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Month: April 2026

The Mortgage Industry Isn’t Over-Automating. It’s Automating the Wrong Things.

Posted on by Purnendu Bala

Walk through enough mortgage operations and a pattern emerges: lenders have applied automation with considerable sophistication to the tasks that needed it least, and left the moments that matter most to chance. The result is an experience that feels seamless until it suddenly doesn’t. And when it breaks, it breaks at exactly the wrong time. This is not an argument against automation. Under sustained margin compression and declining origination volumes, cost discipline is not optional. But…

The Quiet Bottlenecks in Mortgage Lending

Posted on by Larry Huff

“Friction” has quickly become the mortgage industry’s favorite word, but like most buzzwords, it risks being overused and under examined. Everyone wants to remove it, from origination to capital markets to post-closing, but few stop to ask where it actually lives or why it persists. The reality is that friction is not a singular flaw; it’s the visible output of deeper design issues. It shows up in rising costs to originate, in employee frustration, and in the quiet inefficiencies that…

You’re Not Losing Loans in the Funnel. You’re Losing Them at “Start”

Posted on by Ryan Grant

For years, mortgage lenders have optimized the wrong end of the funnel. Entire operating models are built around application-to-submission ratios, pull-through rates, lock efficiency, and funding velocity. The industry has become exceptionally good at measuring what happens after a borrower is “in.” But the uncomfortable truth is this: most of the damage is already done before the application ever exists. The real leakage point — the one that quietly drains revenue, distorts pipeline…

How Application Abandonment Defines Mortgage Performance

Posted on by Tim Nguyen

For lenders, the most important metric is often the one they do not measure. For all the dashboards tracking pull-through, pipeline conversion, lock fallout, and funded loan volume, there is a gap at the very beginning of the mortgage funnel that continues to erode performance in ways most organizations do not fully see. That gap is application abandonment: the borrowers who start an application with intent, engage just enough to indicate demand, and then disappear before ever becoming a…

Don’t Pour AI Over a Broken Foundation

Posted on by Rajan Nair

Mortgage banking is in the middle of a controlled demolition. The old scaffolding of manual processes, repetitive reviews, and paper-heavy workflows is coming down floor by floor, not because someone decided to blow it up, but because the tools to rebuild it in a new way finally exist. AI, automation, and intelligent systems are here, and they are actively reshaping who does the work, how it gets done, and what it means to compete. Historically, automation has always targeted the most…

The Mortgage Payment Gets You In the Door, Everything Else Keeps You Up at Night

Posted on by Anna Chachanidze

Everyone in this business knows what a borrower’s monthly payment looks like. Principal, interest, taxes, insurance, the classic PITI stack. What’s getting more attention lately, and rightly so, is everything that doesn’t fit neatly into that acronym. It’s not a new problem. But in a market where affordability is already strained and debt-to-income ratios are doing a lot of heavy lifting at the qualification stage, the gap between “qualifying” and “sustaining” is worth talking about more…

Apr. 16: LO, AE jobs; AOT, warehouse, homebuyer report, , subservicing tools; STRATMOR’s “Who Owns the Borrower?” Population trends

Posted on by Rob Chrisman

“People who cheat on their taxes disgust me. This is not the kind of world I want to raise my 23 dependents in.” While FHFA Director Pulte is caught up in another controversy , this time with Donald Trump’s Jesus meme, wanna know how much your state makes in taxes every year? Here you go. Mortgage loan originators are very concerned with fiscal issues, as well as who their clients are. What better way than… the Census Bureau! The U.S. Census Bureau released a downloadable file containing…

Apr. 15: Western AE & mgt. jobs; TBA bidding, HELOC, DSCR, CRM, HMDA analysis, MI tools; in-person events for months to come

Posted on by Rob Chrisman

April 15… Tax Day. “Donald Trump is introducing a 30 percent tax on shredded cheese. It’s part of his plan to Make America Grate Again.” Plenty of people were, no doubt, working on their federal taxes last night, as well as state income taxes although nine states don’t have income tax and others, like Mississippi and Oklahoma, are seeking to eliminate it altogether. Some of those working on their taxes could very well have bought or refinanced a home last month. According to Curinos’ …