UWM adds an edge to its AI chatbot

United Wholesale Mortgage is expanding the capabilities of its front-facing chatbot, announcing the roll out of new features Wednesday.

Enhancements to UWM's chatbot, which is dubbed ChatUWM, include brokers now being able to "chat with a document," the bot being able to calculate borrower income and upload a loan right to the wholesale lenders application system.

The mega lender introduced its chatbot built for brokers in May. At the time, the company predicted that its user base would migrate over to ChatUWM to get answers to all of their questions.

"Brokers are going to want a lot more out of it, because they're going to want to start acting as if ChatUWM is a ChatGPT for them, and that's exactly what we're going to give them," said Jason Bressler, the firm's chief technology officer.Recent updates to the lenders chatbot will provide brokers with additional assistance, the lender said.One of the new features is that the bot will allow brokers to upload any PDF and "engage in dynamic conversations with the documents."

The wholesale lender says this can help brokers in situations including extracting details from an appraisal or clarifying seller credits from a purchase agreement. Clarifying seller credits can be as simple as asking ChatUWM, "What are the seller credits?" and "Is the buyer contributing anything additional?" UWM claims.

Brokers will also now have the ability to import a loan to ChatUWM, afterwhich the AI system runs "the file through One-Click AUS, pulls credit and imports it directly into EASE, UWM's application system," the Pontiac-based lender said.

Additionally, ChatUWM's AI technology is now able to examine a borrower's specific financial situation and recommend a product offering that is the best fit."A broker could simply upload a credit report and W2, and the platform will analyze the documents, ask a few follow-up questions and immediately provide a recommendation on product offering," the company's announcement said.

Apart from enhancing its front-facing chatbot capabilities, UWM is using AI to beef up its call center operations.

In a recent interview with National Mortgage News, Bressler said UWM launched an AI-powered initiative earlier this year to have an "overview of all of the calls that come in." 

"We could actually start to get an inflection and tone in how people were talking and it would be analyzed," said Bressler. "We could see if customers or team members were angry and if they were happy and pleasant, so that we could really start to change the overall training of our customer service platform."

Consumer-facing and internal bots have been actively introduced by lenders to give prospective borrowers advice and to help loan officers find details on loan products.

Apart from UWM, mortgage players such as Guild Mortgage, Figure Technology Solutions and Rocket Mortgage have rolled out similar products to streamline the loan origination process.

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