In the category of "It's obvious that there are huge chunks of the economy which need one SFBA-startup quality workflow web app", I give you blend.com , which did that for mortgage origination at banks / credit unions / independent mortgage originators.
It's one of those magically mundane things. The business process here is extremely well-understood; the actual front end and backend processes in the US for mortgage origination are, and this is a technical term, a roaring pyroclastic tire fire.
I went through Blend's white labeled process while trying to get pre-approval to hopefully help a family member out, and literally sent a human two emails "Sorry only have 15 minutes so no possible way this is done today" "Erm ignore the last I think it's ready for you."
This is helped by me being preternaturally organized but sufficient data entry for a mortgage application being collectable in 15 minutes is pretty stunning to me, even with all of the documents ready to go.
If you want to read about mortgage origination and understand why "Hmm this seems like a frontend-heavy web application that one could reasonably deliver in a hackathon" is not coextensive with the actual solution, see
amazon.com/Digitally-Tran…
(Disclaimer: read critically.)
A non-obvious challenge here is that the most important consumer for a home mortgage is not obviously the person buying the house, it is the GSE or other financial system entity which is going to securitize the mortgage.
They have *much* more exacting requirements.
And, structurally, they will *never* talk to the person buying the house, the bank that person has the down payment at, the HR department certifying that that person is gainfully employed, etc etc, *but* they have a lot of very specific questions for *all* of these people.
And so the mortgage loan originator has to have all their paperwork together and pre-reviewed prior to sending it over to the securitizing party.
And if they don't? Well, then they're at substantial risk of either eating the home loan or carrying it on their books for 7+ years.
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