Simplist Technologies today announced the official launch of Sonar, a single digital origination platform for both brokers and enterprises. The launch comes after a beta phase that lasted over a year and involved testing with over 200 mortgage companies.
The platform is described as an all-in-one origination platform that combines a loan origination system (LOS), a point-of-sale (POS) system, and a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Sonar has over 30 Application Programming Interface (API) integrations, including credit providers, pricing engines, and document management systems, per the platform's website.
“With Sonar, we’ve combined the POS and LOS into a single, streamlined platform, enhancing the entire mortgage journey for mortgage originators and borrowers alike,” said Chris de la Motte, co-founder and co-CEO of Sonar in a press release. The long beta testing period helped the company refine its final product. “We experienced firsthand the frustrations of using a fragmented tech stack, and Sonar was built to solve these problems by creating a seamless, modern solution for the entire industry–including borrowers and mortgage professionals alike.”
Anthony Sherman, co-founder and co-CEO at Sonar, added: “With over 20 years of experience in the mortgage industry, I have never been as excited about a development as I am about AI. AI is set to revolutionize mortgage origination by automating the nuanced processes, reducing costs for originators, minimizing errors, and ultimately providing a better experience for consumers. At Sonar, we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformation, streamlining workflows and relationships with AI-powered tools and bringing mortgage loan origination into the modern age.”
In an exclusive interview with NMP, Sherman said that throughout his years of experience in the mortgage business, he and others on the Simplist team identified several pain points that all surrounded LOS, POS, and/or CRM conflicts. One was the costs associated with separate LOS and POS systems, as well as getting those separate systems to work functionally.
"Our biggest differentiator is that we're an all-in-one solution. Typically, you need at least three or four different systems to integrate to complete your whole tech stack. We've integrated the point of sale, the load origination system, and CRM into one tool. We have pricing integrated throughout the entire product so that you can show clients real pricing," Sherman explained. "[Sonar] significantly cuts down all the back and forth between multiple systems...[the user] doesn't need to focus on trying to make all these systems work harmoniously together because they've already been built to work together."
Sherman says the long beta period was necessary to ensure those pain points were identified and solutions were found. That included building in-house artificial intelligence into the Sonar platform and product.
"We've been focusing a lot of our time and effort on artificial intelligence and integrating it within our product. We've had this vision for fully automating more of the workflow, and we've been able to do some really interesting things on the AI front that will save people a significant amount of time in processing mortgages," Sherman said. "As of today, we've already automated about 25% of the entire origination process. We think in the next six months, we could probably automate 50% of the entire mortgage process."
Sherman also pointed out a few additional functions Sonar's AI can do. "You can tell the system, 'Hey, I want to generate a preapproval for James Smith,' and the system will be able to execute that task without any user interaction," Sherman explained. "For today, some of the things that we've seen by being able to integrate artificial intelligence into our system at the core is [the AI] can read all the documents, it can classify all the documents, [and] it can tell you what conditions have been met by the documents."
Sherman asserts Sonar can onboard a new company typically within a couple of hours.
