The price of trust

Since 2021, the median cost of closing a mortgage has increased steadily, nearly doubling for lower-income borrowers seeking FHA loans.

While costs are up for some services required to close a loan, credit and income verification fees have been rising the most and spiked again this year.

When you apply for a loan, lenders can’t trust any of the documents you submit due to the possibility of fraud. Lenders instead rely on data brokers to verify your credit score, income, assets, tax etc.

But borrowers are on the hook for paying for the costs, you’d see this breakdown in loan closing disclosures.

Lenders get hit even worse though. As borrowers, we shop at multiple lenders/brokers to get the best deal and they incur credit report fees for every estimate they provide. They cannot recoup this cost if the borrower decides to close elsewhere.

Then, there are indirect costs like privacy and security compromises due to continuous data breaches at credit bureaus and locking out borrowers due to incorrect and missing data.

Wouldn’t ensuring trust among borrowers and lenders be a better solution instead of paying third party verifiers billions of dollars each year?

At Authentive, we are applying recent advancements in AI to build the platform to foster trust and reduce costs for millions of borrowers and thousands of lenders.