Verification of income and employment (VOE) is an essential step in the loan origination process. It allows you to confirm that your applicants truly possess the income and employment history they claim on their applications, preventing you from falling prey to mortgage fraud and fortifying your risk mitigation.
While VOE is vital, it can also be cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming when done manually. That’s because the manual VOE process is often riddled with disruptions and delays. By automating VOE instead, you can supercharge your efficiency and streamline your loan origination.
In this article, we’ll explain what automated VOE is and how it works. After that, we’ll review the many benefits of embracing automated VOE in your mortgage lending business.
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What is Automated VOE?
Automated VOE allows technology to take care of the more tedious aspects of ordering income and employment verifications. At Certified Credit, our automated VOE solution is called Cascade VOE. It uses a unique rules-based engine and advanced automation to streamline the VOE process from start to finish.
Cascade VOE can access many of the industry’s leading income and employment databases, including Experian Verify, The Work Number, and many more. It also connects with several consumer-permission-based vendors, which allow borrowers to securely share their bank account or payroll account credentials themselves.
With Cascade VOE, you can customize which vendors you use, as well as the order in which you cycle through these vendors. Once you’ve set your vendor preferences, this powerful solution will efficiently order verifications one by one until it yields a hit. All you have to do is:
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- Select the required report
- Initiate your automated VOE
- Let Cascade VOE work its magic!
Cascade can integrate with many popular LOS systems, enabling you to access your VOE data from the platform you’re already familiar with. You can also request to receive notifications via text/SMS or email as soon as Cascade VOE receives a hit. If your automated vendors don’t yield a hit for a certain applicant, Certified Credit’s team will manage the manual VOE process for you.
6 Benefits of Automated VOE
Now that you understand how automated VOE works, let’s take a look at a few of the advantages it can bring to your business:
#1 Enhanced Integration
Many mortgage lenders avoid embracing new technologies because they worry they’ll disrupt their daily operations. Fortunately, automated VOE can integrate seamlessly with the other tech tools you already have in place.
As we mentioned earlier, Cascade VOE can integrate with many leading LOS systems. Once your solutions are seamlessly integrated, you can monitor your verifications from your LOS system with ease.
#2 Convenient Customization
Another common misconception about automation is that it will reduce the amount of control you have over your workflows. Luckily, with Cascade VOE, this is not the case. This solution has extensive customization settings, empowering you to personalize the way you order verifications according to your priorities.
Here are just a few ways you can customize Cascade VOE to suit your unique needs:
- You can select your preferred vendors – Cascade VOE gives you access to a growing selection of third-party and consumer-permission-based vendors. You can choose which vendors you want to use, as well as how many you want to feature in your custom cascade.
- The order that you cycle through each vendor – After choosing your preferred vendors, you can arrange them in your desired order. For instance, you can place the lowest-cost vendor at the top of your list to maximize cost savings. By doing so, Cascade VOE will use that vendor as often as possible and only move on to others if that first vendor can’t yield a hit for a certain applicant.
- Your initiation milestone – Milestone ordering is another powerful automated solution we offer at Certified Credit. With milestone ordering in place, you can have Cascade VOE initiate verifications for applicants automatically once they’ve met certain milestones, such as satisfying your credit thresholds during a hard credit pull. By selecting your Cascade VOE milestone strategically, you can ensure you only order verifications for applicants when it’s truly necessary.
- Your notification settings – After automating your VOE process, you want to be able to set it and forget it. Thanks to Cascade VOE’s customizable notification settings, you can receive your hit alerts via text/SMS or email. You can also review Cascade VOE’s progress from your LOS system at any time.
As you can see, automating VOE doesn’t mean that you have to give up control of your current processes—it simply means that you get to make them easier, faster, and more efficient.
#3 Seamless Standardization
Depending on the size of your business, you may have many loan officers who carry out manual verifications. Each of these loan officers may have a different way of managing and monitoring the process, leading to a higher rate of mistakes and inconsistencies.
Automation can introduce a new level of consistency into your VOE process. After all, Cascade VOE will order verifications from your selected vendors in the same order every time. You simply need to decide which reports and vendors you want to use, rather than leaving it up to individual loan officers’ discretion.
By standardizing this process, you can ensure you only order the verification reports you truly need. Better yet, this consistency can help you pass on your VOE costs to your borrowers in a compliant manner.
#4 Cost Savings
Due to the labor costs involved, manual VOE can be an expensive process. Fortunately, automation can make it more affordable. Here are five ways that automated VOE can save you money:
- By instructing Cascade VOE to use lower-cost vendors as often as possible, you can ensure you always get the most affordable verifications.
- If Cascade VOE can’t yield a hit for a certain applicant, Certified Credit’s VOE team will complete the manual verification for you for a fraction of the cost of doing it yourself. Better yet, our team is fast—we initiate most manual VOEs within 12 to 24 hours of receiving a request.
- With more free time on their hands, your team can boost their productivity in other areas of your business. You may even be able to streamline your staff, enabling you to operate more cost-efficiently during lulls in the market.
- With strategic milestone ordering in place, you can avoid wasting money on premature verifications for borrowers who won’t end up qualifying with you.
- Cascade VOE automatically generates itemized invoices for your verifications, making it easy to pass on their costs to your borrowers while adhering to TRID requirements.
As you can see, allowing automation (and Team Certified) to handle the more tedious elements of your verifications can help you streamline your VOE-related labor costs. In fact, our Cascade VOE customers enjoy immediate VOE cost savings of 15% to 25%, on average. The exact cost savings you can expect will depend on your verification volume, workflow configuration, and borrower invoicing policies.
#5 Faster Turnaround Times
Today’s borrowers appreciate an efficient loan origination process. After all, the faster they close on their mortgages, the sooner they can realize their dreams of homeownership. One way to originate your loans faster is to speed up your verifications.
By automatically requesting verifications from vendors one after another, Cascade VOE can often yield hits in a matter of minutes. In contrast, manual verifications often take up to 72 hours. Thus, automating VOE can potentially shave days from your loan origination timeline, enabling you to satisfy your borrowers’ expectations and outshine the competition.
#6 Improved Borrower Experience
While automation can improve your VOE process in many ways, it can also have positive externalities in other areas of your business. Most notably, it allows your team to reinvest their time into revenue-generating activities, such as:
- Boosting your lead generation efforts.
- Conducting outreach in new communities.
- Cultivating stronger relationships with your borrowers.
- Providing more personalized support.
- Producing educational materials about the mortgage lending process.
By elevating the quality of your customer service, automated VOE can help you secure your borrowers’ repeat business and earn more referrals to their friends and family.
Experience the Many Benefits of Automated VOE Today
Automated VOE has many powerful benefits, from saving you time and money to elevating your borrower experience. If you’re ready to give up the hassle of manual VOEs for good, Cascade VOE can make it happen.
In addition to Cascade VOE, we have many other cutting-edge solutions at Certified Credit. Our suite of mortgage lending solutions includes:
- Affordable credit reports
- Automated lead generation tools
- Automated prequalification
- Automated UDM
- Automated credit supplements
- Property and valuation tools
- Fraud and risk support
- Underwriting compliance
- Settlement services
We also provide top-notch customer service—our Customer Success team is 100% onshore and has a 12-second average answer speed for inbound customer inquiries. Thus, when you partner with us, you can rest assured that you’ll enjoy fast, reliable support for all of your new solutions.
Ready to discover how Certified Credit can help you upgrade your mortgage lending business? Schedule a consultation with our team today.
