After spending the majority of the housing boom developing software that could automate much of the underwriting process — and, in my mind, help enable an era of loosened lending standards — quite a few mortgage tech companies are shifting their focus to the newest hot zone in the industry: risk management. Witness Visionet Systems, who today said it was releasing its very own risk management platform, called MERM. The company bills its new platform as a comprehensive suite of risk management tools that can span across business functions:

Mortgage lenders generally have a fractured risk management process divided among a variety of business groups and interests. Typically, an enterprise risk management strategy is absent, placing the overall organization at risk. As demonstrated by a number of recent failures, risk management can have little effect without a mechanism to define, quantify, manage and track risk across an enterprise in a rationalized fashion.

My question is simple: this wasn’t already being done? Enterprise risk management is a new term to the mortgage industry? It’s been around since at least the mid-1990s.