Your mortgage likely cost $11,500 to originate—and reams of paperwork. How Salesforce Agentforce is helping improve the process

The Fed lowered interest rates recently for a third consecutive time and the second time in two months. The move signaled easing financial conditions that are likely to trigger a surge in the demand for mortgages across the country - particularly in regions where there have already been signs of a housing rebound. But the higher volume will also undoubtedly present a challenge to financial institutions, if they are bound by legacy technology. Too much of the mortgage technology still used by many banks and other lending institutions isn’t designed to keep up with increased demand. Nor are these outmoded systems able to improve profit margins for lenders. A recent Freddie Mac study indicated that as recently as this summer, mortgages still regularly cost, on average, more than $11,500 for a lender to originate. And so, the mortgage market is ripe for innovation. Salesforce supports banks and lenders by helping them bring together customer data including borrower profiles, loan details, and interactions, with AI built in to help teams work more efficiently and better support borrowers. In conversations with our mortgage customers and industry leaders, we’re seeing growing interest in AI agents - autonomous systems that can take action on tasks. This agentic approach will empower lenders to rethink the entire mortgage process, turning the loan lifecycle from a slow, paper-intensive gauntlet into a streamlined digital journey. Embracing AI agents can also redefine the entire value chain, from property valuation and listing to lending and long-term asset management. As someone who served as an executive in the Federal Housing Administration within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I now often wonder if aspects of that mortgage-based calamity could have been mitigated if the industry had access to agentic AI in the functional areas of quality control and risk and fraud management back then. Today, agentic AI offers a level of visibility that simply didn’t exist back then-providing the real-time insights that allow lenders to better support borrowers and ensure they are in the best possible financial position from the start. Agentic applications There are many banking and lending benefits to agentic AI. Let’s start with one of the most basic - automation. A significant portion of lending involves rote tasks which account for a significant portion of the mortgage process, including the collection and assimilation of data such as bank statements, pay stubs, and property details. Agentic AI can automate this work drastically reducing the time it takes to process and underwrite a loan. This efficiency drives down the cost of originating a loan, a critical metric for any lender. Another benefit comes in proactive risk management. Agentic AI excels in this area by providing automated underwriting and sophisticated risk modeling to catch potential issues early in the lending process. By analyzing vast amounts of borrower data and property values in real time, AI systems can spot patterns, flag anomalies (such as undisclosed payments on a bank statement), and...

Preview: ~500 words