Flagstar Bank’s latest
As a part of the program, startups Home Lending Pal, RealKey and Stavvy will get access to experienced mentors and potential customers over three months, ending on Feb. 4, 2021.
This is the second year Flagstar has offered support to home-lending fintechs, which gained an unusual amount of momentum in the past several months as mortgage companies faced an increased need to operate remotely while simultaneously processing high volumes of home loans.
“With the pandemic accelerating innovation in the mortgage industry, the timing could not be better for a program that introduces new paradigms,” Courtney Thompson, head of the default mortgage division at Flagstar and the program’s sponsor, said in a press release.
The three technology companies respectively aim to make different components of the mortgage origination and closing process more efficient while also facilitating remote operations. That could help reduce processing timelines that have been lengthened by this year’s record demand. Between October 2019 and October 2020, the time needed to process loans through Intercontinental Exchange’s widely used Ellie Mae origination system has been extended by 10 days to 54, compared to 44 a year ago.
Home Lending Pal aims to compress the preparation time for the consumer, such that they can shop for a new property in seven minutes using artificial intelligence, blockchain and chatbot technologies. It raised $320,000 through two funding rounds in 2020, according to Crunchbase.
RealKey aims to help mortgage originators collect, verify and review documents quickly through a cloud-based platform that automates the process. It initially raised $1.5 million in 2016, and raised an undisclosed amount from NAR REACH and Second City Ventures in 2018.
Stavvy designed its technology to minimize delays in the digital closing process by allowing mortgage companies to communicate in real time with third parties such as appraisers, notaries and title agents. The company raised $1.5 million funding in 2019.
