Better.com Puts Loan Officer in ChatGPT
Fintech lender Better.com has launched a conversational credit decision engine directly within ChatGPT. The OpenAI-powered tool allows for instant, natural-language loan decisioning, signaling a major trend toward embedding complex financial workflows into consumer-facing chat interfaces.
Better.com's new tool is formally named the "Tinman AI Platform," an engine built on data from over $110 billion in funded loans and 5 billion pages of documentation. It allows loan officers with a ChatGPT Enterprise account to connect their own guidelines and pricing to underwrite mortgages almost instantly. The company claims this can reduce the mortgage approval process from an industry average of 21 days to as little as 47 seconds. This AI push follows a turbulent period for the company. Better.com founder and CEO Vishal Garg gained notoriety in December 2021 for laying off 900 employees over a Zoom call. This was the first of multiple layoff rounds that saw the company shed thousands of employees, including a 3,000-person staff reduction in March 2022. The automation strategy is positioned as a direct challenge to industry giants like Rocket Mortgage and UWM. By automating the underwriting process that traditionally requires large teams of loan officers, Better aims to significantly reduce operational costs and processing times. This move is part of a broader trend in the mortgage industry to leverage AI for tasks like risk assessment, document processing, and fraud detection. The underlying technology, named Tinman, has been central to Better's operations since 2016. The company also developed "Betsy," a voice-based AI loan assistant, to handle borrower interactions, with the company claiming it resolves 80% of queries without human intervention. This new ChatGPT integration makes the core underwriting engine directly accessible to other banks and lenders. This technological pivot comes as CEO Vishal Garg continues to face scrutiny. In July 2024, a New York jury found Garg liable for breach of fiduciary duty and conversion in a decade-long lawsuit filed by a former business partner, ordering him to pay $5.5 million. He has also been previously accused of creating a hostile work environment. The move into a B2B offering, licensing its Tinman AI Platform, signals a strategic shift. After its own massive workforce reductions, Better.com is now selling the very automation technology that streamlines the roles of loan officers and underwriters to the wider financial services industry. Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage with a positive outlook, citing the AI-powered model as a key differentiator.
