The following selection appeared as part of a two-part article in Mortgage Technology Magazine, June-July, 2002.

SwiftSend SwiftView Inc., Tualatin, Ore., offers SwiftSend, a secure, Web-based, electronic document delivery service. The company has been quite successful as a software developer working to allow engineers to easily share complicated electronic drawings over the Internet. SwiftView uses a viewer based on printer control language, allowing users to easily distribute anything they would normally print. The service has been well-suited for mortgage closing documents.  The service is intended to replace overnight mail and courier services.  SwiftSend is available as an Internet service or as a turnkey system that a company can install at its own facility.

Mortgage Technology's Top 100 Technology Vendors As many mortgage professionals have been aware, for some time Mortgage Technology magazine has planned to publish a list of leading mortgage technology vendors. Then came the hardest part: deciding which companies go on the list and which do not. Because electronic document delivery (EDD) does just that, increasing numbers of lenders are converting to it in order to streamline processes and better compete for customers.  We did not include every viable mortgage-industry vendor that uses e-mail, has a nice Web-page or delivers its product or services online. For example, there are too many players involved in transmitting title, credit, and flood information to call them all technology leaders. It is also true that the largest companies, even those that lead in market share, do not necessarily provide the latest technology. Alltel, Fiserv, Fannie and Freddie -- the companies that drive technology adoption for the mortgage industry -- all make a policy of avoiding the "bleeding edge" in technology creation and adoption. None of these giants are front-line experimenters, though they all partner from time to time with companies that push the frontiers of technology for mortgage lending. Despite their dominant role in mortgage origination, the GSEs and the mortgage insurers act in the first instance as loan purchasers and insurers. It is more accurate to see them as the weather for growing mortgages, not the farmers -- and not the tool providers. Behind every technology tool Fannie, Freddie, GEMICO, and United Guarantee use is somebody who first developed that tool in a smaller shop. Therefore, our list does not include Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, the MI companies, the title companies, or all the credit providers. To be included, those players also must offer technology products and services. Nor does our list include worthy newcomers among mortgage technology lenders. We will do a separate article on them later this year. We also decided to defer for a later issue naming a list of lenders -- the Countrywides and Waterfields -- that are technology leaders. That list deserves a separate article as well. At the same time, we tried to make our list as inclusive as possible in order to serve as a benchmark. This year's list of the 100 leading mortgage technology vendors may grow to 120 next year -- or shrink to 80. Indeed, there are those who argue that there are no more than 50 companies that actually deserve to be called mortgage-technology leaders, with most companies really just keeping pace with the innovative few. We don't agree. We think true excellence in mortgage technology comes only with being found used and useful to a body of customers. Our three major criteria for inclusion on our list of the top 100 mortgage-technology providers are customer satisfaction, functionality, and market share. If a vendor has satisfied users, that is crucial. Viable technology vendors gain and hold customers. Yet, while technology that hypothetically provides the greatest power and flexibility will not win if it doesn't get adopted, cream eventually rises to the top. Once a technology tool has proven its superiority by accomplishing tasks that differentiate winners from losers among lenders, functionality becomes king. In turn, superior technology earns market share as the race for survival makes otherwise healthy laggards play catch-up in adopting proven technology tools. At that point, market share becomes an emblem of superiority -- until the next technology revolution presents new tools capable of creating new winners. Finally, we focused our list on the origination, rather than servicing, side of the industry. At this point, mergers and acquisitions aside, here are our picks for the top 100 among mortgage technology vendors.