Entering the property market poses a challenge for many, and the recent economic downturn has significantly impacted today’s mortgage market as well as individuals' personal finances. Consumers are grappling with interest rate spikes and the escalating cost of living. Such uncertainty and insecurity lead to fluctuating financial situations for many. Overcoming the hurdles to home ownership is no small feat.

However, even in happier economic times, the process is often overshadowed by the mortgage application ordeal, characterised by lengthy delays, overwhelming paperwork, and considerable frustration.

The silver lining? A technological revolution is in progress, aiming to overhaul this outdated experience.

Let's start with the hard facts.

89% of customers find the loan application process equally or more stressful than the home purchase itself. With manual methods, legacy systems, and too many cooks in the kitchen, a typical mortgage can take a draining 30-45 days from application to closing. Plagued by radio silence, complexity, and confusion over third-party interactions, borrowers can only wait and hope that everything goes through.

But there's a better way.

Innovative lenders are leveraging powerful technologies to put the customer first. By integrating capabilities like Open Banking, digital ID verification, and seamless data integration, the mortgage journey can be reinvented from application to approval.

At the pre-screening stage, smart solutions can instantly aggregate financial data and documents, eliminating the hassle of manually tracking down information. ID and income can be digitally validated in real-time. The days of physically vetting paperwork are over.

Sounds smooth in theory, but there is still an outstanding bottleneck when it comes to automatically verifying income and affordability, especially in more complex scenarios. Here the process is still heavily manually, and typically requires much back and forth between the underwriter and customer, causing uncertainty and friction.

Document Processing is an increasing topic that can solve this.  

What is document processing

Document processing leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically read, extract data from, and understand documents of various types. The AI is trained on thousands of example documents to learn how to accurately identify and categorise different pieces of information. When a new document is uploaded or scanned, the document processing system can instantly read and comprehend the text, tables, numbers, and images. Turning the physical bank documents into a digitised standardised format for automated insights.  

The result? A fully streamlined, fully digitised process that dramatically improves the time to verify even the most complex information.

Sikoia’s AI-Powered Document Processing Solution

Our latest document processing solution uses the power of artificial intelligence to radically streamline and accelerate the mortgage process. Trained on over 100,000 files and 1,000,000s of transactions, the system can automatically read and extract data from even the most complex financial documents like bank statements, payslips, and tax forms.  

This allows for seamless pre-population of over 40 fields, eliminating tedious manual data entry slashing up to 75% of manual work. At the same time, real-time completeness feedback and cross-validation checking against rules and across documents catches issues on the spot - purging back-and-forth delays. From uploading a document to receiving comprehensive income, employment and affordability insights based on the data, the entire review process is compressed from days to mere minutes.  

For lenders and brokers, this digital transformation drives substantial cost savings and efficiencies. But most importantly, it delivers a world-class experience that finally puts the borrower's needs first.

Learn more here

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