Summary
This announcement suggests Equifax is moving away from providing information solutions and data and into a position of providing Business Process Management (BPM). A move into the BPM sector will cause them to lose focus and become distracted away from their core value of delivering data, advanced analysis and usage of data.
Analysis
This is a press release and demonstrates a drifting focus for Equifax. The ability to sign a signature on a digital pad at the bank is not the same thing as closing loans electronically. The selling process hasn’t changed and still requires the customer to come into the bank and sign documents.
Granting someone permission to view documents does not inherently create the ability to organize, review and enforce audit compliance of the loan package. There must be much more to the process management tools of APPRO® than is highlighted in the release and is captured at the end of the release: APPRO automates every phase of the loan processing workflow - from data acquisition and decisioning through a range of post-approval functions.
This announcement suggests that Equifax is losing focus on their core business of providing data intensive, information solutions into a business process management sector where they will compete with the likes of IBM, EMC and Global 360. Forrester Research in a recent report (Business Process Management for Document Processes, Q3 2007) identifies IBM and EMC as the market leaders. Equifax does not appear anywhere in the report. IBM has been publishing reports on their success in business process managment for mortgage loan providers for over three years and probably longer (CIO Insight, March 2004, Business Process Modeling, A Model Student
Link: http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1552198,00.asp.
Equifax is allowing their strategy of developing enabling technologies to drift from advanced analytics and decision support and their core value proposition that rests on data to process and workflow engineering. There is a distinct difference between enabling the mortgage process with brilliant analysis in order to minimize credit risk and portfolio loss and that of reengineering the workflow process to eliminate the use of paper.
Equifax needs to keep their focus in enabling technologies on improving the quality of the data and enabling smarter analysis and decision making with data usage and leave the process reengineering to IBM, EMC and others.
