Vishal Garg, Better.com
Source: Better.com
online mortgage platform better has partnered with OpenAI to launch an app within ChatGPT that will dramatically reduce the time it takes to underwrite mortgages and home equity loans, the companies have announced, exclusively learned by CNBC.
The app, which the company announced late Thursday, takes Better’s mortgage engine and combines it with models from OpenAI to speed up the underwriting process for loan officers working at banks, mortgage brokers and fintech companies, Better CEO Vishal Garg said in an interview.
“By reducing the mortgage underwriting process, which many of us have personally experienced, from 21 days to just 47 seconds and making it possible via ChatGPT, it’s a huge unlock for everyone,” Giancarlo Lionetti, chief commercial officer at OpenAI, said in a statement provided to CNBC.
“OpenAI is proud to partner with Better to build technology that will revolutionize the mortgage industry and make it cheaper, faster, and easier for American families to get a mortgage,” he added.
For decades, mortgage origination 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, major banks JP Morgan Chase A retreat from the U.S. mortgage market led to the rise of non-bank players, including: rocket mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage.
Better shares rose as much as 5% on the news, while Rocket Mortgage shares fell as much as 6% and UWM shares fell nearly 4%.
Risk of confusion?
As major artificial intelligence companies target inefficiencies across companies, AI agents could reshape the U.S. mortgage market, which generates more than $1 trillion in mortgages annually.
Garg said the new app is part of Better’s pivot from primarily being a lender to consumers to also becoming a “mortgage-as-a-service” technology platform for other mortgage customers.
Garg said the companies are directly targeting the mortgage powerhouse by allowing competitors to move quickly. According to Better, lenders save an average of 21 days, lower loan underwriting costs, and ultimately save consumers money.
“AI is now doing mortgage lending,” Garg said. “A group of large corporations like Rocket, UWM, and PennyMac essentially make money by imposing a 1.5 percent tax on mortgage underwriting. . . . That’s $20 billion that Americans pay every year.”
Garg said OpenAI’s model fed with Better’s mortgage data can save time by running parallel workflows simultaneously across dozens of checkpoints, including appraisals, title reports, income, credit reports, and other metrics.
“This is not a simple tool call; it’s multiple tool calls with a very long and extended logic tree and a very large context window,” Garg said.
