New ChatGPT tool put AI at the heart of mortgage underwriting speed
Online lender Better Home & Finance moves to reset the mortgage tech race, unveiling a ChatGPT-based underwriting tool. The company said the system could compress loan decisions from weeks to seconds and hand smaller lenders a new way to compete with Rocket Mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage.
For decades, underwriting a US mortgage or home equity loan has involved dozens of sequential checks and back-and-forth requests that often stretched closing timelines to three or four weeks.
Better’s new app plugged its Tinman engine into OpenAI models inside ChatGPT to run those checks in parallel for banks, brokers and fintechs, positioning the firm less as a direct-to-consumer lender and more as a “mortgage-as-a-service” provider to the broader industry.
“Taking the mortgage underwriting process, which so many of us have experienced personally, from 21 days to as little as 47 seconds and enabling it via ChatGPT is a huge unlock for everyone,” OpenAI chief commercial officer Giancarlo Lionetti said in a statement provided to CNBC.
“OpenAI is proud to partner with Better to build technology that revolutionizes the mortgage industry and makes it cheaper, faster, and easier for American families to finance a home.”
“AI is now doing mortgages,” Better chief executive Vishal Garg said in an interview.
“Rocket, UWM, Pennymac, a bunch of guys that are large public companies, make their money by effectively charging a tax of one and half percent to underwrite mortgages. … That’s $20 billion that’s paid by the American public in a typical year.”
Garg said the app was built to let rival lenders approve more loans with fewer manual touches, cutting underwriting expenses that have squeezed margins since originations dropped from pandemic highs.
Better’s move lands in a market already experimenting aggressively with AI. United Wholesale Mortgage last year rolled out “Mia,” an AI assistant that handled broker calls and outreach, while a separate tool used ChatGPT to optimize loan estimates for brokers.
Mortgage executives interviewed by Mortgage Professional America have warned brokers that regulators and the government-sponsored enterprises are likely to embrace AI for processing and underwriting, not just front-end tools.
“I think you should think of AI as the most significant development in our lifetime,” said Kim Nichols, chief TPO production officer at Pennymac TPO, predicting that it would change how loans were manufactured “in ways we can’t even imagine today.”
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