Technology providers in the origination space are clearly facing a tough market right now; many are finding that partnering — if not outright mergers — with complementary solutions can be an effective way to drive incremental revenue. To be sure, technology in this industry has always been about partnering, bundling, and integration; but as HW has covered in previous stories, the downturn has sped up the process here for many tech firms. With that as background, Lender Support Systems Inc., a global provider of e-mortgage enabled lending and loan servicing technology software, said Wednesday that it had formed strategic alliance with Loan Score Decisioning Systems, an automated underwriting platform provider — both firms are well known on the origination side of the business. Under the agreement, LSSI and Loan-Score plan to bundle and integrate their core products, as part of an effort to offer increased end-to-end support for lenders and originators. Poway, Calif.-based LSSI provides initial disclosures, document preparation, loan servicing software and compliance services; Irvine, Calif.-based Loan-Score offers decisioning and automated underwriting solutions that can be extended to the point-of-sale. “Given the breadth of our solutions coupled with the ease of integration each platform‘s architecture permits, a strategic alliance made a lot of sense,” said William McCord, chairman and CEO of Loan-Score. “By integrating and packaging various origination and servicing solutions together, we deliver more value to existing customers while also expanding the markets we can sell.” “The increasing utilization of advanced Web services is helping the industry deliver on the promise of service-oriented architecture,” said Cary Burch, chairman and CEO of LSSI. “Loan-Score and LSSI’s orchestration of business services will enable customer’s to improve efficiencies via transparency of communication, integration and the fluid exchange of data from our system to theirs.” LSSI and Loan-Score will announce specific integrations between select products during the second quarter of 2008. For more information, visit http://www.lendersupport.com or http://www.loan-score.com.