Vishal Garg, Better.com
Source: Better.com
Online mortgage platform better ChatGPT has partnered with OpenAI to launch an app that will dramatically reduce the time it takes companies to underwrite a mortgage or home equity loan, CNBC has learned exclusively.
The app, to be announced later Thursday, will take Better’s mortgage engine and combine it with OpenAI’s models to speed up the underwriting process for loan officers working at banks, mortgage brokers and fintech firms, Better CEO Vishal Garg said in an interview.
“Taking the mortgage underwriting process that many of us personally experienced from 21 days to 47 seconds and enabling it through ChatGPT is a huge unlock for everyone,” OpenAI’s chief commercial officer Giancarlo Leonetti said in a statement to CNBC. “OpenAI is proud to be a great partner in building technology that will revolutionize the mortgage industry and make it cheaper, faster and easier for American families to finance a home.”
For decades, originating a mortgage has been one of the most time-consuming corners of American finance, with lenders relying on dozens of steps that can take weeks to complete. After the financial crisis of 2008, so did the big banks JP Morgan Chase The US retreated from the mortgage market, leading to the rise of non-bank players, including Rocket mortgage And United Wholesale Mortgage.
Now, in an era where major artificial intelligence firms are targeting inefficiencies across the corporate landscape, AI agents are likely to reshape the US home-loan market, which originates more than $1 trillion in mortgages a year.
Garg said the new app is part of Better’s pivot from being primarily a lender to consumers to becoming a “mortgage-as-a-service” tech platform for other mortgage players.
Companies are taking direct aim at dominant mortgage players, allowing competitors to move faster, Garg said. According to Better, lenders can save an average of 21 days of time, reduce the cost of underwriting loans and ultimately save consumers money.
“AI is now doing mortgages,” Garg said. “Rocket, UWM, PennyMac, a bunch of big public companies, make their money by effectively charging a one-and-a-half percent tax to underwrite mortgages. … That’s $20 billion paid by the American public in a typical year.”
OpenAI’s models, fed with Better’s mortgage data, save time by running parallel workflows simultaneously across dozens of checkpoints, including appraisals, title reports, income, credit reports and other metrics, Garg said.
“It’s not a simple tool call. It’s a multiple tool call with a super long, extended logic tree and a very large context window,” Garg said.
