5 ways to audit and optimize your loan approval processes

The drive to improve convenience is behind almost every advancement in technology. For decades, the digital revolution has empowered workers to complete tasks more easily and with greater efficiency in nearly every industry. Now, it’s impacting the mortgage industry.

The result is the digital mortgage, a new type of mortgage product that’s completely paperless and can be submitted, assessed, underwritten, disbursed, and stored completely online, with almost no manual processing. This means mortgage applications can be processed in just a few days, hours, or even minutes, rather than the weeks it can take with traditional methods.

As online lenders offer increasingly competitive interest rates and loan terms, the best way for small and legacy lenders to keep up with high-tech loan providers is to offer faster approval times. How? Streamlining processes with automation and digital mortgage software. Here are five ways to audit and optimize your processes:

1. Digitize your applications.

First, eliminate paper mortgage applications and opt for digital forms. Even rigid PDF applications that mimic paper forms come with limits, such as software incompatibilities that can make them hard to fill out. Online forms hosted on websites or apps offer universal accessibility, clearer readability, and easier editing for applicants. Pre-set field parameters can also detect typos or incorrect information, such as an email address missing the @ symbol. Lenders can automatically store submissions, with data extracted, making them immediately ready for further processing.

2. Eliminate manual data extraction and entry.

If your organization hasn’t completely eliminated paper or PDF applications, leverage optical character recognition (OCR) to accurately transform text into usable data. Otherwise, loan processors will waste time manually typing information from the applications, running the risk of misreading documents and making typos. OCR is also incredibly useful for automating data extraction from pay stubs, bank statements, credit reports, property valuation reports, and other documents needed for the underwriting process.

3. Automate routine, manual calculations and tasks with digital mortgage software.

Automation technology has been developed for every industry, and the same is true for digital mortgage software. Many programs can run calculations underwriters use for determining income, home value, and risk automatically with greater speed and accuracy than manual calculations. Other routine tasks, such as sending notification emails to applicants, can be completely automated.  

4. Streamline data transfer between applications with intelligent process automation (IDP).

Each step of the mortgage approval process involves various software tools, people, documents, and even vendors, and they’ll all have different data format requirements. Many automation tools quickly bulk format data and transfer it to digital mortgage software, employees, and third-party vendors without the need for any manual processing. When scaled to the dozens, or hundreds of documents lenders process every day, IDP can save a massive amount of time and energy.

5. Find end-to-end automation solutions.

The more tools and software solutions are involved in any workflow, the greater chance communication breakdowns and errors can reduce throughput and defeat the purpose of automation to begin with.

Automation Hero is an intelligent process automation platform, powered by deep learning artificial intelligence and built in with the capabilities of robotic process automation, IDP, and OCR. Its incredibly versatile API ensures compatibility with digital mortgage software or even the most complex, niche, and challenging mortgage industry software, so it can connect every tool. It’s also powerful enough to serve as a complete end-to-end solution, letting users drastically reduce or even eliminate the need for multiple automation solutions.

As you search for digital mortgage software or more ways to streamline your processes, always remember that faster and more accurate approval speeds improve customer satisfaction. Best of all, the enhanced profitability can help lenders offer even more competitive rates, giving even greater competitive advantage.