Is the mortgage industry headed towards real-time loan processing? If SoftWorks AI has its way, the answer would be a resounding yes.
With increasing compliance costs and more intense competition in the marketplace, mortgage lenders are feeling the pressure to minimize their loan processing costs to ensure growth and profitability. As a result, lenders are recognizing the need to fully automate their business, in order to significantly reduce the manual work and expense of processing and approving a loan.
In addition to reducing mortgage processing expenses, lenders need to compete successfully in a very time-sensitive environment. As the popularity of programs like Quicken’s Rocket Mortgage increases, lenders are increasingly compelled to process mortgages faster than ever before. This, in turn, is challenging the industry to look at more innovative ways to automate their business, so they can compete in today’s environment.
SoftWorks AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, is not the first business to attempt solving this problem. But according to founder and CEO Dr. Ari Gross, it aims to be the only touchless automation solution on the market. If Gross is successful in his mission, lenders will have the ability to process loan applications in real-time.
SoftWorks AI developed its disruptive Trapeze for Mortgage Automation software to transform the mortgage loan process into one that can drive company productivity with minimal human intervention.
Its deep knowledge of the mortgage industry coupled with state-of-the-art computer vision and artificial intelligence technology enable all facets of the industry to drive higher performance. Because of its roots stemming from a research lab, Gross sees his solution as the only one that can fully automate areas such as origination, underwriting, servicing and post-close review.
“Our in-production mortgage automation solution has increased underwriter productivity for our clients by over 100%,” said Gross. “This relates to SoftWorks’ native ability to parse and use OCR for complex documents. By combining AI and computer vision technologies together, SoftWorks can effectively auto-validate the mortgage classification and data extraction process, streamlining the loan approval process.”
The business of mortgage automation has been around for decades. However, other solutions on the market have yet to provide a true touchless solution. As a result, lenders are still relying on humans to correct the software’s errors.
“The problem that many of our customers experience is that most automation solutions produce results which are not sufficiently reliable, and that human validation is still required at every stage,” Gross said. “As a result, humans are still required to go back and fix the mistakes the bot made, creating an unnecessary bottleneck, eliminating the ROI that clients were expecting to realize.”
So far, Trapeze for Mortgage Automation has delivered clients in origination and mortgage insurance a high degree of touchless automation, resulting in correspondingly high rates of process optimization.
Here are some of the benefits that SoftWorks AI offers its clients:
- Real-time loan processing – SoftWorks’ clients have realized a reduction in loan application processing time of as much as 96% through automated data extraction and classification.
- Reduced labor costs – In-production mortgage automation solutions have shown cost reductions in excess of 50%, both in pre-underwriting and underwriting. These significant reductions in manual loan processing can greatly reduce the labor costs of processing a loan.
- Accurate classification, assembly, and data extraction – Algorithm-based classification, assembly, and data extraction are processes that are each guided and monitored by corresponding validation processes. Each of these critical processes can be set to a precision threshold so that only cases with very high accuracy are fully automated, while the remaining tasks are flagged for manual review.
Trapeze’s proficiency in OCR and computer vision, together with its ability to understand the accuracy of each operation, allows it to process data from mortgage documents both faster and more accurately than the competition.
“It’s hard to deliver real process optimization and we believe that many AI-based solutions in our industry are oversold, leaving behind many unsatisfied customers,” Gross said. “We are very careful to fully understand a company’s mortgage process workflow before proposing an automation solution, and as such, we’re able to deliver a level of client satisfaction that, in our estimation, exceeds 95%.”
As a result of SoftWorks’ best-in-class solution, a large number of the company’s new clients come from satisfied client referrals and existing clients who are looking to automate additional lines of their business. Despite being just 18 months old, SoftWorks AI works with many of the nation’s top mortgage lenders and insurers.
As an industry leader focused on the application of AI technology to the mortgage industry, Gross will lead a panel at the MBA Technology Solutions Conference & Expo on Tuesday, March 26 at 11:45 in Dallas. He will be joined by William Packer, executive vice president and chief operations officer at American Financial Resources, and Richard Gagliano, president of origination technologies at Black Knight.
The discussion, which is part of the Emerging Technologies Track, will focus on where artificial intelligence is headed in the mortgage industry.
Gross will lay out where practical AI can impact the mortgage industry today, in addition to where it’s headed in 2020.
“I look forward to joining other mortgage technology leaders to discuss ways to streamline and optimize mortgage processing,” Gross said. “We’re entering a critical period of transformation and lenders need to be prepared to meet the challenges that lie ahead.”
Born in a Research Lab
Although SoftWorks is new to the mortgage industry, it brings a unique academic perspective to solving today’s problems.
Gross started his research and development over 20 years ago in the areas of computer vision and machine perception. His research originally focused on aiding the visually impaired to read scanned content in real-time using 3D OCR.
Over time, Gross realized that these technologies have far-reaching business implications and founded his previous company, CVISION, to help thousands of companies recognize data on structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents. CVISION also developed enterprise solutions to create compressed and searchable PDFs.
Realizing a need in the fintech industry for business process automation solutions, the team began development of an AI/ML solution with implications in the mortgage, tax and AP industries. After a successful exit from CVISION, Gross and his team of engineers founded SoftWorks AI to automate many of today’s manually-intensive business tasks and to help knowledge workers achieve higher performance.
What’s Next?
The company is committed to automating every aspect of mortgage processing and is now working on audit and compliance, in addition to mortgage-backed securities.
It’s also focused horizontally on all areas of lending and funding where knowledge bots can be disruptive through automated income verification and cash flow analysis.
Solutions architect Eitan Agai will provide MBA Tech attendees with a sneak peek of the module on March 25 at 11:45. The demo will show how Trapeze can help automate various underwriting tasks for cash flow analysis.
“Automating all aspects of the mortgage lifecycle is still a challenge that we’ll need to tackle one use-case at a time. Our ability to understand data with high precision and then design touchless automation solutions for document-centric processes translates into many use cases in financial services,” Gross said.
Find out more about how SoftWorks AI helps lenders optimize their mortgage processes by scheduling a meeting here at MBA Tech.
