Electronic Loans Slowly Gaining Ground.

The process of creating a truly electronic mortgage has been excruciatingly, but necessarily slow, key secondary market players said here earlier this month.

James Newell, associate general counsel at Freddie Mac, said the need to move at what seems to many observers as an almost dilatory pace is simply an effort to get the process right the first time without making any mistakes.

"We've got to take this seriously if e-mortgages are going to become mainstream," Mr. Newell explained at the Mortgage Bankers Association's Legal Issues in Mortgage Technology Conference.

"If we do it wrong, it will affect entire portfolios of assets. Therefore, the process demands great attention to detail."

The Freddie Mac executive said that while it may seem that the e-mortgage "chicken has not yet cracked the egg," much progress has been made into creating the industry standards that are necessary to bring the vision of an efficient, consumer-friendly paperless process into reality.

However, one problem that has yet to be solved is the issue of authentication.

As Mr. Newell explained it, current technology cannot embed an "authoritative copy" identification in the original e-document and a "non-authoritative" marker in all other copies.