Mortgage Company Claims 40-Minute Underwriting Times

Sun West Mortgage recently claimed having reached a 40-minute underwriting turnaround time for 70% of customers and a 1-hour time for 95%. The technology is from a company called Celligence, which is an “affiliate” of Sun West and was funded last year by Sun West CEO Pavan Agarwal.

Sun West describes itself as a “technology and financial enablement firm.” It has other sites called LowRates.com, HomeBuyerConnect.com, and MortgagePossible.com, which seem to be additional faces for the Sun West mortgage lending business.

In addition, there is Celligence, which is supposed to “change how users connect, explore and interact with financial tools and the UX experience,” and its major product called Morgan that turns a “pre-approval into a valuable, property-agnostic” NFT, or non-fungible token in cryptoasset parlance, that has “a conditional guarantee and is conditionally backed by real US dollars from Sun West Mortgage.”

“The mortgage approval process continues to evolve,” Agarwal said in the press release. “We are able to offer faster approval times that are completely transparent with our adoption of new blockchain based technology. This ensures our borrowers are treated fairly, both for their price and approvals across all channels of the mortgage application process.”

Conventional mortgage approvals can frequently take weeks. Sun West is using Celligence’s technology to construct the loan file and perform the majority of approvals “which allows unique loan conditions to be reviewed now in less than 40 minutes.”

“Our AI engine streamlines the entire review of a mortgage application, reducing employee per file cost that oftentimes are an economic barrier to complex file approvals with lower loan limits,” said Sun West COO Jennifer Vallinayagam, also quoted in the release.

An interesting twist is that the technology products and services aren’t solely for internal use. As some other CRE companies have done, Sun West is taking a page from the practice of technology companies that create technology for their own use and then license it to underwrite their R&D costs. Amazon is one of the more notable examples. Many of their computing products started as something they needed internally and then they turned them into products. The company’s AWS cloud computing platform was an outgrowth of what they were using for their operations. The logistics and order process automation have become such a big product that a majority of boxes they ship are on behalf of third-party sellers. Amazon even has a satellite ground control system that  eventually turned into AWS Ground Station.

The rationale is a practical look at money. If a competitor can get purchase or lease a similar system to yours to compete with you, it’s a savvier idea to make money off licensing your system, bring in profit from sales you probably wouldn’t have made, and then find other ways to distinguish yourself.