Innovations Award Winners Speak Out

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The PROGRESS in Lending Innovations Award Winners talk about the future of mortgage lending. Mortgage executives came together to attend PROGRESS in Lending Association’s Eleventh Annual Innovations Awards Event digitally.

We named the top innovations of the past twelve months. After that event, we wondered what would happen if we brought together executives from the winning companies to talk about mortgage technology innovation. Where do they see the state of industry innovation right now? And what innovation is it going to take to get our industry really going strong? To get these and other questions answered, we got some of the winners together.

In the end, here’s what they said:

Q: Some say innovation has to be sweeping change. Others say innovation can be incremental change. How would you define innovation?

JOSH FRIEND: Innovation is often a new product, but it can also be a new way of doing something or even a new way of thinking. I don’t think innovation has to be mutually exclusive to sweeping change or incremental change. This past year has taught us that both apply. We saw innovation introduced to quickly respond to doing business during a pandemic(i.e., digital solutions that allowed us to engage our customers when we couldn’t meet face to face), which resulted in sweeping change. As rates dropped and volumes increased, we saw lenders look for new ways to streamline the origination process, which were incremental in nature.

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