Why Intelligent Integration Is the Mortgage Industry’s Next Competitive Edge
John Hardesty is vice president of mortgage at Argyle, New York, a consumer-powered platform automating income, employment and asset verifications using direct-source payroll, banking, and document data.
Over the past two decades, the mortgage tech ecosystem has exploded with platforms designed to solve specific problems for lenders. Mortgage Advisor Tools, a connectivity hub for lenders, lists nearly 80 categories of mortgage tech products and services. That’s just categories, not vendors.
Loan origination systems, point-of-sale platforms, eClosing tools and a host of other mortgage products all promise efficiency, speed and cost reduction, and lenders are buying in. Yet, instead of creating a seamless digital journey, the industry now finds itself managing a patchwork of disconnected tools. Data rarely flows smoothly; it trickles, stalls or gets stuck.
While lenders are more digitized than ever before, fragmentation is dragging down profitability and increasing risk for errors. That’s why the next phase of digital transformation is intelligent integration: the purposeful connection of systems so data can move freely, workflows become less manual and every tool adds measurable value rather than complexity.
The Cost of Fragmentation
The financial toll of fragmentation is impossible to ignore. Freddie Mac’s 2024 Cost to Originate Study found that origination costs have surged nearly 35% in just three years, reaching $11,600 per loan. In the survey, lenders reported administration and operations, digital tools and customer support as having more significant cost increases than any other categories.
Staff bear the burden of that inefficiency. Nearly 70% of lending professionals spend 20 or more hours each week wrestling with siloed systems. That is half a workweek lost to tasks that technology should already handle.
Delays and repeated requests for information take their toll on borrowers, too, and that frustration erodes trust in lenders. Some 68% of consumers have abandoned a mortgage application due to friction. In today’s market, where competition for each lead is fierce, that level of attrition is devastating.
Tech fragmentation also increases risk. According to CoreLogic’s 2024 Mortgage Fraud Report, one in 123 mortgage applications were estimated to have indications of fraud. As document fraud grows more prevalent and sophisticated, every manual handoff and workaround is an opening for bad data to slip into the process.
Why Integration Matters Now
The industry is at a turning point. Margins are down, loan volume is inconsistent, regulatory expectations continue to evolve, and fraud is on the rise. Simply layering on more technology will not solve these challenges. What lenders need is connectivity, the ability for their existing systems to work together without constant manual intervention.
Intelligent integration provides the foundation for advanced technologies that make lending more efficient: artificial intelligence, automation and predictive analytics. By automating handoffs and syncing data across platforms, lenders reduce errors, accelerate decision-making and remove bottlenecks that drag down productivity. According to a 2023 Freddie Mac report, lenders who invest in automation save an average of $1,700 per loan, cut loan defects by 40% and shave seven days off their loan cycles, an 18% improvement over peers with lower adoption.
But automation alone doesn’t deliver those gains. The real value comes when technology is strategically integrated across systems, ensuring data flows seamlessly from application to close. With intelligent integration, these technologies move beyond the theoretical as practical tools that improve both efficiency and compliance.
The Competitive Payoff
Consumer-permissioned verifications are less expensive than legacy databases to begin with; lenders report saving upwards of $100 per loan and shaving 12.5 days off cycle times for every loan that makes the switch. Intelligent integration is central to maximizing the number of loans that realize those savings.
The path to intelligent integration doesn’t require ripping out existing infrastructure. Progress starts with auditing workflows to identify where handoffs create delays, where data is rekeyed unnecessarily and where the most painful workarounds occur, then quantifying the impact by applying industry benchmarks.
One of the most critical decisions is where to place income, employment and asset verification: at the point of sale, or later in the loan origination system. Placement matters. When verifications are frontloaded at pre-qualification or application, lenders see roughly three times the savings in both cost and cycle time compared with positioning the step later. The reason is simple: earlier integration minimizes reliance on expensive legacy databases and removes friction later in the loan process.
With intelligent integration, each connection removes a barrier, allowing data to flow more freely. Over time, these incremental improvements compound into a lending process that is faster, leaner and more adaptable to changing market conditions, leading to stronger profitability and a more sustainable business model.
(Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect policies of the Mortgage Bankers Association, nor do they connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. MBA NewsLink welcomes submissions from member firms. Inquiries can be sent to Editor Michael Tucker or Editorial Manager Anneliese Mahoney.)
