‘Netflix Of Mortgages’
Wood says that the app is targeting consumers who “live on their phones.” In other words, younger homebuyers are the app’s demographic. So far, Wood said that beta testers are comparing the app to Uber and Venmo, some even going as far as to deem Bee the "Netflix of mortgages" because of the ability to essentially stream a mortgage on-demand.
Wood has a background in finance as a loan officer. He’s also dabbled in the areas of mobile app development and blockchain technology, previously working for a software development company that built white-label mobile apps for some major brands such as Neiman Marcus, Home Depot and Moe's Southwest Grill. Wood got the idea for Bee while working as a loan officer and constantly being asked if his company had a mobile app. “Sadly, I would have to tell them no,” said Wood.
The app promotes itself as a contactless way of completing a mortgage in under 10 minutes, with the app being able to process between 70% and 80% of origination data without any loan officer involvement. Pre-approval allegedly takes just minutes and real-life loan updates are sent via the app’s portal. As the broker, Bee is the primary and only point of contact for borrowers with each of the lenders they work with.
Connor Borrego, chief product officer at UniPro, Inc., said that if Bee is offering conventional mortgages as a reseller, they could potentially resell mortgages that were being offered by crypto lending platforms. In other words, Borrego says that Bee could offer more competitive interest rates to their users for their home mortgages.
“I imagine because mortgages are just a subset of the larger finance industry that some sort of project will emerge, but most of what I have seen to date has been around creating NFTs for the deeds to properties, and allowing home sales to occur using crypto as a form of payment,” Borrego said. Borrego says that it seems like they are already tackling bias-fre executions. Since Web3 would allow Bee users to have control over their data and what is shared at the time of application, Borrego says that it could potentially move towards the removal of bias from the application process.
The primary hurdle to a tech stack that can power a mobile mortgage is the decisioning protocol. If a loan officer is needed in any way to process the 1003 data, then it’s not a mobile mortgage process the buyer can do whenever they want from wherever they want–like they can order a ride with Uber or buy stocks with Robinhood without having to go through a human taxi dispatcher or stock broker. All digital lenders today use a human loan officer and processor as their primary decisioning protocol for the uniform residential loan application.
For users that don’t want to be totally hands-free from the mortgage process, Wood says that the app offers a chat option–which resembles Instagram’s direct message function–for users to talk in real time with a certified loan officer.
Wood has no qualms about kick starting his app as a recession looms in the distance. “Some of the most successful companies in history were started in recessions including Microsoft, IBM, HP, GE, GM, Disney, Hyatt, Publix, Trader Joe’s, FedEx, and Google, Facebook and Salesforce,” Wood said.