, and that takes time," said Dowd.

"From the borrower's perspective, time is like molasses," even when the process is just days.

The analyzers look at the documents, and this allows the underwriters to concentrate on guideline exceptions, rather than the stare-and-compare method to make certain everything matches up.

"We use machine learning and artificial intelligence on the front end to recognize the documents," Dowd explained. "We're not using any AI to do [the] decisioning because I think there's too much risk in that."

The products are not about eliminating workers, but getting rid of waste in the process, he added.

Adding new customer acquisition capabilities

Besides the analyzers, ICE Mortgage Technology has added two mobile offerings for loan officers to market to consumers as part of ICE Customer Acquisition.

The My Home Loans Borrower Mobile App provides consumers streamlined access to review, upload and eSign documents, view loan status, use online calculators and maintain direct contact with one or more lenders.

The second is an Encompass loan officer app for efficiently capturing borrower information during the application and origination process allowing for accuracy and workflow efficiency.

In what Dowd termed the "upfront journey" to sell to a consumer, starting from borrower engagement through the time they submit an application, "there's a bunch of people involved within the lender.

"You have a marketer who's generating their campaigns," he said. "You obviously have the borrower, you have a loan officer, and you might have a partner [like] a real estate agent, or…CPAs."

Creating a single solution with no integrations needed

"So we've created a single solution that addresses all those personas," Dowd said.

The aim is to have a place where the user "can do it all," he said.

A big shift is taking place to get away from product offerings and focus on capabilities, and "provide it in a single solution with a single user interface and a single source of data, no integrations to worry about, no overhead to manage with all these different vendors," said Dowd. "I think you'll ultimately, with this, be able to drive a better solution."

Mortgage Cadence rolls out new version of LOS

In 2021, the most recent version of the Mortgage Cadence loan origination system, Mortgage Cadence Platform, MCP for short, was unveiled.

It was a flexible system users were fully able to customize, but not everyone needs this functionality.

MCP Essentials is basically the same system, Hooper said with the same underlying technology and code base. But Mortgage Cadence added a prepackaged workflow, and, in some cases, some guardrails.

"At the heart of our DNA, we've always been a very flexible system that can support a lot of different lending types in the industry, and we wanted to bring that same type of configurability and flexibility to the midmarket space with Essentials, but without all the high cost of an enterprise solution," Hooper explained.

The target market for Essentials

The product is aimed at mid-sized banks and credit unions, firms which typically don't have the technology staff on hand to support an enterprise LOS. It is a multitenant, software-as-a-service offering, said Hooper.

MCP Essentials is being delivered through the Microsoft Azure Public Cloud.

At first, it will be offered only to retail originators.

While the user can make some choices, they will not have the ability to adjust certain modules from the standard configuration.

The typical lender for this new offering will do between 40-to-50 loans a month, but Essentials might be the right product even for those who do 1,000 units, Hooper said.

"It really depends on how much control and flexibility you want within the system," he added.

In the future, Mortgage Cadence will be looking to extend the offering to IMBs; they still remain a market for the enterprise product.

Even with the target market, the update has created benefits for all Mortgage Cadence customers, not just ones who will be using Essentials, Hooper said.

Dark Matter originations systems migrate to Amazon

Dark Matter migrated its two loan origination systems, Empower and Nova, to Amazon Web Services.

"This migration represents a pivotal moment for Dark Matter and our clients," said Sean Dugan, who will soon move up to CEO of Dark Matter, in a press release. "By fully embracing AWS, we're not just improving our infrastructure — we're accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver next-generation mortgage solutions that help our clients succeed in an evolving market."

With the switch, Dark Matter said its users will have access to accelerated product updates and feature releases, plus more reliable performance and improved scalability to adjust operations to meet fluctuating mortgage demand. It will also add advanced security protocols and enable business continuity at times of natural disasters and local outages.

"This exemplifies our commitment to empowering financial institutions with cloud solutions that scale seamlessly and accelerate digital transformation," said Rich Geraffo, vice president and managing director, AWS North America.

Floify's new no-code app for loan applications

Point-of-sale system Floify has rolled out a product it calls Dynamic App. The no-code offering allows lenders to tailor mortgage loan applications based on product type by eliminating irrelevant questions.

Consumers will be prompted when they enter the POS to specify the purpose for the loan they are seeking and then will be routed to specific questions relevant to that product.

Lenders have the ability to create customer questions for specialized products, like non-qualified mortgages or home equity lines of credit.

"We see allowing lenders to collect information specific to the type of loan they are originating as a game-changer, streamlining the approval process and providing a red carpet experience for loan applicants," Sofia Rossato, president and general manager of Floify, said in a press release.

"In essence, Dynamic Apps supports easily configurable, no-code application types that reduce application fallout and ultimately help lenders do more business."

Floify demonstrated the product at ICE Experience. Later this year, the company plans to enhance Dynamic Apps to support additional types of loan application workflows, the press release said.