AI Drives the Next QC Evolution (Sponsored by ACES Quality Management)
By Trevor Gauthier
Mortgage quality control (QC) has always played a central role in protecting loan quality, investor confidence and regulatory compliance. Over the past two decades, QC practices have evolved significantly, shifting from manual, spreadsheet-driven workflows to configurable platforms that automate audits with centralized reporting.
This transition was a major leap forward, giving lenders and servicers the ability to improve audit accuracy, streamline operations and scale QC programs to handle rising loan volumes. Yet new challenges continue to emerge. Lenders now face heightened regulatory scrutiny, rapid shifts in investor expectations, growing datasets and increasing borrower demands. As the mortgage landscape becomes more complex, QC operations must evolve again to manage higher volumes of information with greater speed and precision.
A New Inflection Point
For many years, QC teams managed audits using static tools, disconnected communications and manual processes that were difficult to scale. The arrival of platforms like ACES Quality Management & Control® modernized these workflows, introducing automation, rules-based audit engines, and centralized reporting to ensure more accurate and consistent results.
Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is driving the next inflection point in mortgage QC. While previous technological advances focused on digitizing manual processes, AI goes further by enhancing auditor effectiveness, uncovering patterns faster and improving consistency across audit findings. This evolution offers organizations an opportunity to strengthen compliance and manage risk more proactively.
With the launch of ACES Intelligence™, ACES became the first QC technology provider to bring generative AI to mortgage and financial services quality control. ACES Intelligence delivers functionality that uses natural language to accelerate tasks such as criteria building, exception writing, summarization and reporting. By providing AI capabilities inside the QC auditing environment, ACES Intelligence enables auditors to act on their findings faster, improve communication across teams and focus more of their time on high-value judgment-based work.
How AI Is Changing QC
AI’s growing role in QC centers on its ability to increase speed, improve accuracy and surface actionable insights. By analyzing data more efficiently, AI can reduce manual workloads and give teams more time to focus on higher-value activities.
One key application is easier loan criteria building through natural language. Instead of requiring technical queries or complex filtering, ACES Intelligence users can now build audit populations by asking questions conversationally. The AI supports the most-used loan fields and user-defined fields, while preserving existing logic unless changes are explicitly requested so nothing gets overwritten by accident.
AI also generates executive summaries that distill complex audit findings into clear, accessible narratives. These reports outline the audit selection method, include defect statistics and highlight new or material findings to help stakeholders understand results quickly and take action when needed. As Thessel Jonas Hyango, managing director of quality control at The Loan Store and an early ACES Intelligence user, noted, “The best part about ACES Intelligence is that it saves me time by turning complex audit data into actionable summaries.”
Auditors can also create exception content summaries for specific audit findings across multiple loans, view the last 50 comments on an issue and apply filters to review patterns. These summaries help identify systemic issues, guide root-cause analysis and improve reporting consistency.
Writing assistance is another area where AI adds value. ACES Intelligence includes a generative writing assistant that helps craft and polish exception comments, ensuring clarity, professionalism and alignment with internal standards. The comment analysis feature also reviews historical content to uncover recurring themes and strengthen exception documentation.
Additionally, built-in PII detection flags sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers or credit card information, within the exception dialog. Users can redact the data, accept it with a business justification or reject the alert, and all selections are logged for audit tracking.
These capabilities are not abstract concepts. They are now fully embedded within the ACES platform and already in use by some of the industry’s leading QC teams. As Todd Krell, partner at CrossCheck Compliance LLC, shared, “Implementing ACES Intelligence into our workflow has been a game-changer. It saves my management staff valuable time by streamlining the process of rewriting findings and analyzing audits, allowing them to dedicate more attention to our clients. The consistency and efficiency ACES Intelligence brings have noticeably improved our overall productivity. ACES Intelligence makes us better equipped to serve our clients.”
AI’s Role in Driving Human Performance
AI’s role in QC is best understood as an enabler. While AI can analyze data, summarize findings and surface patterns faster, the expertise of auditors remains essential for interpreting results, applying context and ensuring compliance.
As discussed earlier, ACES Intelligence handles many of the repetitive, time-consuming aspects of QC, including generating summaries, consolidating exception commentary, and assisting with criteria building. By taking on these tasks, AI allows QC professionals to focus on higher-value activities that require human judgment and strategic thinking.
Teams can dedicate more time to analyzing root causes of defects, improving processes and driving operational enhancements rather than being bogged down by administrative work. This shift elevates the role of QC professionals by enabling them to act on insights rather than getting lost in manual tasks.
The business benefits are significant. Lenders and servicers can achieve broader audit coverage without adding headcount, improve consistency in findings and commentary and shorten remediation timelines when defects are identified. Enhanced communication between QC teams and other business lines also accelerates corrective actions, reducing delays and strengthening collaboration.
These improvements contribute to stronger risk management, better loan quality and increased confidence among investors, regulators and stakeholders. Organizations using advanced QC technologies today are better positioned to adapt quickly to changing regulatory expectations and competitive pressures. As a result, many are beginning to view QC not just as a compliance function but as a strategic driver of business performance.
Navigating the Future of QC
As lenders explore how to integrate AI into their QC workflows, they are increasingly turning to trusted partners to navigate this evolution effectively. ACES Quality Management has been supporting organizations for nearly two decades, providing configurable technology solutions that help clients manage compliance risk, streamline operations and enhance audit accuracy.
Today, ACES serves some of the largest and most complex financial institutions in the country, including many of the top independent mortgage lenders, servicers and credit unions. By embedding innovation directly into its platform and focusing on client-driven needs, ACES continues to help organizations respond to regulatory changes, manage increasing loan volumes and maintain confidence in every loan file.
This approach reflects an important point about AI adoption in QC: AI as a constructive disruptor. Within quality control, the objective is not to overturn established workflows but to strengthen them. By providing solutions that empower auditors and integrate seamlessly into existing processes, ACES enables clients to adopt emerging capabilities without compromising operational stability.
Leading Through Innovation
Mortgage QC has already moved from spreadsheets to smart platforms, and now AI represents the next step in that journey. As technology reshapes the way audits are conducted, success depends on striking the right balance between human expertise and technological innovation. ACES Quality Management partners with lenders and servicers to help them navigate regulatory complexity, manage risk and improve loan quality. As AI becomes part of the conversation, ACES remains committed to delivering technology that enables QC professionals to work more efficiently, communicate more effectively and deliver better outcomes for their organizations.
(Sponsored content includes material submitted independently of the Mortgage Bankers Association and MBA NewsLink and does not connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. For more information about sponsored content opportunities, contact Bill Farmakis at bill@jlfarmakis.com or 203/834-8832.)
