Ten years ago, several corporations, including Ultraprise Corporation's ultraprise.com and Pedestal Capital (both now defunct), were blazing a path to revolutionize mortgage banking in the secondary markets by allowing online execution of trades of closed loans. Both of these systems were similar, but I will speak to ultraprise.com. It was created during the height of the dot-com boom and was meant to create a new online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace for the secondary mortgage markets. The assets on the platforms needed to be closed whole loans, but they could be traded on a flow or bulk/pool basis. In the case of ultraprise.com, there was a bid/counter bid/auction functionality that would allow buyers to compete for the pools of loans. However, there were many technical challenges, including a complete lack of data standardization in the secondary markets--think Microsoft[R] Excel [TM] and "tape cracking." Whether the actual (paper) assets matched the online datasets used for decision-making was another challenge.
