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Blend’s Rapid Home Equity is an automated digital origination solution that leverages real-time data to accelerate the home equity lending cycle. It features instant pre-approvals, pre-filled applications, and integrated debt consolidation tools, enabling lenders to close loans in days rather than weeks with significantly higher pull-through and operational efficiency.
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TechTranscript
00:00Welcome to HousingWire's Demo Day on Demand. I'm Alison LaForgia, Managing Editor of HousingWire's
00:07Content Studio. And in this demo, Lily will be taking us through Blends Rapid Home Equity.
00:14Blends Rapid Home Equity is an automated digital origination solution that leverages real-time
00:19data to accelerate the home equity lending cycle. It features instant pre-approvals,
00:24pre-filled applications, and integrated debt consolidation tools, enabling lenders to close
00:29loans in days rather than weeks, with significantly higher pull-through and operational efficiency.
00:35Lily, take us through the demo of Blends Rapid Home Equity.
00:39Well, I'm really excited to show you our Rapid Home Equity solution today.
00:44Like in the next 10-ish minutes, I'll walk you through how we're helping lenders compete in the
00:50new digital-first home equity market. So let's set some context. Rates are staying above 6%,
00:57as we I'm sure have all seen. And the 10-year is doing, you know, who knows what, which has made
01:04home equity a really, really critical product. Both for borrowers looking to access equity without
01:09giving up those really great low-rate first mortgages, and for financial institutions looking
01:15to retain and deepen those customer relationships.
01:18What's really changed is that over the last decade, home equity originations,
01:23both through the web and call center channels, have kind of exploded. I think from about 16%
01:28in 2016 to now over 60% of total volume. The battleground is totally changing, shifting to
01:35pure digital. Fintechs have really set a new bar with five-minute apps, instant decisioning,
01:41and funding in under 10 days. That's pretty much what borrowers are expecting. And as a homeowner,
01:46I'm getting mailers all the time that honestly look really attractive from these financial
01:50institutions. That's where blends rapid home equity lets you meet the bar. It integrates right
01:55into your existing systems, which is an amazing way to mobilize really quickly around this initiative.
02:02So let me show you a little bit about how this product works. Okay, so let's go ahead and step
02:09into the borrower's shoes. This is Andy. She's an existing customer of yours. Most banks are going to
02:14treat Andy like a total stranger. But in the blend workflow, notice that we're greeting Andy by name.
02:20We're telling her she can get pre-approved in less than five minutes. It's really not a generic
02:25application. We're tapping into existing customer data when we can to pre-fill as much of the
02:31application process as possible. Andy isn't starting from scratch. She's just going to confirm some
02:36information and keep moving along. This really helps with friction around drop-off that we've
02:41continued to see in the industry. We're also going to give Andy some confidence that there's no hard
02:45credit to get this customized offer. And that's the sort of rewarding experience that borrowers are
02:50really demanding these days. If we're missing any personal information about Andy, we will use an
02:58integrated service to pull that data directly from a third party. So any chance we can to pre-fill,
03:05we're going to go ahead and tap into those services to create the most seamless experience.
03:09Now we're going to ask only the essentials about the property, how Andy's going to use this property
03:14moving forward, what the estimated property value is, that we can source directly from data that you
03:21as a lender have, or from an integrated property service and AVM provider. We're going to aim to keep
03:27this information as tight as possible because every unnecessary question is definitely a potential
03:32drop-off point. So just a little bit more property detail info we need in order to get to that final
03:38offer here. Go ahead and looks like we couldn't pull the attachment type from our property
03:44integration. So I'll set the attachment type. And now we're really sort of at the behind the scenes
03:51middle of the loan, this really critical part where the invisible list of application requirements
03:56is really what can speed up or slow down the application process and help with a lot of those
04:02important metrics that we're tracking as part of this product and what would make you really
04:07successful. We're preparing to run an instant income report here. We'll be pulling soft credit.
04:13We can do things like trigger a property condition report so that when the borrower gets through the
04:17application, all that information is ready for them and for the lender on the back end.
04:23We're also evaluating liabilities we find in the credit report. So we want to see if Andy qualifies for
04:29debt consolidation or if we need to identify any additional mortgages that she might own. If you
04:34happen to service the first lien as a lender, you can auto link these mortgage liabilities directly
04:39up front ahead of time. But if not, we can give Andy the opportunity to tell us exactly what we need
04:45to know to get to the right offer. So here again, we've got a couple mortgages. I'll go ahead and select
04:49the right first lien to indicate this is the one that is currently on the property. Again, this is optional in
04:55the event that Andy does or doesn't have mortgage liabilities on their credit report.
05:00So here's where it starts to get really powerful. We're about to automatically pull Andy's income
05:07and employment records. We've got the employer, we've got the job title, salary, all verified
05:13instantly. This means no pay stubs. It also means no waiting on documents. And this is what helps drive
05:20that 35% faster workflow. Andy's going to keep moving and the ops teams aren't going to have to
05:26chase paper. Once we have income and confirm that we've got all the income employment data that we
05:32need in order to proceed with the application that Andy's going to tell us about, we've got property
05:37value. We've also got the credit report. We can give Andy now the boundaries for what they qualify for
05:43based on this information we have about their property and their financial profile. This allows us to
05:49tell her exactly what she's looking for based on the application. This is one of my favorite parts.
05:54So we're surfacing all of Andy's existing debts. This could be credit cards, personal loans, auto loans,
06:00showing her exactly how she can use this new line of credit, which is really going to do two things.
06:05First, it's going to increase the loan amount and drive faster first draws. And second, it's going to
06:10help position you as the lender as a real financial partner, not just as the lender for this home equity
06:17product. You're going to help Andy optimize her entire financial picture by surfacing these
06:23opportunities for her. I'm going to go ahead and skip it for today, but it's a great tool and something
06:28that's baked in right into the flow. And now here we are. We've got a pre-approved offer for Andy
06:35in just under five minutes. She's looking at what's personalized for her 6% rate, 10-year draw period,
06:4320-year repayment, all based on the financial information and verified data that we were able
06:48to pull through this workflow. This is the instant decisioning that fintechs have really used to help
06:54capture the market share. And now our customers can deliver that same experience, but with the trust
06:59that they've already built with Andy. So once we continue with the application, if Andy sees what they like,
07:04she had the opportunity to change the line amount if needed. We're going to go ahead and surface any
07:09disclosures that are required to be displayed as part of this. We can also enforce that Andy's
07:13actually looked at these disclosures before letting them proceed with the application information.
07:20As soon as Andy go ahead and hits continue and apply, we'll capture any remaining app data. So this
07:27could be declarations as it is here and the demographics. This could also be any custom
07:34questions that you might want to ask your home equity borrowers in order to help categorize
07:39service or manage that line of credit. I'll go ahead and zoom through these lovely questions that
07:46I'm sure we're also familiar with. And then again, if we have data that we need in order to complete
07:51the application that we weren't able to get from any of these third-party integrations or embedded
07:57services, we'll go ahead and ask them in real time. And move through demographics quickly.
08:02And then we're pretty much done with the application process. And then we will have a full app here.
08:06This is not just a prequel, right? We have actual approved information now that we've completed the
08:12application workflow. But one more embedded service that I just want to highlight because I think it's
08:17so important, insurance verification. So what's really great about insurance verification is that
08:25instead of having this really frictionful moment in time where the borrower's got to go dig up their
08:30policy, scan it, take a picture of it, figure out what it is and how to get to it.
08:35We're going to go ahead and have a let Andy connect right in the middle of the application flow so that
08:40we have that deck page waiting for your ops teams. Super valuable integration to a partner called
08:48Canopy Connect where that insurance is going to get linked automatically. We can also pull down data from
08:54that insurance provider call. And then Andy can view and confirm that that policy is correct. And she never
09:02has to leave the experience to do that. As soon as we've attached and validated the homeowner's insurance and any flood
09:09insurance information that we might need, Andy's going to move right into the Blend borrower portal where Andy can now
09:15communicate with her loan team, complete any follow-up tasks. And when she's ready to close, we'll use Blend's
09:21digital signing room right within this experience to review all the disclosures. No branch visit, no wet signatures,
09:27everything's going to happen right here, which is really what allows you to hit those five to ten day funding cycles
09:33and hire pull through. So in closing, let me just bring it all back together real quickly. What you saw was a pre-filled application
09:42from any of these data sources that we've highlighted, automated income verification, embedded debt
09:47consolidation, instant decisioning and approvals baked right into the workflow, and a fully digital
09:52closed experience. What's great is that this is integrated into your existing stack. So Rapid Home Equity is
10:00really about sitting within the constraints of the infrastructure that you already have. This is really how you're going to
10:06help compete without ripping and replacing that infrastructure.
10:10Lily, what a frictionless data driven process. So I have to ask, how do you instant personalized offers start at the start of the
10:23application? DriveBlend's 1.5 higher percent pull through rate?
10:28Well, traditional home equity apps tend to start with a lot of friction, you know, a generic form, a bunch of
10:36questions, and then sort of silence and, you know, hurry up and wait experience. Borrowers will submit and, you know, have to
10:44wait multiple days to find out if they even qualify. And that pause is really where the intent starts to die, people get
10:51distracted, they start shopping around, they abandon entirely. And our Rapid Home Equity solution flips that experience,
10:57right? So because we're so deeply integrated into the lender's origination stack, and we already know
11:03information about the borrower or can find this information about the borrower, we are pre-filling
11:07their information, greeting them by name, and within minutes, they're seeing that sort of carrot, right?
11:11The carrot and the stick analogy were to manifest here. They're seeing real personalized pre-approved
11:17offers, offers with real rates, limits, and terms. And that moment's really critical. So when that borrower sees a
11:24concrete offer, they're no longer just exploring, right? They're now deciding. You've kind of collapsed
11:29the funnel from what could be a maybe you're going to get some funds to a yes in a single five-ish,
11:3510-minute, you know, session. That's what really helps drive the one and a half X higher pull through
11:41confidence, immediacy, and the benefit to the borrower and momentum before the borrower ever really has to
11:47leave the experience. You mentioned a really tight closing time. So what specific automation
11:55levers allows Blend to shrink the closing cycle to five to 10 days while maintaining that strict
12:01compliance that we're all looking to make sure we have? I think the key is that we're not speeding
12:07things up by skipping steps. We're really speeding things up by eliminating manual work. So there's kind
12:15three core automation levers behind that. So the first is pulling in these trusted data from
12:22sources that you trust and have access to today. The RapidO equity pulls from either verified customer
12:29account and property data already within the lender's ecosystem, which can help remove redundant
12:35borrower data entry and reduce some of those downstream exceptions that happen in the application process.
12:43That helps us also preserve a very clean audit trail, source the information, tell the lenders
12:48where that information came from. The second lever is real-time verification. So we saw income,
12:53we saw employment, property validation. All of that happens digitally through these direct data
12:59connections that we've got on our very open platform, right? So instead of the documents and
13:05callbacks or manual reviews, we can do this real-time sourcing and real-time verification
13:10in the middle of the application. And then the third is embedded services. So inside the
13:17Barrow Flow, like Canopy Connect, what we just saw with the homeowner's insurance verification in-app,
13:21we get that information at the moment that it's needed. We've also got some really exciting things
13:25happen. I'll just plug for a moment on our AI side of the house that you'll start to see come into the
13:30Rapid Workflows, which allows us to start to run and embed some of these services and real-time,
13:36again, validations in the middle of the application process. This is going to help eliminate
13:42casing down documents, you know, side emails that we hear so much about, and a lot of the operational
13:48cleanup where time tends to elongate somehow during the funding cycle. So those three levers really are
13:57what is helping us remove friction, and that stretches the home equity timeline. So the result
14:03tends to be a five- to ten-day close that's actually more consistent and compliant, you know,
14:08without skipping any of those really important steps. Now, if I'm really excited about this,
14:14and I'm a lender who's maybe on a legacy system, how fast is that implementation path, and how quickly
14:20would I see that 35% improvement in funding speed that you mentioned? So a really common question is
14:28speed to market, right? And that's really critical, especially in the current environment. And a lot
14:35of the lenders that we interact with tend to be on pretty old or highly customized systems. What's
14:41really excited about Rapid EmEquity is that it's designed to integrate and not replace. I know I
14:46mentioned that earlier, but it's really important. We're sitting on top of existing LOS, origination stack,
14:52you know, using these pre-built connectors and APIs so that lenders don't have to rip out what's
14:57already working for them. So for most institutions, implementation typically falls within the,
15:03you know, eight to 12 week range, depending on configurability and the own testing that they
15:08have on their side in order to integrate something like this into their processes. Because it does,
15:12it can help really with that back office operations and underwriting piece,
15:19piece, but it has to be part of your kind of initiative to unlock a lot more home equity
15:25volume, as many of the lenders that we're interacting with are so excited to do.
15:29So in terms of impact, lenders usually see measurable cycle time improvements within the
15:35first 60 to 90 days of going live. That 35% faster funding, again, really comes from removing those
15:43manual touch points and data entry, doc collection, verification follow-ups, not from changing the
15:50credit policy or increasing risk. So again, we're just looking to change the way that these steps are
15:55accomplished, not really by removing those steps altogether. Lily, thank you so much for joining me
16:02today and for taking us through blends rapid home equity. For our audience, for more information,
16:08click the link below.
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