A soup-to-nuts fully digital mortgage process presently stands as the Holy Grail for the lending industry.
Working toward that goal, Bee Mortgage App teamed with Elphi — a software as a service mortgage technology provider — to make the first lending app created entirely from a mobile standpoint. As it stands, the initial 1.0 version of the app is a loan calculator that generates mortgage leads for Florida Capital Bank.
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"It's pretty straightforward and has been called 'a COVID tool for real estate agents.' You answer some simple questions and it pings Optimal Blue for a rate, does a PITI and DTI/LTV calculation allowing the buyer to identify their ideal mortgage payment and sales price before they start looking," Curtis Wood, founder and CEO of Bee Mortgage App, said in a statement to NMN.
Bee wrapped up its pre-seed fundraising in September and moved onto a seed round — which is live now — and collected $125,000 on the first day. The startup's investors include hundreds of individuals, Dysruptek — the corporate venture capital fund of engineering firm Haskell — and GFL Investments, a firm that, according to Wood, is made up of "a bunch of old high school buddies from the '60s who invest in blockchain projects."
The current round of funding will go to developing the artificial intelligence and blockchain capabilities planned for the next step of the app: automated pre-approval. Recently,
"We're using it to replace the loan officer within an automation architecture that merges the POS and LOS into a streamlined database controlled by the borrower via our mobile app instead of a LO at their desk working and decisioning the data," Wood said, noting that the company also has taken several steps to ensure the transaction is compliant.
"Blockchain acts as a trusted data validation method used to verify a borrower qualifies for the loan they want and we're using it to validate qualifying data. We are not using blockchain as a database or storing or placing any personal information of our customers on it."
Bee estimates three-minute fully automated mortgage pre-approvals will be ready in 12 months.