Better.com‘s consumer AI-driven chatbot is converting mortgage shoppers into clients and resolving customer queries, company officials say. 

The AI voice assistant, called Betsy, is fielding roughly 35.5% of borrower calls entirely on its own across nearly 100,000 calls a month, Vishal Garg, chief executive and founder, told FinAi News. 

The autonomy rate has been climbing since Betsy went live in October 2024, Garg said.

Better.com doubled its lead-to-lock conversion since last October using Betsy, he said, calling that “the clearest signal of where she’s adding real value, not just call volume.” 

Lead-to-lock conversion is when a client shopping for a mortgage finds one and locks in the interest rate during application. 

Most of Betsy’s work sits early in the process by following leads, collecting documents, answering eligibility questions and scheduling, he said. 

Loan officer productivity also has improved.  

Better.com’s loan officers on the Betsy-enabled stack are closing roughly three times the industry average in monthly volumeand Betsy is saving them more than 1,600 hours a month in aggregate, Garg said. 

Betsy’s stack is not vendor-agnostic on the reasoning side.  

“The language model running Betsy is OpenAI‘s. The voice layer — the actual speaking and listening — runs on ElevenLabs,” he said. “We picked the best tool for each job rather than forcing one vendor to do everything end to end.” 

Major area of AI deployment 

Major mortgage origination tech providers and originators including Blend Labs, Orculus and United Wholesale Mortgage are already deploying AI in their operations to drive efficiencies. 

Mortgage operations are one of the most tedious and manual labor-intensive workflows within financial services, Blend Labs Head of Product Srini Venkatramani told FinAi News. 

San Francisco-based Blend processes roughly one in six U.S. mortgages and is looking to reduce time needed to originate mortgage by half with its new AI-driven Autopilot tool, Venkatramani said. 

“Lenders spend about $11,000 to originate a single mortgage,” he said, adding that 90% of that cost are tied to loan officers, processors, underwriters and closers verifying the same data and documents. 

The company also is developing AI features that are consumer-facing to improve user experience and drive conversions, he said.  

“Mortgages are one of the most important and biggest decisions a consumer makes in their life,” he said. “If you can make that experience simple, you might gain a customer for life.” 

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