Clearly, the little guys have a much different dialogue with their customers than the large institutions because people relate more to the local financial institution. But customers are always going to be product- and price-sensitive. The little guys can scale a lot easier based on technology that includes a good rules engine, automated workflow, and the ability to take mortgage applications as close to the customer as humanly possible. Pretty much anybody in the branch should feel comfortable taking on that duty; it's going to uniquely position them to have more hands on deck, without a bloated FTE base.

"Technology allows smaller institutions to compete on product and price simply by enabling them to have a much lighter overhead than the big guys."

I don't know that many of the community banks have ever really fully leveraged the mortgage opportunity with their customers. Any community bank that goes into it with the ambition of making great sums of money is going to be disappointed. The ones who go into it thinking, How do I give my customer the best experience, the most convenient and empowering process and their employees are very disciplined at selling other bank products and services will ultimately achieve real value from it. So I think that's where technology, and particularly web-based technology, comes in.