The market of home lending is rebuilding itself. I call it Mortgage 2.0. As people inside the mortgage lending market look forward towards rebuilding, everyone outside the market – the U.S. Government most notably – is looking backwards. They want to understand what happened and they want to prevent it from ever happening again.

So the rules for Mortgage 2.0 are being rewritten, some seemingly more out of fear or frustration than logic. A patchwork of laws, regulations, and new oversight is being created to quell the anger and frustration of an outraged American taxpayer and a government caught by surprise. Other rules, more sustaining, however, are organically emerging through the nature of a free market, Adam Smith style.

From my vantage point, in a free, albeit heavily regulated new Mortgage 2.0 market, new cash will be extremely important. New cash is continually required to fund new loans to keep the system working. This new cash will come not from already strapped taxpayers, but from investors looking to make a return on their investments, with the confidence that they can manage their risk appropriately. That is, new cash will come from those who will require new levels of transparency. For the industry to succeed, more than the demands of the new administration, the demands of the new investor must be met.

The demands of the new Mortgage 2.0 investor can be summarized succinctly. The new investor simply wants as much real information as possible on the investment. Regulations may help to standardize and force the disclosure of information but as anyone knows, information can easily be misleading, or inaccurate.

The single best way to get information that has proven itself beyond any speculation is the open network. In an open network, data is seen and reviewed by multiple entities, providing organizations with the means to double check that information, to ensure that pieces of information makes sense in relation to the whole project, to analyze that information, and to use all of the available information. The debate is non-existent. An open network is absolutely fundamental to a viable new market.

In the era of Mortgage 2.0, transparency enabled by the open network is the purple cow, a marketing term coined by Seth Godin that means key business differentiator. Open up the network and create an environment for enterprise-wide and industry-wide standards and multi-party validated information, and the investors will come.