Rethinking Mortgage Lending Through AI, Automation, and Transparency — Tomo - July 9, 2025
By Staff Reports - July 9th, 2025
The U.S. mortgage sector is at a crossroads. For decades, the process of getting a home loan has been synonymous with paperwork, stress, and a lack of transparency. But the convergence of artificial intelligence, rising consumer expectations, and housing market volatility is forcing the industry to evolve. With affordability challenges mounting and younger, tech-savvy buyers entering the market, lenders are being pushed to rethink not just how they operate—but why.
Enter a new generation of fintech-enabled players seeking to rewire the mortgage experience from the ground up. At the center of this transformation is a focus on automation, price clarity, and seamless digital workflows. In this conversation, Will Begeny, Vice President of TrueRate at Tomo, offers a grounded perspective on where AI fits into this evolving landscape—not as a buzzword, but as a pragmatic tool to address inefficiency, inconsistency, and inequity.
This edited Q&A is organized around four pillars: strategic imperatives, operational execution, financial implications, and technological deployment.
Here is what he had to say:
STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES
BTR: Technology is disrupting the traditional broker-lender-agent triad. Is this disruption about eliminating roles—or transforming them?
Begeny: It’s not about eliminating roles. It’s about making them fit for the modern environment. The mortgage process used to revolve around personal networks—your real estate agent had a trusted lender, and that relationship often shaped the deal. But in today's market, trust isn't enough. People want proof. They want clarity on what their options are, especially with pricing.
Agents can still be central to the process—but not as gatekeepers to a preferred lender. Increasingly, their value lies in being educators, advisors, and facilitators of a smarter, more empowered buying process. We’ve seen agents proactively share TrueRate with clients as a trust-building tool. It gives them cover legally and ethically while improving the borrower experience. That’s where transformation happens: roles adapt, not disappear.
BTR: Do industry norms still reflect the reality of today’s buyers?
Begeny: Not really. A lot of practices in real estate and lending were built for a pre-digital world. We’ve inherited traditions that assume information asymmetry—that the lender knows more than the borrower and benefits from that gap. But younger buyers, digital natives, expect transparency by default. If they can track a package across five distribution centers, they expect the same insight into where their mortgage application stands.
We’re now seeing demand for instant loan estimates, automated pre-approvals, and frictionless interactions. These aren’t nice-to-haves anymore. They’re baseline expectations. And that’s shifting the power dynamic from lender-led to borrower-directed.
BTR: How much of this is technology-driven versus market-driven?
Begeny: It’s both. The technology now exists to deliver faster, clearer, cheaper lending. But the market is forcing the issue. Rate volatility, affordability constraints, and tighter inventory have made every transaction more consequential. Lenders who cling to manual processes can’t compete. It’s no longer just about interest rates—it’s about responsiveness, reliability, and reputation.
OPERATIONAL EXECUTION
BTR: How are modern lending operations being restructured around intelligent systems?
Begeny: We’re in a transition from process-based roles to outcome-based roles. In traditional setups, loan processors and underwriters had fixed tasks: verify this, email that, chase documents. But with intelligent automation, the question becomes: what value does a human add that a machine can’t? Increasingly, the answer is nuance, judgment, and exception management.
We hire people who can think like systems designers—who don’t just complete tasks but ask, “Should this task even exist?” That mindset allows us to scale efficiently. One person can manage what used to take a team. But it only works if your technology is doing the heavy lifting.
BTR: What about coordination across the broader transaction—agents, title, attorneys?
Begeny: That’s still one of the biggest friction points. Even if your internal systems are world-class, the moment you hit an external dependency—like a delayed appraisal or a manual title review—the process can break. We’ve learned that true customer satisfaction often hinges on how well we shield borrowers from those external hiccups.
So we’ve invested in tools that keep all parties in sync: automated notifications, shared timelines, permissioned data access. The idea is to create visibility without overload. You shouldn’t need to call six people to know where a file stands. That kind of transparency reduces anxiety and accelerates coordination.
BTR: Have buyer expectations around timelines changed?
Begeny: Absolutely. What used to be acceptable—30 to 45 days to close—now feels glacial. We’ve done three-day closes in some cases. More commonly, we aim for two weeks. But the psychological shift is bigger than the logistical one. Buyers no longer want to wait for an answer. They want real-time status updates, just like they get from Uber or Amazon.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
BTR: You’ve mentioned an $11 billion figure in system inefficiency. Where does that come from?
Begeny: It’s the cumulative effect of friction. Think about every step in the mortgage process that’s duplicated, manual, or unnecessary—document re-uploads, miscommunication, redundant reviews. Each of those steps adds time and labor, and that cost rolls downhill to the borrower.
In aggregate, we estimate that borrowers are overpaying by about $11 billion annually. That includes inflated origination fees, non-competitive rate structures, and operational bloat. In slower housing years, it’s still a massive number. And in strong markets, the inefficiency just scales with volume.
BTR: What does that mean at the individual level?
Begeny: It means the average borrower could be buying a house a year sooner. That $3,000–$4,000 in lost savings annually can make the difference between getting approved or not. Especially for first-time buyers, every dollar counts. When lenders run leaner operations and offer more transparent pricing, they empower people to build equity earlier.
BTR: Are traditional cost structures sustainable?
Begeny: Not in a high-rate, high-cost environment. Legacy lenders built models that rely on large salesforces, expensive marketing funnels, and high customer acquisition costs. In a world where buyers can get real-time quotes from 20 lenders in under a minute, that model collapses. Price competition increases, margins shrink, and operational efficiency becomes the differentiator.
We’re seeing a bifurcation: some lenders are leaning into transparency and scale; others are doubling down on sales-driven models. The former tend to gain trust and repeat business. The latter often rely on one-time margins.
TECHNOLOGICAL DEPLOYMENT
BTR: Where is AI most effectively deployed today in mortgage lending?
Begeny: Right now, the most mature use cases are in document analysis and workflow orchestration. AI systems can read income documents, flag anomalies, confirm consistency, and spot missing signatures—all in real time. That alone saves thousands of hours annually. It also reduces human error, which is a leading cause of delays.
We also use AI for internal triage. Which files need attention? Which ones are clean and can auto-approve? That allows our staff to focus on the few cases that genuinely require intervention.
BTR: Is AI replacing decision-making or augmenting it?
Begeny: It’s augmenting. We’re not at a point—nor should we be—where machines make final credit decisions unilaterally. But they can surface the right information, accelerate analysis, and flag risk with more consistency than human teams alone. AI doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t cut corners, and it scales infinitely.
More interestingly, it also helps improve borrower interactions. Chatbots and natural language interfaces are now good enough to answer complex loan questions without long hold times. That improves experience and reduces service costs.
BTR: What’s next in AI deployment?
Begeny: We’re starting to explore more federated data access. Instead of uploading 10 different documents, a borrower can give secure API access to their bank, payroll, and credit provider. The system then pulls, verifies, and analyzes the data in seconds. This removes friction and improves data quality.
Eventually, AI will also play a bigger role in pricing models. Right now, risk-based pricing is still somewhat rigid. But with better data, we can move toward dynamic pricing that better reflects borrower realities—and potentially expands access without increasing risk.
Closing Thoughts
Mortgage lending is poised for systemic reinvention. What began as a slow digitization of paper forms has evolved into a sweeping reengineering of how credit is evaluated, how loans are priced, and how borrowers experience the home-buying journey. Artificial intelligence is not simply streamlining processes—it’s rewriting the value chain.
Yet, as Will Begeny makes clear, technology alone won’t change the market. It must be paired with a strategic commitment to transparency, interoperability, and human-centered design. The most successful lenders going forward will be those who embrace AI as a co-pilot—not just a cost-cutter—and who design workflows that can flex around an evolving ecosystem of title companies, agents, and regulatory guardrails.
At the heart of this transformation is a shift in trust: from relationship-based to data-driven. Borrowers are no longer willing to accept opaque pricing or delays without explanation. They expect to be empowered, informed, and respected throughout the process.
If the mortgage industry can meet those expectations, it won’t just improve loan processing—it will help close longstanding gaps in homeownership access, financial mobility, and economic inclusion. AI may never replace the human role in such a high-stakes transaction, but it can help ensure that the people involved are focused on what matters most: getting borrowers into homes, not lost in paperwork.