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Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service is the one-touch, GSE-accepted digital verification of assets, income, and employment that shortens the time it takes to originate a mortgage. 

According to ICE Mortgage Technology, as of June 2021, the average loan closes in 49 days. Verifying assets, income, and employment digitally can save up to 20 days on that time, helping lenders close loans in less than a month.

What makes MVS unique, and how does it help lenders? Download our MVS infographic to learn more.

MVS uses data from bank account, payroll provider, and pay stub, three separate data sources, to provide the most accurate verification as well as the broadest coverage and highest success rate of income and employment verification solutions.

MVS is a single-vendor solution approved by both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for use in verification, one of only two such solutions on the market.

MVS provides a one-touch experience for borrowers for verification in only one session, so they don’t have to hassle with a second time. Once the verification is permissioned, it’s also available to be refreshed if the lender needs to update the information without bothering the borrower.

If you’re ready to explore how to incorporate MVS into your asset, income and employment verification for mortgage lending, sign up for a demo today.

Finicity’s SVP of Enterprise & Strategic Sales Lynn Sheck was named to HousingWire’s 2021 Women of Influence list. The honor recognizes Sheck as one of the most influential women in leadership in the housing economy. Sheck’s efforts are helping to transform the mortgage experience through Finicity’s open banking platform, specifically the new Mortgage Verification Service product. You can read why she received the honor at HousingWire and you can see the full list of honorees.

SimpleNexus announced an integration with Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) that allows lenders to streamline the verification of applicants’ assets, income and employment using a single embedded service.

Finicity launched MVS in February. The service leverages consumer-permissioned bank and payroll data to provide accurate, real-time insight into a borrower’s current assets, income and employment in minutes, without any paperwork. MVS has helped lenders shave up to 12 days off the origination process and is accepted by both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, making loans eligible for rep and warrant relief.

SimpleNexus is the first mortgage point-of-sale (POS) platform to offer Finicity’s MVS as an integrated solution. Without ever leaving the SimpleNexus mobile app, borrowers can use MVS to complete asset, income and employment verification in a few simple steps that take just minutes to complete. Lenders receive validated payroll, paystub and bank account data in real time and can refresh the data within 10 days of the loan closing as needed to fulfill investor requirements.

Read the full release here.

The traditional mortgage process can feel cumbersome to borrowers and loan officers, especially when the digital solutions dominating our lives have us accustomed to fast, convenient, and simple processes. Slow and complex mortgage workflows are more than inconvenient and unfortunately all too common. They require input at every step, back and forth between multiple partners even for some of the simplest tasks. Traditional, manual mortgage processes can also hinder lenders from reaching the full potential of their organizations.

Fortunately, Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) enables lenders to build a simple, streamlined mortgage verification experience with the flexibility to adapt to different mortgage lending use cases and enhance the lending experience for all.

The Drawbacks of Yesterday’s Mortgage Process

Gathering documents, calling employers, and conducting manual verifications add time to the origination process and can be a source of stress for prospective borrowers who have to hunt down paperwork. All that paper shuffling can also increase the chance of fraud and risk for lenders. High-friction lending experiences are frustrating for borrowers who have become accustomed to digital experiences in all aspects of their lives.

And while adopting a digital mortgage solution can simplify this otherwise cumbersome process, adapting digital solutions can be daunting when your organization is accustomed to a particular traditional workflow. Do you have to ditch everything about your current process? Are the returns of a digital mortgage solution worth the time and resources to transform your organization?

Let’s find out.

Finicity MVS: The Simple and Flexible Mortgage Verification Experience

Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service addresses these problems with traditional mortgage lending and the concerns lenders face when confronted with the thought of changing their workflow. It comes down to two key components that have been core to MVS’s development from the beginning: simplicity and flexibility.

MVS Simplicity

Thanks to Finicity’s open-banking platform, MVS can deliver the financial data necessary for accurate, GSE-accepted, reliable verification of assets, income, and employment. And it gets better: MVS enables lenders to receive the verifications they need with only a single permissioning experience by the consumer, from multiple data sources. Even adding paystub data to bank and payroll data for a more comprehensive picture of income can still only take one permissioning experience that feels right at home in the digital lifestyle of today’s borrowers.

Data-driven verifications cut the risk of manual verifications and toss out the paper chase that came with ‘paper-based’ (from actual paper to digital documents) processes. The all-in-one, one-touch experience further streamlines and simplifies the lending process and improves the overall experience for both borrowers and lenders, potentially cutting up to 12 days off the origination timeframe.

MVS Flexibility

Every lending scenario is as different as the borrowers that come to you. These unique scenarios mean that there can’t be a one-size-fits-all digital mortgage solution. It needs to be flexible. MVS is flexible enough to adapt to unique mortgage lending use cases and workflows and balance the appropriate level of borrower friction, optimizing the overall process.

With MVS, lenders can request only the data they need to validate income, assets, or employment, or they can request all the verifications at once. No need to sort through unnecessary information to assess a borrower’s risk. For example, a refinancing may not require the asset verification necessary with a new home purchase. MVS provides what you need, when you need it, and in the best, most simplified way with clean, easy-to-read reports.

And while MVS’s one-touch experience is ideal, some use cases or customer experiences require more than one permissioning experience with the borrower. Some consumer flows, for example, only require asset data in one step, and then request income data separately. Or, your flow may attempt a complete verification from transactions only, and you may return to the borrower for a second permissioning experience for paystub data later. MVS can as easily adapt to these two-touch scenarios as the one-touch experience, enhancing lender flow rather than replacing it, and allowing lenders to balance friction with borrowers on their own terms.

Regardless of the permissioning experiences required for accurate and reliable risk assessment, borrowers and lenders will always enjoy a streamlined, fast, secure permissioning process through Finicity Connect for less friction and more time saved. Thanks to this flexibility, MVS helps lenders balance what you believe is the best experience for the borrowers with the tools you need to get the highest possible verification success rate.

With Finicity’s MVS, you can enjoy the benefits of a streamlined, simplified, and flexible digital mortgage experience without sacrificing what makes your lending process unique to your organization. And to top it all off, you get the most accurate data, courtesy of open banking and consumer permissioning. Enhance your lending with Finicity Lend’s MVS.

2020 accelerated the adoption of many remote and digital solutions across nearly every industry. And while mortgage lending has some catch-up to play relative to some other industries in adopting digital solutions, change is happening, and it’s happening fast. Even if you’re not adopting digital mortgage solutions, many of your competitors are. 

But digital adoption can certainly come with its own challenges. These barriers, however, are not impenetrable, and a targeted approach to overcoming barriers to digital adoption can set you on your way to enjoying all the benefits of a digital mortgage experience. 

Why Adopt Digital Mortgage Solutions?

Digital adoption in mortgage lending involves integrating a digital mortgage solution, such as a digital verification of assets, or transforming a traditional workflow to a digital-first model. Digital solutions enable lenders to verify income, assets, and employment without the high-friction interactions with borrowers that were complicated by pandemic restrictions. 

As digital mortgage solutions have proven during the pandemic, digital adoption enables mortgage lenders to be more nimble and adapt to unexpected disruption in the market. Digital adoption also streamlines the origination process. Fannie Mae found that digital verifications can reduce cycle time by up to 12 days. And that real-time data is more accurate and helps mitigate fraud and credit risk. Digital adoption has also picked up traction as it better satisfies the expectations of today’s digital consumers.

So what’s keeping more mortgage lenders from adopting digital solutions? 

Barriers to Digital Adoption

Changing a mortgage lending workflow is no light task. Even if you see the benefits to digital mortgage adoption, it’s another issue entirely to actually implement digital solutions and strategies. Understanding the barriers standing between you and a successful digital adoption is the first step toward targeting and overcoming these challenges and enjoying the many returns of a digital mortgage process. Let’s take a look at some of the most common barriers to digital adoption.

1. Apprehensive Teammates and Borrowers

Frequently, the barrier to digital adoption isn’t so much technical as it is about the apprehension of the teammates who will be using the solutions and the prospective borrowers who will give their trust to the solutions. Although many consumers already share their financial data digitally, allowing access to bank account data can be intimidating for borrowers. The fact is, loan officers, processors, underwriters, and other team members may just be more comfortable with their well-worn traditional workflow. 

Overcoming this barrier will require showing teammates that the returns of digital adoption far outweigh the growing pains, and assuring borrowers that the secure consumer-permissioning process actually empowers them with greater control over their financial data. It also helps to integrate a simple-to-use verification technology like Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) that simplifies the entire verification process into a one-touch experience.

2. Integrating Technology with Traditional Systems and Workflows

At the core of digital adoption is leveraging innovative technology and solutions that enhance the mortgage experience. Adapting to new technology, however, can become a barrier when you’ve been relying on the same traditional solutions for decades. Technology must also be able to integrate with a lender’s loan origination software. 

Fortunately, while any adoption involves some learning curve MVS is built to be intuitive and quick to integrate. And as a one-touch solution for mortgage verifications, MVS makes adaptation easy. No more using multiple processes to get the necessary information. Everything you need is in one streamlined process.

3. Changing Trusted Processes

Trust is an integral element of mortgage lending. Borrowers trust lenders with personal information and with the hope and stress of one of the most significant decisions of their lives. And you trust your tried-and-true process to deliver a low-risk, accurate origination. Traditional processes may be out-of-date, slower, and potentially higher-risk than newer processes, but it can nonetheless be difficult to leave that familiar process behind. 

Fortunately, digital adoption doesn’t necessarily involve abandoning everything about familiar processes. Instead, adoption enhances those processes. For example, Prosperity Home Mortgage has implemented a hybrid lending model. They leverage Finicity’s digital verification solutions for a streamlined, competitive experience, but they also still prioritize in-person guidance for borrowers to personalize their lending experience. Prosperity maintained trusted, familiar priorities while augmenting their overall process with digital solutions.

Solutions like MVS also ease the enhancement of trusted processes by enabling a single process to verify assets, income, and employment. That process is also built to satisfy and exceed the expectations of today’s digital borrowers, which means this new verification solution will feel more comfortable and seamless than traditional paper-based processes.

4. Disjointed Strategy and Poor Change Management

Some lenders may have already overcome the other adoption barriers and may be on their way to integrate digital mortgage solutions. However, a disjointed adoption strategy or poor change management can become another barrier to successful adoption. Weak buy-in to the digital adoption at different levels in the organization can slow down the adoption process and prevent proper training and effective synergy between teams. 

A cohesive digital adoption strategy and effective change management involves demonstrating the benefits of digital adoption from the top of your organization on down. Successful adoption requires commitment and coordination from all. MVS can smooth out that commitment and coordination by reducing the amount of change being instituted with a single simple process, making the overall adoption easier to manage.

Target these digital adoption barriers and you’ll be on your way to a successful digital adoption and all the benefits that come from digital mortgage. Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service can help you do just that.

If you’re a lender, landlord, or employer, you know this to be true: it’s crucial to have up-to-date, verified information about applicants. You don’t want to underwrite a mortgage, provide a car loan, or rent an apartment to someone you don’t have needed information on. You want to make sure applicants can do what they’re promising.

We’re talking about verification of income and employment, and it’s what makes many significant transactions or agreements possible. It allows businesses to take wise risks and helps consumers make financial decisions that are right for them. Let’s take a closer look at what employment and income verification services are, how they work, and how businesses can leverage Finicity Lend™ for more streamlined and accurate verification experiences.

What Is Income and Employment Verification?

Income and employment verification—or verification of income and employment (VOIE)—is just what it sounds like: a way to ensure that someone’s stated income and employment are accurate. Employers and lenders typically use VOIE for more significant purchases or agreements. Lenders might use VOIE for preparing a mortgage or other loan, landlords for tenant screening, and employers for background checks.

If, say, a lender completed a VOIE for a potential borrower, what would they see?

How Does Online Income and Employment Verification Work?

Verifying income and employment can be pretty simple using consumer-permissioned data. For example, at Finicity, here’s how it works:

First, the consumer grants permission for their data to be used either from their financial institution or a payroll provider. They can upload a pay stub, if needed, or other income data.

Second, we digitally extract and verify the income and employment data you need. We’ll analyze the data and add insights to provide a historical view of income and/or employment and confirm the current employer and/or income level by cross verifying employment data with transactions in their bank account.

Finally, we provide a thorough, but easy-to-read report or just the specific data you need.

Other services typically don’t connect directly to banks and use lagging data like database solutions or manual verifications that request information directly from the applicant’s employer or even the IRS, for example. That can take a long time, though (some documents may take months to make it to you), so it’s worth it to go with a service that can automate employment and income verification. It’ll do the heavy lifting for you in minutes, making your life simpler.

The Benefits of Using Finicity’s Open Banking Platform for VOIE

When choosing an online income and employment verification service, you don’t just want a simple process. You also want accurate information and the assurance that the service is keeping your data secure. Finicity’s open banking platform is provides those important benefits, plus some nice perks:

Additionally, Finicity’s solutions mitigate risk for lenders and reduce liability for prospective employers. We act as a consumer reporting agency (CRA), so we follow strict standards that maintain the highest data accuracy and consumer protection.

First, our data meets and exceeds the demanding data quality requirements of investors and GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, our data is used for high-dollar decisioning governed by strict regulatory oversight, so it’s ready to be leveraged in any use case.

Second, we use consumer permissioning, which means that borrowers have control over how their data is shared and used. That’s a win-win for consumers, lenders, landlords, and employers. 

Third, we implement best-in-class physical, technological, and procedural security safeguards similar to those used by major banks, credit card companies, and trading firms. As security threats evolve, we evolve to stay ahead of the curve. 

How Finicity Is 3x More Successful Than the Leading Automated Verification Company

Currently, most businesses conduct verification of income and employment manually. For example, mortgage lenders contact employers directly to request income information and other documents. They’ll ask for verbal confirmation, or they may need to wait for fax or email verification. Sounds pretty old-fashioned, but that’s still the way a lot of this business is done.

Even some forms of online income verification may be slower or less secure than they could be. In today’s fast-paced, threat-laden business world, that’s bad news. Finicity’s VOIE solution was designed with these issues in mind, and our solution is three times more successful than the leading automated verification company. 

Employment and income verification services help businesses and consumers take wiser financial risks. To learn more about how Finicity’s VOIE service can help you make smart decisions, request a demo of our income and employment solutions.

The mortgage application process should be easier. It should be more accurate. It should involve less risk and less fraud. It shouldn’t be a slog for borrowers or for lenders. It should be as convenient and streamlined as we’ve come to expect from other modernized, digital experiences. 

Transforming the entire underwriting process is a massive undertaking. And while Finicity already provides solutions across all the primary segments of mortgage lending, today we’re reaching another milestone by streamlining the verification of assets, income, and employment into a one-touch, GSE-accepted experience. I’m excited to introduce Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS), the faster, more accurate, more empowering verification experience for both lenders and borrowers.

What Is MVS?

Mortgage lending underwent a historic transformation in 2020. Problems that had been minor cracks in the mortgage lending experience became chasms as lenders had to rapidly adapt to physically-distanced workflows. But despite the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuing economic fallout, and record-breaking volume—which, while temporarily obscuring them, does not eliminate the cracks—certainly accelerating the need for a new mortgage experience, that need was already apparent. 

Paper-based mortgage processes take more time—something many lenders are already lacking with today’s high volume—and they’re more prone to fraud. Slower, less streamlined solutions also reduce organizational agility, preventing lenders from keeping pace both when the market is booming and when the market again normalizes. And the high-friction paper-chases are annoying for borrowers that are already acclimated to fast, convenient, digital solutions. 

We wanted to deliver a mortgage lending experience that exceeds the expectations of today’s borrowers while also enhancing outcomes and agility for lenders and their stakeholders. That’s why we designed MVS to deliver a one-touch, GSE-accepted digital verification of assets, income, and employment. Now you can complete all necessary verifications in one seamless process. It’s a fast, secure, anytime-anywhere experience that gives the borrower control over their financial data while also providing the lender with a real-time, accurate picture of the borrower’s financial health. 

MVS is powered by Finicity’s open-banking platform. This means that mortgage lenders get access to extended lengths of real-time data, analyzed and categorized thanks to advanced data intelligence. We also assure the most accurate data and keep the consumer at the center of the data-sharing experience with clear transparency and the ability to dispute reports. Access to reliable, real-time, multi-sourced, and even cross-verified data enables the most accurate verifications, setting you on your way to get rep and warranty validation from GSEs and investors. 

And because every lending use case and process is unique, we’ve designed MVS to be flexible and accommodate everything from refinancing to new purchases, including both qualified and non-qualified mortgages. We’ve also made it easy for mortgage lenders to integrate MVS into their workflow with several flexible integration options.

All of these features come together to build a consumer-centric lending experience that improves ROI for lenders.

Why Should Lenders Use MVS?

MVS is more than a product, it’s a partnership with Finicity that enables lenders to benefit from our open banking platform and our market-leading, secure connections to financial institutions. Through those connections, lenders can get the accurate data necessary to verify assets, income, and employment, and enhance their overall decisioning and underwriting processes. And with GSEs tightening their rep and warranty relief policies due to COVID-19’s impact on consumer income and employment, lenders will need the most reliable data from the most reliable sources.

MVS enables a digital mortgage experience, allowing lenders to reap the benefits that come from digital streamlining. In fact, validating assets, income, and employment digitally can cut up to 12 days off the origination process. MVS takes digital streamlining even further by completing these verifications with only a single borrower interaction. You can then refresh those verifications at close at no cost and without reengaging the borrower. With MVS, you complete more originations in less time—time that’s crucial for lenders to remain agile in a crazy, high-volume year like this. More time opens room for more originations and more commission.

The convenience of digital verifications and the simple, streamlined consumer permissioning process also enhances the lending experience for borrowers and helps them leave more satisfied and more likely to refer their lender to friends and family. MVS’s seamless and customer-centric digital experience enables lenders to distinguish themselves, especially against digital laggards, and gain a competitive edge.

We’ll also set you up for success with Finicity’s Adoption Best Practices training so you can hit the ground running and start reaping the rewards of a streamlined, digital mortgage process. 

With MVS, everybody wins. 

Don’t settle for yesterday’s mortgage lending experience. You deserve better. And so do your borrowers. Use Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service to build the foundation of your enhanced mortgage lending experience. Find out how to integrate MVS into your mortgage lending process and to learn more about how Finicity provides other mortgage solutions in prequalification, underwriting, funding enablement, secondary quality control, and servicing.

One-touch, GSE-accepted verification of assets, income and employment reduces loan process by up to 12 days

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – February 25, 2021 – Finicity, a Mastercard company and leading provider of open banking solutions, today announced its one-touch Mortgage Verification Service (MVS), enabling lenders to provide the simple, easy experience that today’s consumers and lenders are looking for in mortgage origination. The solution allows consumers to permission data, quickly and easily, so lenders can verify assets, income and employment in a single interaction with borrowers that takes seconds or minutes instead of days or weeks. The verification is accepted by both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in place of cumbersome manual loan documentation.

While mortgage lending has rapidly moved toward a digital experience, the verification process has largely remained a manual, paper-driven process. By reducing the burden of manual methods of documentation, Finicity may help shave 8-12 days off the origination process for rapid loan closing while also increasing accuracy, improving profitability, and creating a better experience for both lenders and borrowers.

Through Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service, Finicity’s open banking platform leverages high value data available from financial institutions and payroll processors to provide accurate, real-time insights into a borrower’s current assets, income and employment. The solution offers flexible flows for different mortgage lending use cases — from refinancing to new purchases, qualified to non qualified mortgages.

This innovative service creates a simple, fast, FCRA-compliant verification experience that empowers consumers to digitally permission use of their financial data with one touch, through Finicity Connect, to rapidly validate key financial suitability requirements of a mortgage application. This is perfectly aligned with Finicity’s mission to empower both lenders and consumers while helping consumers benefit more from their own financial data. 

“We are streamlining mortgage lending significantly, reducing costs and shortening the time needed for the overall loan origination process,” said Finicity CEO and Co-founder Steve Smith. “With Finicity Lend, our ultimate goals are to help mitigate risk for lenders, create an improved consumer experience, and ultimately increase overall financial inclusion by helping borrowers better prove their creditworthiness.”

GSE Accepted

The Finicity Lend Mortgage Verification Service is accepted by both GSEs as a valid demonstration of a borrower’s assets, income and employment. Lenders are able to use Finicity verification reports for automated assessment and receive representation and warranty relief using Freddie Mac Loan Product Advisor® asset and income modeler (AIM).  Fannie Mae accepts Finicity mortgage verification reports for automated assessment within Desktop Underwriter® validation service through Day 1 Certainty®. 

“Freddie Mac has been at the forefront of advancing the digital mortgage experience that today’s borrowers have come to expect,” said Rick Lang, Single-Family Vice President of Strategy and Integration at Freddie Mac. “Our data-driven strategy helps produce safer loans and reduces the paper chase so our clients can speed up underwriting and bring borrowers to the closing table sooner.”  

“At Fannie Mae, we’ve been pioneering the digital technologies that will make the borrowing experience faster and easier for borrowers,” said Chuck Walker, Vice President Digital Alliances and Distribution at Fannie Mae. “Manually providing verification documents is a time-consuming and stressful process, so addressing asset, income and employment verification is central to moving the industry toward the ideal digital mortgage.”

What the Industry is Saying

Finicity clients and partners are already weighing in on Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Services (MVS):

“At Sierra Pacific Mortgage, we were excited to be a participant in the rollout of this enhancement to the lending process”, said Gary D. Clark, Chief Operating Officer at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.  “Continued improvements to the lending process is an important initiative at Sierra Pacific Mortgage, and one that elevates the consumer experience is a win-win for everyone.”

“As we began utilizing this new service, it quickly became clear how much it would improve the lending process for both our loan officers and borrowers”, said Patrick Gardner, Principal of Vellum Mortgage.  “Digitizing the mortgage process not only creates a faster, smoother experience for the borrower, but we’re also seeing significant cost savings and an increased volume of loans that we’re able to close.”

“For consumers, our focus is on delivering a fully mobile, fully seamless homeownership journey that’s centralized in one connected platform.  For lenders, SimpleNexus promises flexible efficiency that doesn’t get in the way of doing business.  Our integration with Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service delivers on both fronts with GSE-accepted verification of assets, income and employment in one easy interaction,” said SimpleNexus Chief Product Officer Shane Westra.

See MVS in Action

Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service  will be available across multiple LOS/POS platforms. See our MVS solution live at the following events: 

To learn more about Finicity and its commitment to fast, reliable and high-quality data, visit www.finicity.com. 

About Finicity

Finicity, a Mastercard company helps individuals, families, and organizations make smarter financial decisions through safe and secure access to fast, high-quality data. The company provides a proven and trusted open banking platform that puts consumers in control of their financial data, transforming the way we experience money for everything from budgeting and payments to investing and lending. Finicity partners with influential financial institutions and disruptive fintech providers alike to give consumers a leg up in a complicated financial world, helping to improve financial literacy, expanding financial inclusion, and ultimately leading to better financial outcomes. Finicity is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. To learn more or test drive its API, visit www.finicity.com. 

ICE Mortgage Technology™, the leading cloud-based loan origination platform provider for the mortgage industry, announced today the winners of its 2021 ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Awards.

The ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Awards recognize the most creative mortgage lending companies who are pushing the envelope by creating extraordinary, customized solutions with ICE Mortgage Technology to achieve their business goals with exceptional results.

The 2021 ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Award winner for Lenders’ Choice for Innovative Service Provider is Finicity (with Waterstone Mortgage).

“With a year of unexpected challenges, these industry-leading and resilient companies customized our ICE Mortgage Technology solutions to utilize automation technologies and data-driven insights to excel during a demanding year,” said Joe Tyrrell, president, ICE Mortgage Technology. “We’re proud to recognize these exceptional winners who showed agility, flexibility and persistence as our industry continued to pivot throughout 2020.”

You can read the full press release here or more about the winners here.

You can also read about how Waterstone Mortgage and Finicity worked together to experience a 10-15% monthly boost in digital verifications. Providing asset data sooner in origination process, saved loan originators’ time, and simplified the entire borrower experience.

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:

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.