Better Home & Finance, the parent company of the digital lending platform Better.com, has unveiled an innovative voice-based artificial intelligence loan assistant named Betsy. The announcement, made on Thursday, marks a significant step in mortgage processing technology, offering customers "timely and accurate answers" as per the company's statement.
Betsy was developed through Tinman, Better.com's proprietary loan origination platform, which stores information and data pertinent to loan applications. The development of this platform was boosted by a collaboration initiated in 2022 between Better and the big data firm Palantir. The AI assistant is designed to improve communication with both potential and current customers by providing answers to mortgage application queries, verifying outstanding application data, and interfacing in real-time with the Tinman platform.
Vishal Garg, the founder and CEO of Better, emphasises that fulfilling a mortgage loan is traditionally a labour-intensive and rules-oriented process. Betsy, however, automates many of these tasks, distinguishing itself from standard text chatbots and document processing services typically launched through traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Optical Character Recognition (OCR) vendors. "This is true disruption of the non-licensed tasks performed by armies of traditional customer service reps, loan officers, and processors in the mortgage industry," Garg stated.
Better's chief financial officer, Kevin Ryan, pointed out that the average cost to sell and process a mortgage in the United States hovers around $9,000. However, with the implementation of Tinman, this cost has been reduced by over 35%, primarily due to automation of the more time-intensive components of the mortgage process. Ryan expressed optimism that this technology would further lower costs, translating into more competitive rates and enhanced service quality for customers.
The company's strategic moves come in the context of a dwindling mortgage market, which has seen Better's workforce shrink significantly from 10,400 employees in 2021 to just 820 in 2023. Despite these challenges, Chad Smith, the president and chief operating officer, indicated plans to rejuvenate the company's staff by hiring between 40 and 50 licensed loan officers each month, aiming for a total of 1,000 new originators over the next 18 months. This will be aided by increased productivity levels, which mean fewer operational staff are needed per loan officer during this lending cycle.
Since its inception in 2016, Better claims to have facilitated over $100 billion in mortgage funding. In September, the company introduced a streamline refinance programme in partnership with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
Financially, Better is on a path of recovery, posting a net loss of $42.2 million in the second quarter of 2024, an improvement from the $51.5 million net loss recorded in the previous quarter. The company originated $962 million in mortgages during the same period, marking a 45% increase from the prior quarter. Looking ahead, company executives anticipate that funded loan volumes will surpass $1 billion in the third quarter of 2024.
Source: Noah Wire Services