A company by the name of ISGN Technologies, Ltd. — don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of them until very recently, either — is apparently on a buying spree in the mortgage industry, announcing this morning that it had purchased Dynatek for an undisclosed sum. Dynatek’s MORvision automated underwriting system is the software company’s core asset. ISGN also purchased all of FairIsaac’s mortgage software holdings in late March, a purchase which delivered MortageHub, LenStar and FORTRACS into the company’s portfolio. The company says it’s into something it’s calling knowledge process outsourcing, and in its press release strains to differentiate it from the business process outsourcing we’re all familiar with:
Unlike traditional business-process outsourcing, which is employed along a horizontal business process, such as accounting, “knowledge-process� outsourcing requires deep industry expertise and sourcing partners that can execute and improve upon mission critical tasks, such as loan origination and processing.
There’s an old saying: If it looks like a horse, smells like a horse and moves like a horse — it’s a horse. Same for KPO, which isn’t really different from BPO at all other than the marketing spin the company puts on it. (In my opinion, of course.) What I find interesting is that a large India-based outsourcing firm is now aggressively pursuing a backwards integration strategy, buying the software platforms that many of its offshore employees probably had to use whenever they contracted with a US-based lender. Could this be the start of a trend?
