Rocket Mortgage in Detroit, the nation’s largest retail mortgage lender and a part of Rocket Cos., has announced continued advancements to its Pathfinder tool, an AI and machine learning-powered search engine used by mortgage bankers, brokers, and underwriters to find the answers to complicated qualification or loan processing questions.
Pathfinder’s proprietary technology is used by more than 40,000 housing professionals, providing one source of data that cuts through mortgage processing complexities to help clients achieve their dream of homeownership.
The tool catapults the mortgage industry into the information age. In the same way that smart phones put all the world’s knowledge in their users’ pockets, Pathfinder ensures those who originate and process home loans have all the information needed to facilitate the American dream at their fingertips.
Instead of thumbing through emailed guideline updates, printed reference pages, handwritten notes, or tapping into their personal experience, in mere seconds loan officers can search Pathfinder’s 400,000 pieces of content.
“Pathfinder has been an invaluable tool for curating complex data and transforming it into knowledge engineering. This technology, and others that leverage advancements in AI and machine learning, are truly evolving how we can facilitate homeownership,” says Brian Woodring, chief information officer of Rocket Mortgage.
Rocket Mortgage was the first lender to release a searchable home loan knowledge database three years ago — simplifying the nuanced home loan process. At the time, Rocket started working on a machine learning framework for natural language processing — which increased Rocket’s speed and efficiency in answering client questions without additional follow up by 20 percent, the company states.
From there, Rocket continued to advance its technology and now uses its own custom Google AI search, which helped Pathfinder surpass the previous milestone by another 9 percent.
Rocket also is testing a new AI chat interface in Pathfinder to help mortgage bankers and brokers answer client questions. This test has preliminarily resulted in a 69 percent increase in speed to resolution, compared to the current process.
With that success, Rocket is supercharging the Pathfinder experience using large language models (LLM) and is currently adding more than 3,300 new loan scenarios to help loan officers provide resolutions for their clients with speed and confidence. All told, Pathfinder collects 75,000 data points each day that the company can use to train the tool to be even more effective.
With the easy access to mortgage data, a mortgage banker, broker, or underwriter who just joined the industry has access to a collection of knowledge that would usually take decades to accumulate.
To illustrate how useful it is, page views and automated actions — which help loan officers find the best option based on a client’s specific financial situation — account for more than 1.5 million interactions with Pathfinder each month.
Loan officers can lean on Pathfinder’s technology to easily uncover the benefits of every loan program.
Rocket officials state the announcement marks the first of many advancements for Pathfinder that will enhance the banker, broker, and client experience through new, innovative generative AI technology.
For more information, visit rocketmortgage.com/.
