"When the time comes, you can attack the market with full gusto"
Souren Sarkar is a huge believer in the value of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. Despite recent dips, Sarkar is positive about the “concept of monetary decentralization” in blockchain technologies and how it can push mortgage companies to the next level.
“Any early markets are open to wide fluctuations,” he argued. “If we look at the history of money as such and you look at prehistoric times, it was not stable. There was a lot of fluctuation and a lot of problems that appeared there. So, we’ve got to look at crypto as a new concept of money that’s in the early stages. The fundamental platform features and the pitfalls have not all been figured out yet.”
Sarkar is the CEO of Miami-based IT consulting firm Nexval. In an exclusive interview with Mortgage Professional America, he talked about the future of mortgage tech and how blockchain or decentralized technology can prevent mortgage fraud.
Read more: 6 ways to avoid mortgage fraud
“But I think that the blockchain concept is a concept for our times,” Sarkar said. “There are some implementation issues and other things like that, and there’s a fluctuation in the market that reflects that it is not mature to the point where it can be immediately used, but development continues at a ferocious pace. And this is what I tell our clients and everyone else in the industry we interact with. You have to remain conversant with what is going on in the industry. You don’t want to be that company that wakes up one day and says, ‘Oh, now it’s being implemented, and you’re behind the curve.’ And people who are trying and failing rather than in front of me say, ‘well, what failed here’, right?
“And the experimenters, some of them will break through and will be the mortgage company of the future. I have no doubt about that. I would really observe them if I were an established mortgage company and observe where they are and be prepared with the technology in the system. So, when the time comes, you can attack the market with full gusto.”
Sarkar also discussed how these technologies can help mortgage companies get one step ahead of “straw borrowers” or “fraudsters ahead of the technology curve.”
“So essentially, a straw borrower is putting forward the identity of another person and buying a home in their name,” he said. “They are looking at the gap of the lack of sharing of data between the mortgage providers and the disparate systems where property data is kept and taking advantage of that.
“There are so many of these scams and fraudsters, they are smart people, sometimes smarter than the industry, and they’re ahead of the curve. I wish that they use their smartness to do more positive things, but that is an example that shows potent holes in the industry because we are not sharing data, and our systems are not talking to each other as they should.”
Sarkar talked about the advantages of putting borrower and loan data on a decentralized platform in more detail on the latest episode of MPA TV, which you can watch here for free: How to overcome the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality in mortgage.
