Better Home & Finance Holding Company has joined with Infosys, a digital services and consulting firm, to introduce the Mortgage as a Service (MaaS) platform for independent mortgage banks and banks.
Better CEO Vishal Garg said this platform will help get the mortgage industry into the 21st century. Instead of hiring five vendors to handle the various stages of the mortgage process, the new platform will do everything including point of sale, pricing, underwriting, loan origination, closing, funding, and investor sale.
"We're taking what we've built for ourselves and we're hoping to make it the standard across the industry," Garg said in an interview with NMP.
He said it's similar to what Amazon did when it built AWS for itself and then released it to the public as a cloud computing service and database.
"It will take all the best things that Better has built and as you know Better is small, right? We have less than 1% market share in the industry, but there are all these other players and of all the things that we've done, I think what we've done the best job at is building awesome technology that really moves the industry into the future," Garg said. "We want to now share that technology with the entire industry."
Better has already funded over $100 billion in fully digital loans for the industry. One of their clients, Ally Home, says it's helped them be more efficient.
“Our strategic collaboration with Better helps us deliver best-in-class digital mortgage services to our customers in a highly innovative, scalable and cost-efficient manner,” said Glenn Brunker, head of Ally Home. “Leveraging Better’s digital platform has also helped us limit operational volatility as the mortgage industry continues to evolve in the current interest rate environment.”
Garg said the IMBs can use Better or Infosys to access the technology.
“Infosys has deep expertise in the mortgage process and delivering large and complex programs for us while reducing transformation risks. This 'Mortgage as a Service' solution, along with Infosys’ expertise, has the potential to help firms embrace a more efficient digital and automated approach to running business operations," Finlocker CEO Henry Cason said.
Garg said the industry has been trying to "staple" together technology solutions for too long and his company has been successful because they built this product from scratch.
"The promise of digitization was lower manufacturing costs," but "the cost to originate a mortgage has actually gone up from 2016 until now even though we've had all these digital solutions put in place," Garg said. "There's still all these bridges that have to be built to stitch the digital solutions together."
He's hoping the industry sees this as a seamless solution. He said their cost to originate with Tinman, Better.com's technology platform, is "substantially lower than the industry average and we're now able to take that cost savings and give it back to the industry as a whole."
