The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools has made it easy to find products that can help accelerate and automate financial and real estate processes. To implement AI successfully, lending and title company businesses must also address critical considerations surrounding when, how and by whom the technology is used. To do otherwise is a setup for failure.
Before diving into tips on how to get the most out of AI, a discussion of why lenders and title companies should use AI in the first place is in order. When people think about the benefits AI stands to offer, their minds tend to go primarily to efficiency and productivity gains. By automating processes that take employees substantial time to perform manually, AI can make business operations more efficient and reduce costs.
That’s true. Efficiency, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the advantages that organizations can reap by embracing AI in the lending industry. The most successful AI tool deployments also lead to results like the ability to capture more opportunities within competitive markets, increase borrower satisfaction rates and improve employee retention — all of which ultimately translate to a boost in business competitiveness.
“The lending industry shouldn’t embrace AI simply because it can make
tedious processes faster … It can also open the doors to gaining a
valuable edge for the business as a whole.”
The point here is that the lending industry shouldn’t embrace AI simply because it can make tedious processes faster or help overstretched teams be more productive. It can also open the doors to gaining a valuable edge for the business as a whole.
Best practices
To gain all the advantages that AI stands to offer in the lending and title company industry, businesses must do more than deploy AI in ways that automate standard processes — such as launching AI chatbots to collect routine information from borrowers or using generative AI to draft messages to clients. They should also embrace “above-and-beyond” AI practices.
For instance, businesses can proactively reach out to clients with help from automated, AI-driven tools. AI programs can send reminders to borrowers about upcoming deadlines. The programs could also generate proactive guidance about where to find information clients may need when completing forms.
These messages not only reduce friction and the risk of issues like missed deadlines when processing title information. They also increase client engagement and satisfaction, which in turn helps companies capture higher rates of repeat business.
Personalize messages
AI applications are also great at personalizing communications with each client — another way to boost engagement and satisfaction. Personalization is valuable in many industries. In the realm of lending, personalized communication can be especially critical.
After all, submitting reams of data when applying for a loan or responding to title agency requests can feel tedious and draining for clients. It’s worse when they’re asked for information that is irrelevant, or that they’ve already supplied, because the systems they interact with are unable to personalize requests.
AI can help to smooth this process by personalizing interactions with borrowers that take place via automated processes. For example, based on whether a loan applicant has a W-2 job or is self-employed, an AI tool could personalize requests for submitting the appropriate income verification information. That makes the experience more pleasant and satisfying from the borrower’s perspective than one where the client has to sort out on their own which type of information to supply.
Morale risk
In addition to using AI to engage with clients in creative ways, it’s important to assess how the technology affects your own employees. At a time when there is a widespread sense that AI may be a threat to jobs, it’s not uncommon for employees to worry that a company’s increased use of AI will make them irrelevant, leading to a decrease in morale.
To avoid this risk, businesses should emphasize the ways that AI accelerates mundane processes, while still making employees critical for managing complex tasks where the technology comes up short. For example, imagine a title company business uses an AI-based tool such as the accounts payable platform Stampli to automate invoice processing. The AI capabilities of the tool might speed up the overall invoicing process to the point that it takes 10% of the time it used to.
But there will always be cases — such as invoices with severe formatting irregularities that require manual review — where employee expertise is necessary. By underscoring how AI eliminates tedium without making skilled accounts payable employees irrelevant, businesses can benefit from the efficiency gains that AI stands to offer without undercutting employee morale.
“AI is no replacement for human interaction when contending with unusual scenarios —
such as navigating complex lien issues.”
Likewise, title companies that use tools such as Alanna, an AI-powered virtual closing agent, can minimize the time employees spend answering routine questions from clients. But AI is no replacement for human interaction when contending with unusual scenarios — such as navigating complex lien issues.
Merging technologies
Because of AI’s relative novelty, it’s not uncommon to find that businesses treat the software application as a rarefied type of technology that deserves to live in its own bubble, siloed from conventional finance tools and processes. To get the most value, however, AI tools need to integrate deeply and seamlessly with the technology a business already has in place.
For instance, most large businesses in the lending industry have traditionally provided internal databases where employees can look up information about business processes. A company that decides to deploy an AI chatbot to assist employees shouldn’t treat the chatbot as a complete replacement for its internal database. Instead, the chatbot should be able to answer questions, while also pointing employees to the relevant parts of the documentation database for more information.
In this way, AI becomes an enhancement for existing technology and processes, not a substitute. This approach allows employees to adapt to using the application at their own pace, since traditional solutions remain in place. No one is forced to adopt AI overnight or to shift to AI-based processes exclusively.
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Ultimately, the success of any lending or title company hinges on how its employees engage with its clients — not which types of tools it uses. AI has many benefits to offer when it comes to boosting the efficiency of lending and title reporting processes. Whether companies can take full advantage of those benefits depends on how effectively the people they employ, as well as the ones they do business with, take advantage of this new technology. Deploying the application is the first step in taking advantage of AI, but it’s critical to leverage those tools in ways that actually benefit the people who are at the heart of the equation.
