For decades, mortgage lending has operated with an artificial divide at its core. Agency lending lived in one world. Non-QM lived in another. Different guidelines, different systems, different mental models. That separation once made sense, largely because the agencies did not buy non-QM loans and had no reason to. But over time, what began as a structural distinction hardened into operational silos, and those silos quietly introduced real costs across the industry. The cost was not just...