As part of another flurry of announcements tied to the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention, Ellie Mae announced it had acquired Capsilon, an AI-powered mortgage automation software for lenders, investors and servicers.
The company said the acquisition of Capsilon, a partner already integrated with Ellie Mae, means customers immediately will be able to gain the benefits of Capsilon technology leveraged with Ellie Mae.
“I think the journey to automating the origination is all about automating the workflow,” Ellie Mae Chief Operating Officer Joe Tyrrell said in an interview with Dodd Frank Update. “The Capsilon acquisition accelerates the journey to the North Star of automating everything.”
Capsilon’s platform, Capsilon IQ, is used by six of the top 10 originators and servicers to automate manual work and power their businesses with trusted data. But Tyrrell said it’s the companies recently introduced Instant Underwriter – what Capsilon claims is the mortgage industry’s first autonomous underwriting engine that leverages artificial intelligence, data extraction and process automation to complete underwriting tasks in seconds – that is the true game-changer for Ellie.
“Today we see about 50 percent of the loans being made are on our platform, and in about 80 percent of those, the borrowers’ way of documenting income is a pay stub and W-2 form,” Tyrrell said. “Now we’re able to automatically extract that data, perform an income comparison with the W-2, determine whether that’s within an acceptable tolerance and if not, move it to an exception tool.
“We’ll be able to accelerate that to documents, to appraisals, to flood reports, to title reports. The Capsilon platform will help in a lot of ways to underwrite the loan while the application is being completed.”
In a press release announcing the deal, Ellie Mae President and CEO Jonathan Corr said the announcement was a significant day for the mortgage industry.
“As lenders and servicers continue to shift toward data-driven automation, we are excited to provide automated document recognition, classification and data extraction to further drive down costs and time of loan origination, acquisition and servicing,” he said.
Capsilon founder and CEO Sanjeev Malaney said in the release that the company was excited for the new opportunity.
“By joining forces with Ellie Mae, we are excited to extend our capabilities and deliver unprecedented functionality through deep integrations with the Encompass Digital Lending Platform, he said. “This will help lenders leverage automation from consumer engagement through investor delivery and servicing. We believe this combination will offer value to all of our customers and integration partners, regardless of LOS or servicing platform.”