6 RPA Use Cases to Accelerate growth in the Mortgage Industry

As we all know, the mortgage industry is a highly process-driven field. For this reason, it has faced stagnation among other industries. However, digital transformation has revolutionized the mortgage industry, and companies within have adopted automation as a solution.

Among many automation solutions, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has been known as one of the most popular solutions, as it can reduce company costs, improve team efficiency, and reduce turnaround times. By adopting this solution, mortgage companies can replicate any task-oriented process guided by a set of pre-determined functions replicating human labor.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can streamline the mortgage application process by automating the interaction between loan applications, data entry, data extraction, and reporting.

These are a few of the many RPA use cases in the mortgage industry:

1. Application interaction and integration: In the loan application process, one of the most time-consuming steps is putting together all the required documentation. Loan Officers usually spend a great part of their day reviewing and inputting documentation into a Loan Origination System. However, with the use of RPA, tasks like downloading documents from an email and uploading them into any LOS can be automated. This frees up loan officers to focus on value-added tasks.
2. Data entry and extraction: Since a loan application is filled out by a buyer separately from a LOS, by means of a form built into a mortgage website, for instance, the transition to a LOS has been typically filled by humans. Pulling manually a buyer’s loan application data from a separate system into the LOS can be done at a much faster pace than a human using RPA. This magnifies the loan officer, loan processors, and underwriters' work by eliminating the need to “double-check” regulations were followed, lenders were accurately vetted, or loan products were implemented properly.
3. Fraud Detection: Mortgage companies have been implementing solutions to detect fraud before it’s too late. Nevertheless, with the use of RPA, companies can identify applicants that are likely to commit fraud in advance. Since fraud is prevalent in 1 out of every 120 applications, it's practically a needle-in-a-haystack scenario. RPA, with its rule-based approach, can help flag suspicious applications according to company or industry standards. With proper reporting, notifications can be sent through email, text or another medium of choice. Additional data gathered by a robot can help in making an analysis to identify new threats and evolve faster to prevent fraud.
4. Financial analysis: Analyzing financial reports such as bank statements, income statements, and tax documents, are tasks that require a lot of attention to detail. However, with the use of Robotic Process Automation, Loan Officers can quickly and accurately gather information by extracting data from documents with integrated AI solutions seamlessly. Whether it's text or image-based, an AI model can be composed for either uniform or dynamic document layouts to extract the data needed across all documents and inserted it into an automated process. Manual processing and analysis of loan application documents will no longer be necessary with an AI-enabled robotic process in place.
5. Workflow automation: Robotic Process Automation can be implemented in processes that follow a structured set of rules. A workflow from a business is easily translated into functioning automation code that allows for a quick and cost-effective automation implementation. This fits the mortgage industry’s highly regulated nature perfectly. That means the complete automation of pre-approvals, document distribution and closing disclosures, resulting in a processed mortgage application with 100% accuracy.
6. Customer Service: RPA Bots are useful to assist customer service agents by helping them send automatic communications, transfer information within the LOS, push and pull applications data with a little manipulation and even automate call center routing.

To conclude, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a tool that can highly impact process-oriented companies, such as mortgage companies. The implementation of RPA will reduce costs, improve efficiency, accelerate the return on investment (ROI), and lower turnaround times for companies. Accelerating growth is now achievable with an automated pre-approval process or even a truly automated underwriting system. Thinking about automating your mortgage processes? Schedule a call with a Nibbio engineer!