Rocket Mortgage is adding new features and capabilities 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 is used by more than 40,000 housing professionals, providing a single source of data that cuts through mortgage processing complexities.
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 unmatched 400,000 pieces of content.
“Pathfinder has been an invaluable tool for curating complex data and transforming it into knowledge engineering,” says Brian Woodring, chief information officer of Rocket Mortgage, in a release. “This technology, and others that leverage advancements in AI and machine learning, are truly evolving how we can facilitate homeownership.”
The searchable home loan knowledge database was introduced three years ago. 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%.
Rocket then continued to advance its technology and now uses its own custom Google AI search, which helped Pathfinder surpass the previous milestone by another 9%.
Rocket is also 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% 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 Rocket 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 just 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 uncover the benefits of every loan program, while they focus on the important things that only humans can do – like building relationships with clients.