CapitalThinking and MortgageRamp --
Finance Goes Digital

Mortgages Get Faster and Easier... One of my all-time favorite business books is High St@kes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson, who developed and sold FrontPage to Microsoft.  It's a fun story of "greed and glory" in the days just before dot-com mania -- full of attitude and wit.  "If you could have looked inside both Netscape and Microsoft, you would have run away screaming into the night."  But the really intriguing point is that Ferguson is the Co-Founder, along with CEO Heather Shively, of CapitalThinking.   So real estate can attract a mainstream technology player.  That's good for our industry. 

Last week, Sam Solie, VP Sales & Marketing, gave me a WebEx tour of Bluewire, CapitalThinking's "web-based technology platform for lenders, commercial mortgage banking firms and other commercial mortgage participants."  The week before Don Cotton, Director of Product Development at MortgageRamp, had taken me through a similar WebEx demo of DealCentral, MortgageRamp's technology to "originate, manage, close, and deliver more deals, faster and easier."  Wow, these are both VERY serious tools developed at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.  The world is changing.

After buzzing around each site for 30 minutes, your eyes begin to glaze over and your brain overloads with impressions of endless features and benefits -- pipeline management, digital packages, deal tracking, financial analysis, document management, portfolio analysis, contact management and securitization.  Whew.  Fundamentally, Bluewire and DealCentral are seeking quite simply to digitize the entire process of commercial mortgage finance by storing all data in a central location, accessible to everyone.  That's a huge change.  So how quickly will the industry adopt this digitized process?  Both services boast of major supporters.  Bluewire is operational at J.P. Morgan Mortgage Capital and PNC Real Estate Finance.   DealCentral went live at Bank of America last week, with installations to follow at Archon Financial and GMAC Commercial Mortgage (which owns a majority stake in MortgageRamp) over the next few months.  ... Are digital tools making your life easier?  Send me stories.     

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com