Scaling success: Why OCR and automation are becoming critical for mortgage lenders

Consumers love convenience. This truism has been behind the rise of some of the biggest online companies in the retail, travel, and even financial industries. Brick-and-mortar sellers are now struggling to keep up with ecommerce giants like Amazon; travel agents have all but been replaced by flight and hotel booking platforms like Expedia; and banks and traditional lending institutions now face fierce competition from fintech startups like Rocket Loans. Consumers want fast and streamlined experiences that yield immediate results — capabilities only offered by technology. And increasingly, this kind of demand is entering the mortgage space.

Heavy on manual processes, traditional mortgage approvals can take days or even weeks before applicants get approved or denied. Digital mortgage applications make it easy for potential borrowers to submit queries, while OCR and automation technology make it possible for lenders to quickly process, underwrite, and issue a decision. The higher labor efficiency also reduces costs, making it possible to offer more competitive interest rates.

How OCR and automation enable digital mortgage trends

Automation, especially in the form of robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent document processing (IDP), has been a mainstay in the financial services and mortgage industries for years. OCR, or optical character recognition, has become increasingly important to streamline data entry processes. Without these technologies, digital mortgages wouldn’t be possible. For traditional lenders, leveraging their capabilities to replace even more manual processes is the only way they can keep up with fintech competitors.

Here’s what OCR and automation offer:

Faster data extraction. Mortgage applications can have hundreds of fields, and checking each one manually can take a long time. OCR technology can instantly read documents and translate every word into usable data. When paired with AI, they can even correctly label or categorize the data.

Higher accuracy. OCR tools don’t get tired, so they process documents faster and with higher accuracy than humans, which frees up workers’ time for other invaluable contributions. Less mistakes also means higher productivity, which improves profitability of every application processed.

Streamlined underwriting workflows. Most applications still require some level of human review, but automation platforms can increase their speed and efficiency through data entry, automatic approval routing, document distribution, and notifications.  

Faster approvals. Rocket Loans is famous for processing loans in as little as 10 seconds. While legacy lenders won’t be able to match that kind of speed by implementing third-party automation solutions on their backend, it will improve processing speeds within homebuyers’ attention spans. This puts power back into the hands of lenders who have credibility and authority in the finance sector. 

The tech that’s transforming digital mortgages

Most OCR, IDP, and RPA platforms offer piece-meal automations, forcing users to assemble workflows and build processes around the limits of their various tools. Automation Hero is a new intelligent process automation platform, powered by deep learning AI and boasting the most advanced capabilities of all the technologies that came before it in one comprehensive product. This allows users to implement complete end-to-end processing for any type of document. 

Users who are new to automation can install the platform as their only solution for streamlining workflows, or use its capabilities to augment their existing systems. Automation Hero’s advanced AI serves as the connective fabric between OCR, RPA, data systems, and other technologies to create full, end-to-end automations.  

Digital mortgage trends are here to stay, and they’re only going to become more popular. Consumers tend to trust legacy lenders over new startups, but as more digital natives enter the real estate market, that dynamic could soon shift. The best time for traditional mortgage providers to start investing in new technology was yesterday, but with Automation Hero, it’s never too late (or hard) to get started, catch up, or even surpass the competition.