Tackling lending challenges with precision using powerful automation

The mortgage industry is one of the most intricate sectors in financial services. From the sheer volume of documents and data to constant regulatory scrutiny, the entire loan lifecycle is riddled with opportunities for error, inefficiency and escalating costs. In addition, data originates from a wide variety of sources and formats, including documents, verbal communication, digital platforms, transcriptions and more, depending on the interactions and specific needs of the customer. For lenders, mortgage professionals, banks and credit unions, these challenges translate to operational bottlenecks, heightened risks and increased costs that directly impact profitability and the borrower experience.

The good news? There are tools available to help tackle these challenges. By leveraging trusted intelligent automation throughout key stages of the loan lifecycle, you can eliminate delays caused by time-consuming manual tasks. This allows your team to focus on work that truly requires their expertise. But it’s not just about saving time—it’s about enabling smarter, more consistent decision-making processes that boost efficiency while reducing risk.

In many of my conversations with clients, I've heard them express a common concern: they recognize the value of automation but feel uncertain about where to begin. In this article, we’ll explore the key challenges lenders face and how automation can address them. We’ll also break down what to look for in a mortgage automation solution and share real-world success stories from lenders who are already seeing results.

The key challenges facing lenders today

1. Inconsistent underwriting practices

Underwriting is the cornerstone of the mortgage process, yet its manual nature often introduces inconsistencies that can impact decision-making. These variations can result in overlooked red flags, processing delays and increased buyback risk. Such inconsistency not only hampers efficiency but also erodes borrower trust. By implementing an automation solution, you can apply a uniform set of rules to every loan, ensuring consistent, unbiased underwriting decisions. This streamlines the process, mitigates risks and delivers better outcomes for both lenders and borrowers.

2. Overwhelming documentation requirements

Every loan potentially requires hundreds of documents—from income statements to asset records—each needing careful review, comparison and validation against the loan origination system (LOS). This tedious manual "stare-and-compare" process is not only time-intensive but also prone to human error. Using automation to streamline underwriting with greater speed and accuracy directly enhances borrower satisfaction and builds loyalty.

3. Errors in income, asset and credit analysis

Mistakes in analyzing income, assets or credit profiles can lead to severe consequences, such as costly loan buybacks. These errors not only undermine profitability but also increase exposure to compliance risks and capital limitations. By leveraging automation for document verification and data validation, you can identify discrepancies and potential risks early on. This proactive approach minimizes repurchase risks and supports adherence to federal, state and investor regulations.

4. Pressure to reduce costs

Approximately 40% of loan origination costs are tied to operations1, leaving lenders under significant pressure to cut expenses and streamline workflows—all while maintaining high standards of quality and compliance. Leveraging automation to swiftly process documents allows your team to focus on tasks that truly require their expertise, driving efficiency without compromise.

Finding the right mortgage automation solution for your business

These challenges demand solutions tailored to streamline workflows, improve decision-making and reduce risks. Having the right technology is key. With trusted intelligent automation, you can transform your operations to deliver unmatched precision and scalability. Automation solutions built to transform these processes should incorporate key capabilities to capture information, perfect data and accelerate the underwriting process.

Capture information from any source

Whether it’s pay stubs, bank statements or retirement account documents, your solution should pull data seamlessly from a variety of sources. This versatility reduces the burden on borrowers by accepting data in multiple formats, from digital files to scanned copies. It should also consolidate each document into one unified platform, standardizing the collection of loan information.

Perfect the data across systems

Manual data validation should be a thing of the past. Your automation solution should crosscheck the data extracted from various documents against the LOS to ensure consistency and flag discrepancies. By automating this process, you can eliminate the potential for human error, providing unmatched accuracy in key tasks such as income analysis, asset assessment and credit evaluation.

Accelerate the underwriting experience

Look for a solution with an exception-based workflow. This means it allows your team to focus their attention only where human expertise is truly needed. With this approach, routine tasks and straightforward cases can be streamlined, allowing underwriters to concentrate on higher-risk or more complex evaluations.

By having all three capabilities in place, you can achieve faster loan cycle times with fewer resources—boosting both productivity and accuracy.

Real-world results: tangible benefits for lenders

Your automation tool shouldn’t just address operational pain points—it should have a measurable impact across every stage of your workflow. Here are a few examples of the results mortgage automation has delivered for our clients.

Income analysis corrections

An analysis was performed across lenders leveraging the ICE Income Analyzer to automate income analysis uncovered errors in an estimated 20% of the loans reviewed. Among the flagged issues was a miscalculation of a borrower’s pay frequency, which could have resulted in inaccurate income assessment and significant repurchase risk. By automating this process, the error was identified and corrected before loan approval, sparing the lender from costly buybacks and ensuring greater accuracy and reliability.

Accelerated loan processing

By automating the data and document management process with the ICE Mortgage Analyzers, a credit union was able to significantly reduce manual errors and delays, ultimately decreasing the home mortgage loan processing to final approval turn time by 5 days. Read their story.

Faster loan closings

By leveraging the ICE Mortgage Analyzers, this lender was able to improve efficiency and quickly scale with demand shifts. Today, it takes them an average of 15 days to close a loan, but one of their top near-term goals is to achieve a clear to close within 10 days. This is largely due to the Analyzers minimizing manual tasks and delivering an accurate review, so their processors can do their jobs faster. Read their story.

Driving the future of mortgage automation

At ICE, we’re dedicated to transforming the home finance process through end-to-end digitization. A key part of this mission is the streamlining of the loan manufacturing process. Our ICE Mortgage Analyzers are designed to address a critical step in this process by optimizing underwriting and loan processing workflows. Integrations within our Encompass® platform, the Analyzers automate critical tasks—such as income verification, credit analysis, asset review and audit checks—to deliver greater accuracy and consistency throughout the origination process.

According to a 2024 study by MarketWise Advisors, the Analyzers can save clients up to 224 minutes per loan, translating into an impressive cost savings of $156 per loan. By streamlining these workflows, we're helping businesses to lower costs, enhance decision-making and drive scalability.

As we continue to expand our suite of automation tools across the ICE Mortgage Technology platform, we remain focused on helping clients simplify operations and unlock greater value. To learn more about the ICE Mortgage Analyzers and how they can transform your business, visit our website here.

1. Case Study: Lender Reduces Fallout Costs by +40%