What has changed is the proliferation of mortgage providers since the industry was deregulated, and the "centralization" of mortgage processing by third parties and retail sales.

"The mortgage industry is in a state of evolution," Cash said. "The mortgage business that used to be run prior to deregulation saw a lot of end-to-end activity in the branches which was inefficient. As deregulation ran through the industry there was a thrust to centralization and to generate economies of scale and reduce cost."

Holding the mortgage industry back are highly-manual, paper-based processing which involves a lot of rekeying with multiple data entry points.

Add to that diverse sales platforms - the banks all have their own proprietary systems for in-house processing and separate systems for brokers - and there is plenty of room for standardization.

"That creates problems for hand-off, rekeying, and it's very people based so it's very non-standard," Cash said. "The by-product is that mortgage processing is not scalable and to deal with volume you have to have more staff. Margin compression is continuing so you need to develop a proposition to give scale and remove people as a dependency and introduce automation techniques as a means to do that."