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64 SPEED I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T / M I C H A E L H A R R I S Technology has been the go-to answer for dealing with change in our industry since around the late 1980s. e mortgage lending business has used technology to automate and digitize a process that had traditionally been buried in piles of paper. In fact, we have accomplished so much here that most people don't even notice that our business adopts technology more slowly than just about any other industry. Changes in our industry have continued to be fomented by both market and regulatory forces. A keen observer of these will attempt to forecast both the business and technological evolutions that must be adopted not just to cope, but to lead. e pace of these changes require that we look several steps ahead. We certainly saw that just after the financial crash, when it became clear that one in 10 home loan borrowers would go into default. e same thing happened to loan origination system (LOS) developers during the runup to the crash. With loan volumes three times as high as they had ever been before, lenders were struggling to keep up. e problem was that most of the new business was subprime and the old LOSs didn't work as well with those "story" loans. ey needed new tools if they were going to keep up with Wall Street's appetite for assets they could securitize. ere were plenty of observers in those days warning of the imminent crash. We must look at leading indicators in the development and adoption of new technology with the same diligence that we have always read the tea leaves that might forecast changes in interest rates. With that goal in mind, let's explore five hot tech trends and see what they may mean for our business in 2018. TREND 1: PLATFORM CROWDING For the longest time, much of the work performed by industry technologists had to do with writing code to seamlessly connect different systems, owned and controlled by different parties. Ensuring data integrity, security, and ease-of-use was tough work. No one wanted to give up too much about their own proprietary systems. Today, that work is pretty much all done for us by the software. e Application Programmer Interface (API) made it possible for the programmer to expose data feeds and query hooks into a system, making it easy for another programmer working on another system to connect and share information. Today, there are a great many FULL AHEAD