by Ari Gross, CEO & Founder
Touchless automation has become something of an unfulfilled promise for the mortgage industry. Product, Operations, and IT leaders have all glimpsed a vision of falling costs, rising productivity, shorter lending cycles, and reduced risk. However, touchless automation forever seems to be on the horizon, shimmering promises of greater efficiency and profitability that remain tantalizingly beyond reach.
What’s stopping the mortgage industry from achieving its automation ambitions? There are plenty of solutions that claim to automate loan origination and servicing, but they all fall short of their core proposition. Unfortunately, lenders have come to recognize that getting “automation” to work demands a great deal of human intervention.
The experience is frustrating and expensive. It’s holding the industry back. Unrealized cost-saving and productivity goals are evolving into a threat as rising inflation and interest rates create a difficult economic climate.
The roadblocks to mortgage automation
To understand why this is happening, let’s think about loan origination as a journey. It begins with a borrower’s inquiry and ends with a loan decision. Navigating a path to each decision requires lots of documents: bank statements, ID documents, paystubs, 1040s, W2s, past mortgage statements, and more. Think of these documents as waypoints on the route, each one adding essential data until there is enough for a decision to be made.
The more thorough the data understanding & analysis, the less risky the decision. A thorough process entails a complex journey, with many document waypoints, so it helps to have a map. That is exactly what mortgage automation systems provide. They help lenders plot a route to each waypoint, ensuring they have all the information needed to make a well-informed loan decision.
A good map should mean faster, more efficient journeys. So, what’s snarling up the route?
As we know, maps are a great tool to help us plan our route. But they lack the data and therefore context to inform us how to plan our journey. Now let’s think about how transformative mapping apps have become and how they have materially changed our lives. These apps let us know where we are in our journey, point us in the right direction, advise us what actions to take, and warn us about potential problems. They achieve this by looking at our journey as a whole and using constantly refreshed, reliable data to help to make our journey as easy and efficient as possible.
We’ve learned to trust that mapping apps enable the fastest and most efficient journeys, avoiding traffic problems, and taking us to what we need along the way (such as gas or snacks). That’s what’s missing in mortgage automation: error-free, trusted data & data analysis that optimize the lending journey.
Truth for your lending journey
Accurate, reliable data is what TRUE uniquely provides. Our lending intelligence platform extracts, analyzes, audits, and inspects every data point in every document. We make it possible to truly automate the entire lending decision journey.
The TRUE platform is not a standalone solution. Instead, we seamlessly integrate with all major mortgage and loan origination and servicing systems, as well as mortgage insurance processes. TRUE reduces documents and data processing tasks from hours to minutes, without human intervention, and produces clear intelligence that supports lending decisions and the assessment of loan portfolios.
Every lending journey becomes faster and more efficient. Costs fall, risk is reduced, and as with any trouble-free trip, the customer experience is greatly enhanced.
Why should I trust TRUE?
I’ve been involved in the mortgage industry long enough to know automation technology has become tainted by underwhelming results. Why should you believe that TRUE is as good as its word? To answer that, let’s go back to our journey and maps analogy.
The impressive capabilities of mapping apps are thanks to hardware and artificial intelligence that interprets the real world, in all its chaotic complexity, into structured data that mapping apps can use. Huge quantities of information, from satellite imaging to traffic sensors, give us reliable and accurate data that guides successful journeys. The experience is so seamless that we give little thought to the technological achievement of extracting structured data from an unstructured world.
The same challenge exists when we try to extract relevant data from borrowers’ documents. These documents contain a lot of unstructured data. They are inconsistent, disordered, and frequently hard to read. There is a lot of “noise” and even the most sophisticated data extraction technologies struggle to zero in on what’s relevant.
I know this because it’s been the work of my life. I’ve published more than 40 papers and been awarded several patents in areas related to computer imaging, machine learning, and document automation. What I’ve learned is that data extraction for lending is a highly specialized task. That’s why TRUE has focused on Lending Intelligence – our systems are honed to the specific data needs of the lending industry.
I look forward to showing you our impressive technology. Like the systems that make mapping apps so effective, the TRUE platform provides a dynamic suite of highly configurable, AI-powered solutions that interpret data like a human, without relying on humans. Our proprietary machine learning models read and compare documents, using contextual classifiers to make sense of words and images, classifying documents, and extracting the correct pieces of data with unparalleled accuracy. No other provider does this.
Welcome to TRUE Lending Intelligence
The evidence from our customers is that TRUE is a game-changer. Thanks to the lending intelligence we provide, they have seen employee productivity increase from 3 to as much as 5 times. They’ve achieved a 10-fold increase in data captured while reducing manual document reviews by as much as 85 percent. Data errors have fallen, typically by 12 percent, and audits have become 70 percent more efficient even as quality control checks encompass all documents and put an end to risky sampling methodologies.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be adding a feature to our website that will prove our promises by letting you test the capabilities of TRUE for yourself. But there’s no need to wait: our sales team will be happy to provide a personalized demonstration for you right away.
I know the pressures the mortgage industry is experiencing and that they are likely to increase over the coming months. By introducing TRUE Lending Intelligence, my promise is that we’ll help you make successful lending journeys. No mirage, but finally that oasis of accurate, reliable data & analysis that you need to empower mortgage automation. It’s finally here, and that’s TRUE.
