Blend, a startup that sells its mortgage application technology to banks, is enhancing its toolkit to help its clients cross-sell other financial products to consumers.
The San Francisco-based company, which counts incumbents like Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank as customers, is helping banks launch a single entry point for customers’ financial information. With one set of data underpinning a variety of product offers, Blend’s bank clients can tailor customer experiences based on customer attributes, credit profile and buying power.
According to Alden Seabolt, Blend’s consumer banking product lead, the solution will increase conversion rates and allow bankers to reach more customers. “It’s a personalized experience and, once the information is in, the consumer should never have to re-enter that information,” he said. “We want to use existing data on file to understand [the customer].”
According to Seabolt, banks can use Blend’s tools to more efficiently onboard customers and underwrite them. He used the example of a direct deposit to explain how banks can better gather customer data, noting that, from that deposit, Blend has employment and income data it can use for underwriting. The company already offers home equity and account opening applications, and Seabolt said the expectation is to allow banks to onboard customers to all major financial products banks offer.
The retail products come on the heels of other recently announced Blend offerings, including the Blend Pre-Approval Builder. This tool allows loan officers to fill out a mortgage application with customers online to generate a pre-approval letter in 30 minutes. The company also completed a one-tap mortgage application tool where banks can automatically pull customers’ information to generate a mortgage approval decision without having the customer add any additional information. With Blend’s expanded products, bankers will be able to co-browse with customers, and the goal is for all applications to be a one-tap process.
Peter Wannemacher, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said Blend’s move into retail banking is not a groundbreaking innovation, but the move could still provide value to Blend and financial institutions alike. “[Blend’s move] zeroes in on a key focus [area] for leading financial services companies, and that is reducing the cognitive load on the customer,” he explained. “The customer should not be forced to enter in several pieces of information multiple times.”
See also: Digital mortgage application company Blend raises $130m to expand bank partnerships
Blend, a seven-year-old company, has so far raised $310 million. According to the company, Blend partners with more than 170 different lenders and processes more than $2 billion in mortgage applications daily. The company hauled in $130 million in Series E funding in June.





