Lending, Mortgage, Open Banking
How Digital Mortgage Lenders Streamline Verification of Income with Fintech
A smooth verification of income process is crucial for mortgage lenders to satisfy customers and maintain efficiency. Unfortunately, with consumer expectations evolving and with better, more secure digital verification solutions on the market, manual verification simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
Today’s winning solutions streamline processes for everyone involved. More efficient workflows and solutions satisfy the expectations of digital consumers and increase ROI for lenders. Fintech and the digital mortgage it enables are both revolutionizing income verification and transforming risk management. Here’s how.
What Is Income Verification? When Mortgage Lenders Use Proof of Income
Mortgage lenders need to accurately determine whether or not a potential borrower is a risk. Lenders use a series of verifications to assess that risk, including income verification. A lender will request a verification of income to check that a borrower is bringing in enough money to make their monthly mortgage payments. If a verification of income report shows that a loan amount is higher than a borrower can pay back, that borrower is less likely to receive a loan.
Lenders may complete income verification using a few different methods. Historically, lenders have requested manual documentation to verify a borrower’s income. This often involved delivering a paystub and the borrower’s most recent W-2 form along with bank statements. Today, more borrowers can submit documents electronically, via email, or through a lender’s online portal.
However, with digital mortgage solutions and digital verifications, specifically, on the rise, manual income verification is becoming a thing of the past. Instead of relying on paper documents, borrowers can authorize lenders to access their financial data, where they can quickly and easily verify income.
It’s not just that manual verification of income is behind the times (even though it is). Manual verification, while a tried-and-true method for many lenders for a long time, presents concrete drawbacks and even risks that digital verification eliminates.
Manual verification simply takes longer. Hunting down relevant documents and generating friction with a frequent back-and-forth with borrowers takes time that drags out the origination process. Longer origination times mean lower ROI for lenders and less satisfaction from the consumer.
And that consumer satisfaction matters. In this digital economy, your borrowers expect increasingly streamlined processes. High-friction paper chases just don’t meet expectations anymore. And you don’t just want to meet expectations; you want to exceed them. Failing to meet today’s consumer expectations frequently results in fewer returning customers, fewer referrals, and all-around lower brand loyalty.
This is where fintech comes in.
How Fintech Streamlines Income Verification For Better Credit Decisioning
Fintech services remedy the problems inherent in manual verification with secure, convenient technology that streamlines processes for lenders and satisfies digitally-accustomed borrowers. Instead of requiring borrowers to dig up old documents, financial technology can verify income by directly accessing a borrower’s financial data. Fintech aims to simplify the mortgage lending process for everyone involved.
Digital verifications streamline mortgage lending by removing friction with borrowers, cutting origination times with fast processes, and moving borrowers more quickly through the conversion funnel. The most innovative technology also goes a step beyond simply removing friction with borrowers to also deliver a quick and secure user experience that simplifies the verification process.
Streamlining income verification isn’t just about speeding up the process. Digital verification solutions also address the risk- and fraud-related problems associated with manual verification. Physical documents received from borrowers can be unreliable. Inaccurate information leads to poor decisioning. Legacy technology that requires copy-pasting and re-keying leaves ample room for error. More risk and higher chances of fraud cost you more time and money in the end. Early Warning reports that “instead of getting information directly from financial institutions,” relying on manual verification “costs banks and lenders millions of dollars.”
Fintech ultimately improves credit decisioning with solutions that provide more accurate data and deeper insights into a borrower’s financial situation, all while cutting the time and risk associated with manual processes.
What’s Next? How The Latest Technology Will Better All Lending Platforms
The proliferation of financial data, and the open banking platforms that enable its access, are continuously evolving, especially amid the digital acceleration brought about by the pandemic. That latest technology and the innovative solutions it powers will improve lending platforms in every way, from streamlining the overall origination process to enabling more accurate, secure verifications from multiple data sources.
An abundance of consumer-permissioned data enables lending platforms to better serve consumers and increase ROI by easily and simply delivering data from multiple sources that may have been previously unavailable. Verifying employment gets easier when lenders can receive payroll and paystub information directly. Lenders that need to refinance or consolidate a loan can rapidly get the necessary loan details. The combined speed, accuracy, and security of these data connections, as well as increased access to additional data sources, enable mortgage lenders to develop the agility necessary to hone their competitive edge and adapt to future changes and challenges.
The Finicity Solution Is Transforming Risk Management For Traditional Banks
The more accurate, more secure, and more convenient solutions enabled by fintech have the potential to transform risk management for traditional banks and lenders. But transforming risk management involves more than delivering better insights to mortgage lenders; it also involves meeting the digital borrower in their digital ecosystem with a solution that benefits the consumer as much as it does the lender.
Enter Finicity Lend.
What is Finicity Lend?
Finicity Lend is a suite of fintech solutions that easily integrates into any lending platform and streamlines the verification process for mortgage lenders. Finicity’s open banking platform powers these solutions and places the consumer at the center of the verification process, which benefits everyone involved.
It goes like this: when it’s time for the borrower to verify their income, the lender kicks off the consumer permissioning process. The borrower then securely consents for the lender to access their financial data. Finicity then generates a “Verification of Income” report using data straight from the borrower’s financial institution. This guarantees the most accurate data, direct from the source. And to top it off, a verification process that could have taken weeks now takes minutes.
The Finicity Lend Verification of Income report includes:
- Financial institution for each account
- Up to 24 months of deposit transactions
- Average monthly income
- Historical and estimated annual income
How Finicity Lend Streamlines Income Verification and Transforms Risk Management
Finicity Lend is the answer to the flaws inherent in manual income verification. And it’s all thanks to data solutions that revolve around consumer empowerment. Using consumer-permissioned data, provided through Finicity’s open banking platform, Lend gives consumers more control over and transparency into their financial data and its benefits. And when the consumer is empowered, mortgage lenders reap the benefits, too.
Thanks to Finicity Lend’s data solutions, both mortgage lenders and borrowers can enjoy a streamlined verification process. Steve Smith put it best: “Once [consumer permissioning is] done, we’re able to gather all appropriate data across multiple accounts, rapidly analyze it and send a verification report to the lender. No papers. No multiple requests. No questions on validity of the data. All done in minutes, not weeks.”
Access to real-time data is the foundation of this streamlined process. Our verification solutions pull and analyze data straight from financial institutions. And all it takes is a report refresh to get immediate updates to reports. No more hindering the origination process with long periods of back-and-forth, hunting down bank statements and other documents. To top it off, our data intelligence layer analyzes financial data and ranks identified income streams with confidence scores, which both streamlines the decisioning process and provides more accurate data for better risk assessment.
Lend also streamlines the lending process and mitigates risk in the long-term. After all, fraud that comes back to bite lenders usually costs not just money, but time. Access to real-time data directly from financial institutions drastically reduces the chances of fraud when compared to verifications completed with manual verification. Our Lend solutions even compare transaction data with other source data (such as employer-provided data) for an additional layer of security.
In the end, streamlining verification of income with Finicity Lend enables mortgage lenders to close more loans more quickly. That enables greater agility, more space for more business, and more money saved in expenses. And with everything about Lend designed to put the consumer front-and-center, everybody leaves the lending process happy.
Thanks to Finicity Lend, you get the information you need for income verifications, and you get it fast. Your borrowers get a better, more empowering experience. You get a more reliable assessment of risk. And both of you can enjoy a streamlined income verification process. Learn more about Finicity Lend’s data solutions and request a demo to see streamlined income verification in action.