How Modern VOI Extends Income and Employment Verification to Hard‑to‑Reach Employers

Income and employment verification has always been one of the most delicate parts of mortgage lending. It lives at the intersection of credit risk, borrower experience, and operational cost. When it works, nobody talks about it. When it doesn’t work, everyone feels it.

Today, that pressure is magnified. Borrowers expect rapid decisions, regulators and investors expect reliable data, and lenders are operating in an environment where every basis point of margin matters. 

Leaders are constantly trading off coverage, speed, and cost across the portfolio, not just on a single file. In that context, verification of income and employment (VOI/VOE) is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a design decision that can either slow down the business or help it move faster.

This article looks at how modern VOI and VOE can move from a necessary bottleneck to a systematic advantage, and what needs to change in how lenders approach income verification to get there.

Where income and employment verification slows lenders down

Across banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage banks, leaders see a familiar pattern in VOI and VOE. Instant and credential‑based checks handle a meaningful share of borrowers, but a persistent portion of employed borrowers still fall into non‑instant, manual workflows when those methods do not return a hit.

Those are the files that trigger phone calls and emails to employers, create back‑and‑forth for borrowers, and consume the most operations capacity. They also introduce variability in cycle times and create pressure on LOs and processors who are already managing full pipelines.

The institutions that are making progress here are not asking front‑line teams to work harder. They are treating that non‑instant slice as its own design problem: moving employer outreach and follow‑up into defined, trackable workflows, and using specialized tools and services to complete those verifications and return structured VOI or VOE reports.

The opportunity is to step back and treat VOI as a system design challenge, with the non‑instant tail handled through an intentional, managed process rather than a collection of inbox‑driven tasks.

VOI as an orchestration problem, not a one‑off tool choice

Many VOI strategies still sound like one‑off tool choices. It is easy to focus on improving instant hit rate with a single provider instead of designing how all verification paths work together. Modern VOI treats verification as an orchestration problem.

In practice, lenders already use a mix of income verification approaches, for example:

• Instant payroll checks.
• Credential‑based access to payroll data.
• Manual outreach to employers.
• Document review for edge cases.

The real question is not which single path to pick. It is how to orchestrate those methods so that:

• Straightforward verification cases flow straight through.
• Harder cases are handled in a consistent, predictable way.
• Operations teams are not left stitching together ad hoc workarounds.

A more modern VOI approach:

• Applies clear, codified rules about when to try instant methods, when to fall back to credentials, and when to initiate manual outreach.
• Normalizes results into structured, machine‑readable outputs that the LOS and AUS can consume without re‑keying.
• Optimizes for coverage, speed, and cost at the portfolio level, not just instant hit rate on one method.

Once VOI is framed as an orchestration challenge, it becomes easier to see where the biggest gains actually come from.

Structuring VOI for the hardest‑to‑verify cases

Even with instant and credential‑based verification in place, a stubborn tail of employed borrowers remains. These are the cases where:

• Employers sit outside major payroll networks or are slow to respond.
• Credential attempts time out or fail despite multiple tries.
• Policies require refreshed employment checks closer to funding.

When those scenarios are still managed through inboxes and spreadsheets, they tend to be the slowest and most expensive part of the process. They also drive variability in cycle times, overtime, and exception‑driven repurchase risk that senior leaders feel in their P&L and capital planning.

Designing deliberately for this slice of work means:

• Treating non‑instant and manual workflows as first‑class flows in the system, with clear statuses, service level expectations, and reporting.
• Giving those workflows a defined home in the same environment as instant and credential‑based verifications, rather than as “side processes” that teams manage off to the side.
• Making sure outcomes from those flows still return as standardized VOI reports that can be read reliably by AUS and internal policies.

Manual outreach is particularly powerful in this employed‑borrower tail when coordinated through a managed verification service instead of leaving it to individual LOs.

Why income verification strategy matters more now

Several trends are making VOI strategy more important than it was a few years ago:

• Margin pressure. Relying on additional headcount to absorb VOI complexity is harder to justify. Gains increasingly need to come from structural improvements in how verification work moves through the organization.
• Rising borrower expectations. Borrowers bring expectations from other digital experiences into the mortgage process. Long waits while income is verified, especially when communication is unclear, can undo the benefit of a strong application experience.
• Demand for seamless, low‑friction verification. Meeting modern expectations for speed and simplicity means automating VOI/VOE wherever possible, freeing top LOs to focus on building trust, solving problems, and moving loans to close.

Taken together, these forces mean that “good enough” VOI quietly makes a lender less competitive over time.

Putting this VOI model into practice with Blend and Truework

All of these ideas are easier to describe than to implement. That is where the combination of a configurable lending platform and expert verification services matters most.

One example of this model in practice is the way Blend and Truework work together on VOI and VOE:

• Lenders can run instant payroll checks when available.
• They can fall back to credential‑based verification for supported employers.
• When a case requires outreach, they can trigger Smart Outreach, Truework’s managed manual verification method.

Smart Outreach consolidates much of the non‑instant tail that has historically lived with loan teams. Truework specialists conduct outreach and consolidate responses, then return a structured VOI or VOE report into Blend. From that point, income verification looks and behaves consistently inside the platform, regardless of which path was needed behind the scenes.

Because the results are structured and tied to the correct IDs and data fields, they can flow into automated underwriting for programs like Day 1 Certainty (D1C) and Asset and Income Modeler (AIM) where applicable, be reused for quality control and analytics, and inform future interactions with the same borrower.

Transform VOI from friction point to differentiator

Most leaders already know that income and employment verification is a source of friction. The question is whether it stays that way.

Moving VOI from bottleneck to advantage starts by asking a different set of questions:

• What would VOI look like if it were designed as a shared service for speed, risk, and growth?
• How could orchestration and data reuse reduce both cycle time and manual effort?
• What would it take to make complex income borrowers a segment we intentionally compete for?
• How would we redesign VOI if our primary metrics were pipeline velocity and cost per funded loan, not just individual file outcomes?

If your teams are still spending a large amount of time on manual VOE calls, one‑off exceptions, and repeated reverifications, that is a strong signal that your VOI model is ready for an upgrade.

Find out how Blend and Truework can help you put this VOI model into practice and turn income and employment verification into an advantage.

• Request a demo →