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Mortgage software company Simplist Technologies has formally launched Sonar, a product it calls in a Sept. 26 press release, the “world’s first mortgage experience platform.”
The product was beta tested by 200 mortgage companies, the company said, and is unique for connecting a loan origination system (LOS) with a point-of-sale (POS) system.
The intent of Sonar is to create a vertical user experience to flatten the process for creating, working and delivering mortgage products. The industry has traditionally been plagued by antiquated workflows largely driven by a slowly evolving commitment to modern, consumer-centric user experiences. Existing software solutions are often stacked, or fragmented, meaning mortgage providers rely on a number of disjointed systems to deliver services. This tends to result in time spent ensuring software can integrate, data remains secure and teams are able to adopt.
“We experienced firsthand the frustrations of using a fragmented tech stack, and Sonar was built to solve these problems by creating a seamless, modern solution for the entire industry – including borrowers and mortgage professionals alike,” said Chris de la Motte, co-founder and co-CEO of Sonar, in a statement. “By helping thousands of people secure mortgages through Simplist, we gained deep insights into the often disjointed and complex nature of mortgage systems.”
Simplist is the company’s initial consumer-facing mortgage product, an online marketplace to find and compare home financing options for both new loans and refinancing.
Sonar’s artificial intelligence components are at the heart of its efficiencies because it’s able to automate mundane but required tasks common to loan initiation. Shrinking task lists results in faster collaboration, which Sonar facilitates in a simultaneous, multi-party environment thus reducing unread emails, lingering document approvals and other drawbacks inherent to traditional mortgage workflows.
Sonar can be white-labeled for companies wanting to deliver their own solution to the market and, when combined with its scalability, can help smaller firms deliver a competitive software solution to tech-forward consumers.
Sonar is joining other mortgage players in the shift to leverage AI to alleviate application, creation and servicing challenges. Rocket Mortgage, for example, has patented its own process that reports to close loans 25 percent faster than it did merely two years ago.
Rocket was granted U.S. Patent No. 11,921,696 on March 5, 2024, for a process employing “an event-listener architecture with a continual feedback loop that operates to determine the most efficient action pathways for distributed services to populate, verify, and qualify missing data points from a data set,” Inman reported in April 2024.
Rocket is also working with computer vision firm Restb.ai to deliver consumer-facing home search.
Mortgage software company Maxwell blended an AI called AskMax into its Maxwell Business Intelligence platform to make it easier to access functions, process requests and generally reduce interaction, a goal for any software application.
It’s a natural language interface that can do things the company said “didn’t exist before,” Maxwell co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Rutul Davé told Inman. “I think a few other industries are trying it, but definitely not in the mortgage industry.”
Things move fast when AI gets involved, however, and now Maxwell is far from alone in leveraging its benefits to better an industry long stigmatized for not being willing to modernize, regulatory demands aside. That’s no longer the case.
Anthony Sherman, co-founder and co-CEO at Sonar, said in the press release that he’s never been this excited about a product update.
“AI is set to revolutionize mortgage origination by automating the nuanced processes, reducing costs for originators, minimizing errors and ultimately providing a better experience for consumers,” he said. “At Sonar, we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformation, streamlining workflows and relationships with AI-powered tools and bringing mortgage loan origination into the modern age.”
