As technology is being tapped to help financial institutions improve every part of the lending process, credit unions might be wondering how they can compete with megabanks that employ fleets of engineers to build solutions. Enter Origence and its partnership with Informed.IQ, an artificial intelligence fintech that serves the financial services industry.
During a recent webcast hosted by Origence, Bill Lynch, the company’s VP of partnerships, was joined by Justin Wickett, CEO and co-founder of Informed.IQ. Wickett said the company uses machine learning to classify, analyze, and extract data from documents for both lending and deposits. Lynch told the audience that Origence has partnered with Informed.IQ on document processing automation (DPA).
Informed.IQ automates consumer lending verification using artificial intelligence. Wickett said the company works with numerous indirect auto lenders to help them find dealers faster, improve compliance, and free up staff within their organizations.
The term “artificial intelligence” refers to the ability of computers to generally emulate human thought and perform real-world tasks, Wickett explained. Machine learning is a subset of AI and can be thought of as the technologies and algorithms that enable systems to identify patterns, make decisions, and improve themselves through experience and data.
AI presents several advantages to financial institutions, including allowing for more access to data throughout the organization and generating results with fewer human errors in real-time. He said AI is “on the rise” within consumer lending. Of financial institutions surveyed recently, 95% use AI or plan to do so in the near future.
Auto dealers are notorious for submitting 50-page PDFs containing multiple vehicle service contracts and other ancillary product contracts, Wickett continued, adding AI can break these apart in a consistent, accurate manner. It also can employ what is known as “fuzzy match logic.” In many cases, credit applications contain mismatches – for example, the name “Bob” used on one page and then “Robert” on another, or abbreviations, paystubs with the name of a subsidiary that is not the same as the company name on the check, and more.
“Today, credit union employees have to use Google or Bing to try to resolve these issues or make additional employment verification calls. AI harnesses industry data to make these matches.”
Justin Wickett
In a real-world example, Wickett pointed to a large indirect lender that sometimes took 30 days to get a dealer funded – in most cases because deal jackets were getting stuck in manual review.
“Delayed communication damages relationships,” he assessed. “With AI, this process has been sped up exponentially. It can catch missing signatures and even assess the legibility of various pages in seconds. DPA comes pre-trained right out of the box!”
Handling repetitive tasks
According to Wickett, consumer lenders frequently wrestle with when to leverage AI and when to use people. He argued people do not go to work at a credit union because they enjoy performing repetitive tasks day in and day out.
“No one enjoys keying in information from contracts,” he offered. “There are many other important jobs, such as deepening relationships with members. Let’s let machines do what machines do well and free up staff for other jobs. I have heard repeatedly of staff being grateful for being freed up from the repetitive task of checking signatures. Those tasks are error-prone and are actually a liability to the organization.”
With that said, Wickett noted AI still works with humans.
“You don’t want the AI guessing. Working with humans creates a feedback loop that retrains the AI and improves it over time.”
Informed.IQ got its start by working with very large lenders because it wanted a broad array of data to train the AI models, but Wickett said the company formed its partnership with Origence so that it can serve credit unions of all sizes.
“Credit unions are very unique in that they are open to collaborating with each other,” he said. “Even the smallest credit unions can tap into the data Informed.IQ has gathered. Credit unions can supercharge their lending process because the technology has been trained on millions of documents. Building a solution in-house takes a lot of effort and time. Even large financial institutions leverage Informed.IQ’s solutions – especially in fraud protection. There are 200,000 variations of fake paystub generators available online. Can a human working at a credit union memorize all of those types? AI can help sort through these in seconds.”
According to Wickett, his company is “democratizing” the data throughout the industry and bringing faster processing while improving compliance.
“We have already had success getting going with Origence credit unions and look forward to working with more going forward.”
Don’t miss out on additional complimentary assets from Origence that can help your lending program thrive.
On-Demand Webcast Registration: Driving Better Lending Performance Through Point of Sale
- On-Demand Webcast: Machine Learning and Processing
- Complimentary eBook: Lending Tech Trends: An essential guide for credit unions
Check out our 2023 Webcast Calendar for upcoming exciting webcasts!