Level up the end-to-end journey for your customers with innovative mortgage technology

With low mortgage rates and high demand, it’s a busy and challenging time for borrowers to navigate the housing market. We’re committed to helping lenders provide the necessary support by delivering an unparalleled, end-to-end mortgage process built around a seamless, user-centric experience. Our aim is to help lending teams take some of that stress away from their customers.

Historically, the lending process comprises a number of fragmented steps, each of which requires your customers to complete a multitude of manual tasks. This results in long lead times that can result in a sub-optimal experience and high application abandonment rates.

Blend helps lenders deliver a best-in-class mortgage experience in which borrowers complete the process in one unified platform. To show how our innovative mortgage technology improves each stage of the process — and reduces stress where it can — we’ll follow the example of Claire.

Claire is a fictional character who represents a first-time homebuyer.

Let’s take a look at her experience with and without Blend.

Without Blend: Claire manually fills out the mortgage application, filling out information she may have already given to the lender in the initial consultation. When she comes across a tricky question she’s not sure how to answer, she gives her loan officer a call, but reaches their voicemail and doesn’t hear back right away.

With Blend: Claire begins a user-friendly application from her mobile phone on the train during her commute to work. She is pleased to find that much of her basic information she has provided previously has already been pre-filled. At the end of the day, she picks up where she left off from her desktop at home. The application interface provides in-line, real-time help, so she has a better understanding of the application requirements. When she comes to a question that stumps her, she connects with her loan officer, who uses Blend’s Co-Pilot function to view a 1:1 representation of her screen and answer her question in real time.

Without Blend: Claire now manually gathers her employment and income data and then must navigate to a third-party portal to verify it. Recognizing how time-consuming this will be, Claire decides to wait until the weekend to complete this step.

With Blend: Claire doesn’t have to manually track down her pay stubs and bank statements. Instead, she connects her accounts so her assets and income can be verified via Blend’s integrations. This data is verified through the Blend portal, so Claire doesn’t have to switch to a different system. She completes this step in a few minutes.

Without Blend: Claire now faces another delay while her bank’s underwriting team manually arranges conditions. She gets a call from her loan officer alerting her that she needs to write a letter of explanation for a gift she received from her grandmother and then send it in to the lender.

With Blend: Blend assesses Claire’s borrower information in real time and directs her toward a templatized letter of explanation. The letter has Claire’s basic information pre-filled, so she completes the remaining fields and adds an e-signature.

Without Blend: Claire now has to wait for disclosures to be delivered through the mail. She has to physically sign this and then return it to her lender.

With Blend: Claire provided eConsent when she began her mortgage application, so she is now able to receive and sign disclosures electronically within the Blend platform.

Without Blend: Claire now waits for a new, final set of physical documents to be delivered, which she has to sign in the presence of a witness before returning them to her lender.

With Blend: Claire decides to finish the process from the comfort of her own home by choosing the Remote Online Notarization close option. She schedules a time to meet an eNotary and have her ID verified, then completes the closing ceremony via webcam — without any major disruption to her day.

It’s no secret that buying a home can be a stressful, complicated process. The example of Claire’s mortgage journey shows us how Blend’s mortgage technology can make things easier.

Bobby Nicely, president at ALCOVA Mortgage in Virginia, is seeing these benefits: “The industry was focused on underwriting turn times. But we knew we were missing more time in the beginning,” he said. “We were losing two, three, four days upfront waiting on a borrower to get a document. Blend sped that up.”

Many more financial institutions are realizing success thanks to Blend. Borrowers using the platform can complete an application in as little as 10 minutes, which helps increase application completion, and in turn, conversion rates. In fact, Blend enables lenders to process more than $5 billion of US mortgages in a day.