Blend announced Thursday its launched new technology that will help mortgage lenders become more efficient and keep mortgage origination costs down.
The new technology, Blend Vision, will digitize certain documents. The product will look at uploaded paper documents and convert them to a digital file, extracting the data from the documents.
Blend pointed out that while 70% of borrowers in its applications opted to connect directly to source data, 100% of the loans include at least one uploaded document.
The new technology will not only increase efficiency as it allows lenders to focus on other things, and not have to manually input data, but it will also reduce the amount of human error that occurs while manually inputting the data.
“Automated data validation checks that the data lifted from uploaded documents is well-formed and complete,” Blend said in a statement. “If data does not pass our validation check, then these inputs will not be used.”
“Real-time monitoring allows us to track trends in our computer visioning success rate,” the company continued. “Whenever we see anomalies in the trendlines, we will manually spot check documents to ensure good coverage. Lastly, we routinely do manual quality checks by comparing documents and data inputs as another layer of diligence.”
Blend Vision will not only increase the data available to lenders, but also seeks to deliver higher quality data, Blend Product Manager of Intelligence and 2018 HousingWire Rising Star Grace Qi said.
Here she is, on the cover of our magazine (click pic to read more)!
Qi explained in a new interview with HousingWire that Blend’s method of digitizing data, while new to the mortgage lending space, is not a new tool. She said Blend is taking tech that exists and applying it to the mortgage market.
And this is just the first step in Blend’s plan. Qi said this first version will be able to read larger, more common documents and digitalize them, however the company hopes to soon develop technology to read any kind of documents borrowers upload.
Blend’s initial version of Blend Vision is already available to a few of its clients, and the company plans to roll it out to all of its customers by the end of the month. It will be included in Blend’s basic package of product offerings.
While the company still does not have a timeline for future versions of Blend Vision, Qi said she hopes to be able to introduce the next offering soon, giving lenders access to higher quality data lifted off of actual documents.
This comes at a time when lenders reported a negative profit for the first time since 2014, data from the Mortgage Bankers Association shows.
Many lenders hope that utilizing digital mortgages will help cut back on costs as competition rises. Freddie Mac talks more about that in this podcast.
