Building The Case For Redefining The Mortgage Industry Using APIs

I am trying to get better at showcasing the early stories I find about APIs making their moves into new industries. It helps to have a post to reference when I add an area as an official research project, and begin tracking on companies more closely in the industry. I'm sure I've seen mortgage-related API rhetoric before, but a post in the National Mortgage News, provides a pretty clear mark in the sand to begin building the case for redefining the mortgage industry using APIs.

The description of the mortgage industry sounds like other industries where many disparate systems and players exist, with a minefield of technical, business, and politic considerations littering the landscape. One reason I cherry picked this article out of the hundreds of posts I tune into each week, is the focus on a new area like mortgages, but also because it focuses on the reality on the ground, and acknowledges there is no single end-to-end solution that will fix what is going--despite many vendor claims.

"No one actually has an end-to-end solution. And with anyone who claims to be an end-to-end solution, their customers are using other services to round out their capabilities."

People will always seek out solutions to their integration issues, this is what shadow IT has shown us in recent history. It is clear the mortgage industry is facing what many other industries are facing, and that they are using many disparate systems, many operating in the cloud, and the need move things around more efficiently is becoming critical. There is no silver bullet in this environment, and APIs are increasingly providing the connectivity that is needed to 3rd party systems, as well as opening up and providing access to internal system resources.

This post provides me with an early line in the sand, showing where I started tuning into the mortgage industry closer. I've added a couple of new keyword search phrases to my API monitoring, and if I keep coming up with conversations around how APIs are being applied in this industry, I will add a mortgage API research area to my work, and begin aggregating the players in the space, along with the tools, services, and processes that are being applied on the ground.