Shrinking margins and consumer demand for a faster, more digital lending experience were already driving forces for a more automated loan origination process in recent years. Lenders found themselves at a crossroads – start developing digital roadmaps or fall behind the competition. Then, 2020 brought about a whole new set of challenges for lenders with the COVID-19 global pandemic and historically low interest rates.

Many lenders found themselves putting off digital transformation as they tried to manage remote workforces and social distancing while keeping pace with overflowing pipelines. And while record volume is a good problem to have, it also can expose the technology gap between those who have already embraced automation and those who haven’t.

So, what’s a lender to do?

Lenders can start by automating their assessment of a borrower’s assets and income, one of the biggest headaches in the origination process. This historically manual process involves document collection (and often chasing) and complicated underwriting calculations.

Lenders can start harnessing technology by automating their assessment of a borrower’s assets and income, one of the biggest headaches in the origination process.

With Loan Product Advisor® (LPASM) asset and income modeler (AIM) – our ever-evolving solution to help lenders automate their capacity assessment process – lenders are seeing a three- to five-day reduction in loan origination cycle times without introducing additional risk to the process.

The recent challenges in the industry brought on by COVID-19 and record volumes only validated the importance of our commitment to enhancing AIM and supporting lenders looking to adopt the solution. Here’s what’s new with AIM:

Payroll Provider Option

Until now, there’s been one option when it comes to assessing income through payroll data. Now, we’ve added Finicity as another option, giving you more choice in providers when the borrower works for an employer that uses a payroll provider integrated with Finicity.

Self-Employed Income Data Source

LoanBeam’s technology was enhanced to include internal revenue service (IRS) tax transcript data. Lenders can receive confirmation through LPA that tax transcript data matches data from the borrower’s tax return documents processed through LoanBeam – giving lenders more confidence about the borrower’s eligible income and documentation.

Self-Employed Income Third-Party Service Providers

Delivering more options and choice, we’ve added two new third-party service providers to our AIM for self-employed solution. Now, you can use CoreLogic and LoanCraft when assessing income for self-employed borrowers.

We understand the impact AIM can have on your processes and business, how it can improve the overall borrower experience and how it can help reduce risk for everyone involved – including us. But our work here is far from over. We’re committed to developing new ways to help you simplify capacity assessment and enhance AIM, and we’ll continue to work in partnership with lenders and third-party providers to do just that.