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August 22, 2019

20 Years in the Mortgage Trade

Since 1999 we’ve been providing lenders not just with great technology, but also with the expertise to design & optimize workflows, instill best practices, and measure and monitor the key metrics for profitability.

It was Steve Miller who first sang, “time keeps on slippin’...into the future.” More like screamin’, if you ask me. It may come as a surprise to many that this year marks the 20th anniversary of Mortgage Cadence and our lending technology. It certainly caught me by surprise.

It wasn’t until I was preparing for this year’s Ascent Conference, our annual gathering of clients to share our latest direction and industry trends, that I was able to fully accept the fact that we’ve been building and delivering technology for the mortgage industry for two decades. It’s been quite a ride.

At Ascent, we compared the changes we’ve seen in mortgage tech over the past 20 years to the changes we’ve seen in the music industry. We didn’t reference the Steve Miller Band, but then we weren’t talking about slippin’ into the future; we were talking about taking the next Giant Leap into it.

When we started this company, it really was just a small business. What you know today as Mortgage Cadence is really the product of four small, startup technology firms.

If you know anything about technology-based startups, you know that only a small fraction of the companies that are started each year make it through their first five years. Most disappear.

Imagine how difficult it is to find four startups that are all destined to survive, and then get the people in those companies to work together to create something as complex as a mortgage loan origination system.

Even if they did all manage to survive, only half of one percent of all technology firms would be able to create something on par with the Mortgage Cadence LOS. The chances of success, objectively speaking, are very low. And yet, here we are.

Today, we not only develop the industry’s most powerful loan origination technology, but we’re also part of Accenture, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world.

If you ask anyone on the Mortgage Cadence team who has been around since the early days, and there are quite a few of us, they’ll tell you that none of us thought we’d end up as part of a company like Accenture. And yet, here we are.

The only reason we made it this far is because we are not afraid of making the Giant Leap. We’ve made a few of them over the past 20 years. Now, we’re preparing for the next one.

Giant Leaps are very hard, which is why so few companies make them. Those that do make the leap do three things right. I’ll tell you what they are next time.