Core provider Finastra and fintech FormFree this week announced a joint effort to streamline borrower verification for mortgage lenders through the use of application programming interfaces (API).

Finastra is looking to cut the time it takes to perform loan originzation activities from hours down to minutes, Mary Kay Theriault, director of product management at Finastra, told Bank Automation News.

Finastra’s end-to-end, cloud-based lending platform, Fusion Mortgagebot, will offer a “lights-out integration” with Formfree’s AccountChek program through APIs. This means lenders never have to leave the loan origination software (LOS), and verification reports are automatically returned directly to the same LOS, Theriault said.

“The idea is to streamline the analytics process to ensure lenders are better positioned throughout the decision-making process,” she said.

Under the new partnership, a borrower’s asset, income and employment data is retrieved and formatted into underwriter-friendly reports. This gives lenders increased transparency and direct-source data for improved credit decisioning while reducing processing time and risk of fraud, according to a Finastra release.

“Fusion Mortgage LOS allows the Loan Officer to initiate the order through FormFree instead of asking the borrower for documentation or sending out manual verifications,” Theriault said.

Athens, Ga.-based FormFree claims to have completed over $3 trillion in loan verifications on behalf of lenders. U.K.-based Finastra serves approximately 8,600 institutions, including 90 of the world’s top 100 banks, according to the companies’ websites.

The two companies have previously collaborated on asset verification tools. Most recently, Finastra integrated FormFree’s AccountChek 3n1 to include income and employment verification features, Theriault said.

The tip of the iceberg

In the future, Finastra look to automatically satisfy lender conditions and create more efficient, secure, and inclusive processes. This includes automating requests such as the ordering of services, titles and appraisals, according to Theriault.

Meanwhile, Finastra is currently leveraging machine learnging to develop its Mortgagebot Workflow Automation solution to reduce the time it takes to perform loan origination activities, she added. The system will process mortgage documents and extract data to automatically update LOS data based on customizable business rules.

“In our opinion, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Theriault said of the new automations.