Serving up this year's outstanding mortgage technology players.

PRESENTING THIS YEAR'S BEST AND BRIGHTEST mortgage technology providers. This list has gone through several changes over the past few years. For example, we originally honored 100 providers, but have recently sliced that down to just 50 in order to reflect the deep industry consolidation. As lenders look increasingly for one end-to-end solution, technology providers have merged or acquired niche players to offer a variety of services or technology applications under one company name.

Also, this year we at Mortgage Technology magazine have embraced new technologies on our end to allow companies to provide us with information detailing why they should be included on our list. We posted an application on our website for interested vendors. Of course, we reserve the right to include vendors that didn't apply, but 90% of the companies that made it on our list did apply through our website this year. What hasn't changed is our commitment to ensuring that the list includes true mortgage technology leaders. In total, 60% of the companies on the list have been in the mortgage technology space for 10 years or more. But longevity isn't the only criteria to get on the list. Our four major criteria for inclusion of eligible vendors and service providers on our list are customer satisfaction, functionality, market share and viable revenue model.

Demonstrating functional value to lenders is our most important criterion. It is crucial that the providers on our list have satisfied users and show the ability to hold them by keeping those customers apace of the technology deployed by competing lenders.