HousingWireHousingWire
United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) announced new enhancements to its artificial intelligence-based chatbot on Wednesday, including the ability for brokers to “chat with documents,” calculate income immediately and help identify products that match borrowers’ needs.
The wholesale lender launched an AI-powered search engine dubbed ChatUWM in May 2024. The chatbot provides instant responses to clients — guidelines, matrices, and lender tools among other information — based on the company’s knowledge base, “The Source.”
“Since we rolled ChatUWM out back in May, we’ve had over 25,000 active external users, with over 400,000 prompts requested and returned. That averages out to nearly 3,000 prompts per day,” Jason Bressler, chief technology officer at UWM, wrote to HousingWire. “We expect these numbers to increase as we expand ChatUWM’s capabilities and it becomes a more integral resource to how our clients work with UWM.”
The new functionalities will allow mortgage brokers to upload any PDF and instantly get information, for example, regarding appraisals or credits by asking for documents. ChatUWM will also analyze the document and guide brokers in identifying the product that fits the borrower scenario.
“The platform will also ask a few questions to provide full transparency and pinpoint compensation for each loan,” UWM explained in a news release on Wednesday.
Other enhancements include allowing brokers to upload W2s, self-employed income statements and rental agreements, calculating income instantly.
“A broker could upload only a credit report and a W2, and the ChatUWM AI technology will calculate the income, read the full content of the credit report, ask a couple of follow-up questions, and immediately give them a recommendation on products that will best fit that borrower’s specific financial situation based off of just that small amount of documentation,” Bressler explained.
He added, “Once a broker uploads a 1040 document to ChatUWM, for instance, the AI technology will extract the data, calculate it, and return it back to them in a matter of seconds. It will also showcase how the income was calculated so a broker fully understands where the numbers come from.”
The company said a loan can be imported to the system by uploading a 3.4 file. According to UWM, “ChatUWM will run the file through One-Click AUS, pull credit, and import it directly into EASE, UWM’s application system.”
Bressler said UWM does not “have exact numbers to share at the moment” regarding the time saved for brokers and their clients. However, UWM “knows these recent enhancements will greatly streamline the process, leading to meaningful time savings for team members, brokers, and their borrowers.”
According to Bressler, the company continues to have regular phone interactions with broker partners and has no intention of cutting back on those. ChatUWM, however, will “allow their phone conversations with account executives to focus on driving business growth and strategy instead.”
