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Mortgage technology provider Gateless is beefing up its flagship product, Smart Underwrite, with new integrations aimed at helping lenders speed underwriting approvals and reduce human error.
Integration with The Work Number from Equifax allows lenders using Smart Underwrite to instantly verify loan applicants’ employment and income information, Gateless announced Tuesday.
In November, Gateless announced integration with Informative Research’s intelligence platform, allowing lenders using Smart Underwrite to import credit and verification data directly.
The partnership with Equifax “creates a real-time connection between direct-source data and underwriting decisions, eliminating time-consuming human review, empowering lenders to streamline operations, boost profitability and help avoid risk,” Gateless executive Katie King said in a statement.
Katie King
King, who is chief risk officer and head of partner strategy at Gateless, said the real-time, event-driven automation employed by Smart Underwrite goes beyond evaluating income and employment data, “enhancing decision-making across all essential loan application inputs needed to generate a faster underwriting decision.”
Spun off as an independent company from mortgage lender Guaranteed Rate in March 2021, Gateless builds on technology originally developed by AI Foundry to harness artificial intelligence, machine learning and machine-vision technology to automate the mortgage process.
The following year, Gateless announced integrations with Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter and Freddie Mac’s Loan Product Advisor, and a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate document classification and extraction coverage used by Smart Underwrite
Guaranteed Rate announced it had adopted Smart Underwrite in May 2023, and Gateless announced it had signed Allied Mortgage as a client in December.
Victor Ciardelli
“The real-time automation offered by Smart Underwrite is a driving force behind our recently announced Same Day Mortgage, our new platform that enables same-day borrower approvals,” Guaranteed Rate CEO Victor Ciardelli said at the time.
Ciardelli founded both Guaranteed Rate and Gateless, and both companies share a common investor, Boston-based private equity fund Thomas H. Lee Partners (THL).
THL took a minority stake in Guaranteed Rate in 2018 on undisclosed terms, and Gateless was formed when Guaranteed Rate acquired a business unit of Kodak Alaris, AI Foundry, in 2020. Together, Ciardelli and THL led a Series A capital raise that allowed Guaranteed Rate to spin Gateless off as a separate company in 2021.
Over the years, THL has made a number of other investments in the mortgage technology and services vertical that it’s since exited. Those companies include Black Knight, Fidelity Information Services, Optimal Blue and ServiceLink.
In 2017, THL paid more than $1 billion for a controlling stake in Auction.com operator Ten-X, Inman reported at the time. Commercial real estate data and analytics giant CoStar Group acquired Ten-X and its commercial auction platform, ten-x.com, in 2020, for $190 million.
While THL reports that it’s exited its position in Ten-X Commercial, it is still an investor in Auction.com.
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