Forget about the big breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Sun West Mortgage Co. says it now has the technology to underwrite a mortgage in about the time it takes for you to watch your favorite show.
Borrowers looking to buy a house or refinance can get an answer back from the lender in 40 minutes, the Buena Park, CA-based mortgage lender announced in a press release issued Tuesday.
With the help of a cutting-edge tech platform, Sun West says it has established a “new industry milestone” by compressing the underwriting time to 40 minutes for 70 percent of borrowers. The mortgage lender also says it now does the loan underwriting for 95 percent of its borrowers looking to buy a place or refinance a loan within an hour or less.
Meet “Morgan”, Your AI-Based Underwriter
Given it takes most other lenders a few days to a few weeks to complete the underwriting process, verify income, and crunch the numbers, how exactly is Sun West able to do this?
The company ascribes its rapid underwriting process to its software platform to an AI-based loan origination and decision system called “Morgan”. The AI-based system “intelligently constructs the loan file and auto-performs the majority of approval functions which allows unique loan conditions to be reviewed,” Sun West notes in the release.
Morgan, in turn, is based on “Celligence™ Empathetic Technology Architecture” – a system developed by Celligence, a fin-tech affiliate of Sun West.
By streamlining the underwriting process, the AI engine developed by Sun West lowers “employee per file cost that oftentimes is an economic barrier to complex file approvals with lower loan limits,” Sun West’s COO, Jennifer Vallinayagam said.
The much speedier turnaround is better for buyers, enabling house hunters to “present offers with certainty and without unnecessary financing contingencies,” she said.
“Our empathetic AI technology, Morgan™, is reshaping the way we allocate our resources,” Vallinayagam added.
If that weren’t techie enough for you, Sun West’s high-tech underwriting platform also uses “new blockchain-based technology,” CEO Pavan Agarwal said.
“The mortgage approval process continues to evolve. We are able to offer faster approval times that are completely transparent with our adoption of new blockchain-based technology,” Agarwal said. “This ensures our borrowers are treated fairly, both for their price and approvals across all channels of the mortgage application process.”
It will be interesting how Sun West fares with its new system, and how the loans that it underwrites fare over the long term.
If nothing else, Sun West’s big investment in technology and speeding up the underwriting process is an example of how rapidly the mortgage business is changing.
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