Digital lending platform Blend this week announced its $500 million acquisition of Title365, an escrow and settlement company, giving the fintech access to those services along with opportunities for new automations.

Blend was looking to acquire Title365’s processes, talent and expertise, rather than its technology, Brian Martin, head of business development at Blend, told Bank Automation News.

Blend has raised more than $665 million in seven funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. Its platform is offered as a white label product at more than 280 financial institutions, including Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Truist and Navy Federal, Martin said.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based Blend will integrate Title365’s title, settlement and escrow services into its own platform, which automates some aspects of the mortgage process and digitalizes others.

“As a software company, that’s one of our key value drivers: our ability to automate and use software,” Martin said. “What we really want to do is create a 10-times-better experience for our lender customers and for the borrower. We’re looking at the entire title process to see where can we use automation. Where can we change the experience?”

Blend co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari said title and settlement processes are manual and ripe for improvement.

“Title and settlement are manual, time-consuming processes for consumers and lenders, and by bringing all parties into the same automated platform we can vastly improve the experience,” Ghamsari said in a release.

Blend automates a lot of data collection that was previously paper-based, Martin said.

“We partner very closely with — and have for some time — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, on some of their data-validation programs, which have been really great initiatives in this pursuit of automation,” Martin said. “We’ve done a lot of things like that — that is how can we be very datacentric, and create this automation.”

One process Blend has automated is the detection of unusually large deposits. The platform can detect a large deposit in a borrower’s bank account from bank data and automatically determine if it is outside of government-sponsored enterprise guidelines. If so, the fintech generates a letter of explanation for the borrower to fill in and sign via e-signature that same day. The process previously involved a loan officer, paper-based letters, and took at least 10 days.

Martin stressed the goal is not to automate the entire mortgage process; borrowers want human interaction in what is, for many, the largest financial transaction of their lives, he said. From a more technical standpoint, a major challenge to automation in the mortgage process is the appraisal piece, he added. Blend integrates with third-party appraisal solutions rather than offering its own tool, he said. Appraisals are difficult to automate and generally take 14 days on average to do now. Automating appraisals would be the biggest challenge to overcome to automate the entire process, he said.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.