Better.com and OpenAI slash mortgage approvals from 21 days to 47 seconds with ChatGPT integration

Mortgages in 47 seconds: Better's new ChatGPT app targets lenders Rocket and UWM

The online mortgage platform Better has partnered with OpenAI to launch an app within ChatGPT that the companies said will dramatically reduce the time it takes to underwrite a mortgage or home equity loan, CNBC has learned exclusively. The app, to be announced later Thursday, takes Better's mortgage engine and combines 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, which so many of us have experienced personally, from 21 days to as little as 47 seconds and enabling it via ChatGPT is a huge unlock for everyone," Giancarlo Lionetti, OpenAI's chief commercial officer, said in a statement provided to CNBC. "OpenAI is proud to partner with Better to build technology that revolutionizes the mortgage industry and makes it cheaper, faster, and easier for American families to finance a home." For decades, creating 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 2008 financial crisis, big banks like JPMorgan Chase receded from the U.S. mortgage market, leading to the rise of non-bank players including Rocket Mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage. Now, in an era where the leading artificial intelligence firms are targeting inefficiencies across the corporate landscape, it's possible that AI agents could reshape a U.S. home-loan market that 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 also becoming a "mortgage-as-a-service" tech platform for other mortgage players. The companies are taking direct aim at the dominant mortgage players by enabling competitors to move faster, Garg said. According to Better, lenders can save 21 days of time on average, reducing the costs to underwrite loans and ultimately saving consumers money as well. "AI is now doing mortgages," Garg said. "Rocket, UWM, Pennymac, a bunch of guys that are large public companies, make their money by effectively charging a tax of one and half percent to underwrite mortgages. ... That's $20 billion that's paid by the American public in a typical year." OpenAI's models, fed with Better's mortgage data, save time by simultaneously running parallel workflows on 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.

Better.com partners with OpenAI to approve mortgages for much less...

Getting a mortgage approved used to take weeks. Better.com says it can now make the approval in seconds. On Thursday, the mortgage company announced a partnership with OpenAI that will place its AI mortgage engine directly inside ChatGPT, making it the first conversational credit decision tool for mortgages and home equity loans available to the broader financial industry. For now, the tool, known as the Tinman AI Platform, is available to loan officers and financial institutions -- not consumers directly -- though that may change down the line. Using Better's AI tool allows a loan officer to underwrite a mortgage and generate a qualification letter in (on average) around 2 minutes and 20 seconds -- a process that has historically taken 21 days. It's the latest example of AI taking aim at the affordability crisis from the inside -- not by changing interest rates, but by stripping the waste out of the system entirely. "The mortgage industry is riddled with inefficiencies that hurt consumers and the loan officers who serve them," said Leah Price, General Manager of Tinman AI Platform. "Big mortgage aggregators charge what is essentially a 1% to 2% tax on each loan just to underwrite a mortgage. That ends now." Better CEO Vishal Garg has spent years making that case with numbers. The company says it has already cut the cost to originate a loan from the industry standard of $9,200 to roughly $3,000 -- and passed on the savings to consumers. With the OpenAI partnership, Garg expects savings to further accelerate. The Tinman engine is trained on more than a decade of mortgage data -- $110 billion in funded loans, 12 million recorded customer calls, and billions of pages of documentation. By embedding Tinman inside ChatGPT -- a platform 100 million Americans already use -- Better is, for the first time, making its technology available to the entire mortgage industry. Tony Song, a Better loan officer, said the platform will allow him to "serve 10x more customers daily compared to what was possible with the traditional mortgage underwriting process." Garg is confident this is just the first step. He told me, "We're just getting started."

Better.com launches AI mortgage approval tool in ChatGPT By Investing.com

NEW YORK - Better.com (NASDAQ:BETR) announced today the launch of a conversational credit decision engine for mortgages and home equity loans integrated into ChatGPT with OpenAI. The Tinman AI Platform app allows lending teams to underwrite mortgage loans through ChatGPT using a custom Model Context Protocol connector. Users can connect their guidelines, pricing, and customer relationship management systems to the platform for loan processing and underwriting, according to a press release statement. The company reports that loans can be approved in as little as 47 seconds with a median time of 2 minutes and 24 seconds, compared to an industry average of 21 days. The platform provides underwriting capabilities for over 45 institutional mortgage investors including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, and banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Truist, Citizens Bank, US Bank, Huntington Bank, and Fifth Third. The Tinman AI Platform is built on data from more than $110 billion in funded loans, over 12 million recorded customer calls, and over 5 billion pages of documentation. The system includes underwriting criteria and pricing parameters covering over 80% of the US mortgage market.Better.com, with a market capitalization of $523 million, has seen its stock surge 189% over the past year despite current profitability challenges. The company reported revenue growth of 44% in the last twelve months, though it remains unprofitable with an EPS of -$12.18. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears overvalued at current levels, with additional insights available through 14 more ProTips for subscribers. "Loan officer teams and banks can simply log into their ChatGPT Enterprise account, download the Tinman AI credit decision engine app, connect their guidelines, pricing, and CRM to process, underwrite, and fulfill loans nearly instantly," said Leah Price, General Manager of Tinman AI Platform. The launch expands Better's collaboration with OpenAI, which includes enterprise-wide deployment of ChatGPT across its 1,400 employees and use of OpenAI's multimodal models for Betsy, Better's AI loan agent. Better.com is an AI-native mortgage and home equity finance platform that has funded more than $110 billion in loan volume. The company serves customers in all 50 US states and the United Kingdom. In other recent news, Better Home & Finance Holding Company has announced several significant developments. The company entered into a Securities Purchase Agreement with Framework Ventures IV L.P., involving the issuance of a warrant to purchase up to 211,312 shares of its Class A common stock. Additionally, Better secured a $500 million credit line through a partnership with the Sky stablecoin ecosystem, facilitated by Framework Ventures. This partnership aims to integrate Better into Sky's ecosystem, which allocates capital to generate yield. Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage on Better Home & Finance with an Overweight rating and a $40.00 price target, highlighting the company's AI-powered home finance model as a key differentiator. The firm's AI-driven decision engine, Tinman, is noted for enabling faster scaling compared to traditional competitors. Furthermore, NEO Home Loans, powered by Better, reported significant efficiency gains in mortgage lending, increasing its annual production run rate from $1.5 billion to $2.6 billion. This improvement is attributed to the adoption of Better's Tinman AI Platform. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.