Reimagining mortgage origination: Innovative document management solution

According to a recent survey by Nottingham Building Society in February 2025, 41% of brokers believe the mortgage process is as slow or slower than it was two years ago. Additionally, 31% of brokers are advocating for more technological advancements to streamline the process.

Despite 90% of the mortgages originating from intermediary, including brokers, user experience at broker end is mediocre due to disparate data systems for capturing and collating document and other required information for submitting a mortgage application. Challenge gets compounded with siloed infrastructure islands within lenders technology landscape resulting in higher costs and reduced flexibility, stagnating new product offerings and opportunity for optimizing business and technology architecture.

Document management: A persistent challenge for lenders

Document management poses a significant challenge for lenders transitioning to next-generation, future-ready platforms. Manual processes for collecting, extracting, and cross-referencing information from documents are both costly and inefficient.

According to our internal calculations, document management in the mortgage origination process costs UK&I lenders approximately £0.5 billion and necessitates the employment of 4,700 people. Currently, 30 to 40% of the mortgage application cost is allocated to document management.

There are three main factors contributing to the challenges and increased costs of document management:

1. Fragmented value chain: Brokers act as intermediaries between consumers and lenders. The systems for document and information capture vary based on broker size, ranging from email-based document collection to sophisticated in-house document upload portals.
2. Document complexity and regulatory changes: The varying complexity of documents and evolving regulatory requirements make conventional OCR techniques unreliable, necessitating manual efforts for information extraction. Cross-referencing extracted information with Bureau and third-party sources is labour-intensive.
3. Effort duplication: Both brokers and lenders duplicate efforts to ensure application completeness and document integrity. Frequent back-and-forth communication to obtain missing documents and information results in slower underwriting and longer time to offer.

Document management platform

Our solution will greatly improve lenders' document management capabilities, leading to increased efficiency, lower costs, and an enhanced experience for both brokers and the underwriting team.

After collecting all necessary documents from the consumer, the broker will upload them to the next-gen document management platform. This platform assists the broker in ensuring the completeness of the documents before forwarding them to our industry leading partner’s document processing engine.

Document processing engine is responsible for several critical tasks:

• Document validation and integrity: Ensuring that all documents are valid and intact.
• Data extraction and indexing: Extracting relevant data and indexing it for easy access.
• Cross-referencing: Verifying information with digital government resources and uncovering supporting banking information using PSD2.
• Income and expenditure (I&E) analytics: Analysing financial data to provide insights.
• Custom business rule engine: Applying a rule engine tailored to the lender’s lending policy.

The output from document processing engine includes all uploaded documents, indexed data, and subsequent analytics. This comprehensive package is then sent to the underwriters within the lender, ensuring they have all the necessary information to make informed decisions.

The document management platform will be cloud-based, allowing for seamless integration with any existing technology stack through an API-based plug-and-play model. This flexibility ensures that the platform can be easily adopted without significant changes to current systems.

Additional benefits of the solution include:

• Increased visibility of errors: Enhanced tracking and identification of errors throughout the origination process.
• Omni-channel support: Consistent and efficient document management across multiple channels.
• Fraud checks: Robust mechanisms to detect and prevent fraudulent documents.
• Integration with third-party data sources: Seamless access to external data sources for comprehensive information verification and validation

These features collectively enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and security of the document management process, providing significant advantages to lenders.

Business case

For a lender processing 40,000 mortgage applications per month, with 75% of documents managed through our proposed platform, our calculations indicate a 65% reduction in costs and a savings of 150,000 hours on manual document review and information extraction. We anticipate a 50-60% decrease in underwriter efforts for standard mortgages, freeing up capacity for specialized cases. Additionally, upfront completeness and document integrity checks minimize back-and-forth communication for missing or incorrect documents, resulting in a 30-40% improvement in turnaround time.

Conclusion

Cognizant can begin with a 1-to-2-week consulting engagement to tailor the business case and secure leadership buy-in. Once the business case is validated, lenders have two options: a 6-to-8-week proof of concept involving 2-3 brokers and 5% of document volume, or a comprehensive implementation to fully integrate our proposed solution across the entire mortgage origination value chain.

Lenders can supercharge their growth by harnessing the power of a document management platform that automates manual tasks through precise data extraction, indexing, and real-time analytics from uploaded documents.

By adopting future-ready solutions, lenders can not only overcome current challenges but also position themselves as industry leaders in the AI-driven future. Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your operations. Contact Cognizant today to discover how we can help you achieve unparalleled success.