If You Think Digital Disruption Has Brought Major Change So Far, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

Not long ago, Gartner published a white paper for us entitled “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption.”

Of course, “digital” and “disruption” are two of the biggest buzzwords in the mortgage industry in the past year or two, and we often ascribe them to what used to be called the e-mortgage.  But there are many massive changes to the way we work and live which are already underway, according to Gartner.

Here are a few of their strategic assumptions, in and of themselves breathtaking:

• By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality.
• By 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen.
• By 2019, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps.
• By 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behavior of over 1 billion global workers.
• By 2022, a blockchain-based business will be worth $10 billion.
• By 2021, 20% of all activities an individual engages in will involve at least one of the top-seven digital giants.
• Through 2019, every $1 enterprises invest in innovation will require an additional $7 in core
• Through 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) will increase data center storage demand by less than 3%.
• By 2022, IoT will save consumers and businesses $1 trillion a year in maintenance, services and
• By 2020, 40% of employees can cut their healthcare costs by wearing a fitness tracker.

So what do industry experts foresee as the result of these assumptions?

Digital experience and engagement will draw people into non-stop virtual interactions. While digital interaction allows the user the convenience of choosing when and how he/she will interact, and improve a worker’s ability to multi-task; this will also mean multi-brand; multi-interface interaction and the rise of brokers.  This will have applications not only for online mortgage lending, but within the mortgage businesses internal communications as well.

Secondary effects will be more disruptive than the initial digital change. Gartner suggests that digital change results in an accelerated rate of secondary changes and reactions.  We’ll let them explain how this impacts us in their own words:

For example, the advent of self-driving cars will lead to a reduction in garages within big cities.

It is also factoring into long-range real estate strategies for companies that have large parking

lot acreage (such as malls). This, in turn, may lead to rezoning of urban areas to take advantage

of the new space. The use of AR may well lead to a massive reduction of real-world objects that

process information. When we can have a digitally represented TV on any wall we choose, why

buy a real TV at all? Just as the introduction of digital TV led to HDTV, which led to streaming of

digital content, which in turn led to binge watching of TV shows, we will see innovations

generating a wake of new changes that most people and businesses will not see coming until

it’s upon them.

We all know that we’re living in a brave new world. Just think about what the iPhone has done to telecommunications and personal Internet consumption in less than 10 years. The mortgage and real estate industry is not immune to this accelerating wave of digital disruption. Expect some dramatic differences to the way we all do business in a very short period of time.