How Mortgage Brokers Can Use AI to Review Financial Documents Faster—and Smarter

Brokers fill a necessary role in the mortgage industry. A good broker will play matchmaker between customers and financiers. Brokers do the legwork of collecting customer documents like bank statements, pay stubs, and tax forms. This is a time consuming part of the role. More than that, in industries such as banking, lending, and real estate, documents are often submitted via email – a red flag for privacy conscious clients and the security of your firm. 

With financial documents playing such a large part of their role, a broker needs to strike a balance between security and trust. Customers need to be able to submit documents securely, but without unnecessary effort. Banks need to evaluate how creditworthy the borrower is, spot reg flags, and catch fraudulent documents. 

Fortunately, AI is making it easier. With technology now going beyond OCR, handwritten applications can be analyzed and organized just as easily as bank statements. 

How is AI Transforming Document Workflows?

Brokers are often used when customers want a wider range of mortgage options. Nontraditional borrowers (like freelancers, business owners, veterans) might be better served by credit unions or smaller lenders. Brokers usually receive documents from clients via email, sometimes from the bank, or sometimes sent directly. These packages might include:

• Bank statements going back 3–6 months
• Pay stubs or employment letters
• Tax returns or Notice of Assessments 

Brokers need to open all of these documents, check them, and compare them to the details submitted on the mortgage form. Docs are compared against the data provided by the applicant, giving the file a final check for inconsistencies – hours of work, and plenty of opportunity for error. Even brokers who have a secure client portal for uploads will still rely on manual review. 

Maximizing Document Review Time and Reducing Workload

Technology has evolved in leaps and bounds; statements can be automatically pulled from customers bank accounts and automatically deposited into a portal. So it’s not impossible that we will encounter “Schrodinger’s client portal file” which both exists (in the file directory) and does not (there is actually no file) at the same time. 

AI workflows are powerful, but it doesn’t mean documents should never be looked at by hand. It can be beneficial for brokers to review docs themselves, even if they leave the heavy lifting up to AI. Manual review captures complex details that add context, catches incomplete scans, and gives brokers peace of mind that someone has physically had their eye on the file. 

Great AI workflows should complement your human effort; there’s a difference between building a financial model and entering details from a paper document into Excel. AI powers manual work so brokers can save time for higher value tasks. 

AI Financial Document Review for Mortgage Brokers 

Using AI helps to maximize your expertise and get the best of both worlds – the speed of technology to sort, organize, and classify, and the luxury of reviewing certain documents by hand (because you have more time to do it!). For mortgage brokers, that means:

• Automated data extraction from PDFs, images, or scans
• Easy financial data extraction from bank statements to Sheets or Excel
• AI-powered pattern recognition, transaction histories, deposit frequency, and more 
• Files that are organized, structured, and clean (with no security risks!) 
• Reduced turnaround times for approvals
• Reduced fraud and documentation error

Email isn’t encrypted end-to-end by default, and sensitive files like tax returns or banking documents are a serious risk when floating around. AI tools built into secure portals offer a safer alternative, as well as providing clients with a seamless experience, controlling user access, and maintaining the audit trail – giving the broker back more time to spend on clients.