Fintech lending company Figure using AI to speed up the mortgage process, and this could revolutionize the industry and benefit borrowers
The business will release an AI tool that uses GPT-4 to help find mistakes in loan papers.
The Figure is a company started in 2018 to help people get home equity lines of credit. The company says its all-online process cuts the time from 45 days to five. The Figure shows that over half of its business is done with other companies. For example, it works with GoodLeap, which lends money for solar panels.
The company has raised over $1.5 billion, and PitchBook last valued it at around $3 billion. It now focuses on AI, which new CEO Michael Tannenbaum, who left his job as COO at Brex to join the company, says is a good idea. He said of his move, “I thought this was something that could change the way that fintech businesses work.”
His main goal for AI is to help with “stare and compare” situations during the loan process. He used the example of a property-level description to show what he meant. This is a unique description of the asset that needs to be used on all legal papers. In the past, a person would have to read more than 60 pages to ensure the summary was correct.
Tannenbaum said that their new tool cuts down on the time and work needed to check the documents by hand. He said it shows how AI can “take costs out of complex processes.”
The company had to talk to OpenAI several times to ensure they would keep their privacy promise and that “the models were not being trained on our customer data in a certain way.” This was because loan applications contain personal information.
Chief Data Officer Ruben Padron said the company aimed to build model-agnostic systems, even though the feature only works on GPT-4. “We test and judge new models as they come out, and we do this almost every week or even every day,” he said. “Their systems give us a lot of flexibility to quickly and dynamically switch to whichever vendor is providing the best performance,” they say.
Padron thinks that Figure will have many more AI options in the future. He stresses that the more they can automate the loan application process, the less chance of mistakes or bias. Padron said, “We’re trying to cut costs, get rid of the manual work, and eliminate bias.” “It’s a journey.” It’s not a place to go.