New American Funding is extending its artificial intelligence strategy directly into borrower conversations, partnering with Kastle to deploy voice agents across mortgage originations and servicing.
The agreement moves AI beyond internal assistance and document processing. Kastle’s agents are designed to conduct customer interactions from beginning to end, provide 24-hour self-service, and complete multistep tasks governed by lender-defined procedures.
For New American Funding, the stated objective is to handle more calls without requiring its operations teams to absorb all of the additional volume.
“Kastle AI enables us to serve each customer with greater speed and consistency throughout the life of their loan,” New American Funding President Christy Bunce said. “As a pioneer in AI enablement for our borrowers and employees, we chose Kastle for its ability to tailor AI agents to our needs, with the flexibility to test and refine each solution before it goes live.”
The independent mortgage lender has more than 5,300 employees, over 300 locations, and a servicing portfolio covering more than 281,000 customers and $73 billion in outstanding loans.
AI Across The Mortgage Lifecycle
The Kastle agreement follows New American Funding’s July decision to transition to Vesta’s AI-native loan origination system, with a phased rollout scheduled to begin in 2027.
Vesta is expected to unify underwriting, processing, and funding while using document intelligence and AI agents to perform routine checks, identify the next action on a loan, and clear certain conditions. New American Funding said that project would reduce manual handoffs and give loan originators and operations employees more time to work directly with borrowers.
Kastle addresses another part of that operating model: the conversations surrounding those workflows.
Taken together, the partnerships suggest New American Funding is building an AI layer that spans from the initial borrower interaction through loan manufacturing to the subsequent servicing relationship.
Scaling Without Adding Headcount
Kastle markets its platform as a way for lenders to “add capacity without adding headcount.” New American Funding did not use that phrase, but it said the technology will allow the lender to take more calls while freeing employees to focus on complex customer situations.
That distinction is likely to determine how the deployment affects loan originators and servicing employees. If the agents primarily answer routine status questions and collect basic information, they could reduce interruptions and give originators more time for advice, sales, and problem-solving.
If the agents eventually handle more substantive interactions, however, automation could reshape who owns the borrower relationship and when a customer reaches a human employee.
New American Funding said its implementation process will allow the company to test and refine each agent before launch. Bunce said that approach is intended to preserve “the conversations that require a human touch.”
Compliance Moves Into The Execution Layer
Kastle’s pitch rests partly on consistency. Its agents use what the company calls Safe Execution Procedures, or SEPs, which prescribe how an agent completes regulated, multistep transactions.
The vendor says its Compliance Engine incorporates requirements related to the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Truth in Lending Act, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and prohibitions against unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices.
The platform also automatically evaluates interactions against a lender’s quality standards, according to Kastle.
Embedding rules into every interaction could eliminate some of the inconsistency found in human call centers. It can also concentrate risk: an incorrectly configured instruction could reproduce the same mistake across a large number of borrower contacts.
The technology is already moving deeper into servicing systems. In April, Kastle announced a direct integration with ICE Mortgage Technology’s MSP, allowing its agents to retrieve loan information, process payments, create servicing tasks, document activity, and conduct collections-related workflows.
Kastle also announced a servicing partnership with Carrington Mortgage Services in July. Carrington said the technology would be used for autonomous customer-service and collections agents, employee assistance, and quality-control coverage across borrower interactions.
“New American Funding understands that the winners in this next chapter will be the lenders who deeply embrace AI without compromising on compliance or control,” Kastle co-founder and CEO Rishi Choudhary said.
