Columbus, Ohio-headquartered lender Lower rolled out mortgage as a service platform that enables consumer finance, banking and real estate companies to offer its mortgage products.
Lower’s platform is aimed to offer a “digital-first home financing experience quickly and easily” with white-label options available that can be embedded into the partner’s process through application programming interface (API) and no-code solutions, the firm said on Tuesday.
“We’ve taken our years of mortgage experience and processes, and allowed any business to offer mortgage to its customers,” co-founder and CEO Dan Snyder said in a statement.
iBuyer Opendoor is Lower’s first mortgage platform customer, which Snyder said will help the platform expand its reach.
In a letter to shareholders following its first quarter earnings, Opendoor said it is preparing to launch a fully digital financing product that can provide a pre-approval in less than 60 seconds with Lower as a “strategic partner.”
While launching an in-house mortgage lending operation has been a complex undertaking for many businesses, Lower says its new platform will allow partner companies to offer customers a full menu of home financing options and expand their lending footprint to more than 93% of the U.S. population.
Chelsea Wagner, who was in charge of Lower’s direct-to-consumer channel, was promoted to SVP of partnerships to lead the new platform. Wagner will be responsible for helping Lower’s partners develop their business strategy in the home lending space, Synder said.
Lower originated $4.19 billion in production volume in 2022, down 46.9% from the previous year’s origination of $7.89 billion, mortgage data platform Modex showed. Purchase mortgages consisted of 52.4% of the entire production while refis accounted for 42.1% in 2022.
The Ohio lender also slashed 6% of its workforce in October leaving about 1,200 employees across its business including retail, wholesale and its direct-to-consumer arm Lower.com.
The lender said the move was to right-size areas of the business that were impacted the most by volatile markets, including refis, operating training and recruiting.
Lower, a subsidiary of Lower Holding Co., provides mortgages through Lower LLC and companies that do business under the names AMSW Lending, Fairfax Mortgage and Key Mortgage Group, etc.
The NMLS showed the company sponsors more than 530 MLOs and has 85 branches across the country.
