Income verification is the costliest bottleneck in mortgage origination

Lloyds cut income verification time from days to seconds with AI agents because their verification rules were already codified. 60 to 70 per cent of the analysis cost per mortgage file goes into extracting data from documents, cross-referencing sources, and calculating ratios. An agent performs that work in minutes when the logic is written down. The real gap is not technological: the criteria for treating a self-employed applicant with variable income live in the heads of two or three senior analysts who have spent 15 years in risk.

Lloyds Banking Group, AI in Mortgage Operations Report, 2024