Live session recap: Simplifying underwriting with a “docs + digital” approach

The financial services industry has embraced digitalization, prioritizing efficiency and seamless user experiences. Yet, physical documents like tax returns, bank statements, and pay stubs remain essential to the underwriting process.

Combining digital and document-based data into a single, accurate financial profile is key to a frictionless customer experience and informed lending decisions. In a recent live session, Ocrolus SVP of Growth David Snitkof and Erik Jilnö, Product Manager at Flinks, discussed how AI-powered underwriting and automated document processing streamline financial data aggregation, creating a unified workflow for lenders.

The evolution of docs + digital

A docs + digital approach enables lenders to integrate data from scanned or mobile-uploaded documents with digital bank connections, ensuring comprehensive decision-making. Supporting both formats simplifies financial data collection, enhances borrower flexibility, and accelerates lending automation.

Borrowers benefit from a smoother, more user-friendly experience. As Snitkof noted, “We are living now in a golden age of customer experience, where consumers have so much choice, and they want to engage with the lenders, service providers and platforms that give them that flexibility. Regardless of which institutions you work with, people demand that really high-quality experience.”

To implement a docs + digital strategy, lenders must modernize workflows, balancing traditional document-based data with digital aggregation methods like bank linking. AI-powered financial data aggregation solutions automate this process, allowing lenders to focus on high-value decision-making and activities requiring a human touch.

Addressing key underwriting challenges

To maximize conversion rates, lenders need to address some common challenges that arise in the financial data aggregation process. These range from poor connection rates and limited document availability to user drop-off and poor customer experiences.

Through Ocrolus’ partnership with Flinks, we have built a customizable docs + digital experience that helps overcome these challenges. This integrated process gives borrowers the flexibility to choose the most convenient way to provide data—whether that be through a digital bank connection or by uploading documents—to provide a seamless user experience.

Together, we’ve helped our partners reduce turnaround times and limit funnel dropoff while delivering high-quality, standardized digital and document-based data to inform lending decisions, regardless of source.

At the core of this solution is the ability to leverage each of our technologies’ strengths. Flinks powers over 1 million monthly bank linking connections, while Ocrolus has verified over 133 million pages of documents in the past year alone. Combined, we’ve seen docs + digital adoption quadruple in the past year.

The future of underwriting: AI and open banking

Open banking is the future of the financial industry. In North America, regulations are working towards new and secure avenues for customers to share their banking info.

But this shift isn’t happening overnight. While the finance industry works to make open banking a reality, in the meantime, the combined docs + digital approach remains a forward-thinking strategy. “You think that regulation causes the whole market to shift in a day, but actually that whole shift takes years,” said Jilnö during the live session.

As the journey towards open banking continues, it’s important not to lose sight of the unique needs of different types of lenders.

“We have customers from business lenders to consumer lenders to mortgage lenders,” said Jilnö. “Everyone is on a different journey in automation and has different prerequisites to get faster turnaround times or a better customer experience.”

While AI-powered data and analytics are already helping lenders improve underwriting efficiency and decision-making, Snitkof and Jilnö also see a potential role for agent-based AI in future underwriting workflows. From creating structured data from unstructured sources to helping both lenders and borrowers identify the document types needed to evaluate creditworthiness for a particular loan type, this technology could help create a more streamlined data collection and underwriting process in the future.

Watch the live session here and book a demo today to learn how you can begin your docs + digital journey.

Key takeaways

• An integrated docs + digital approach has emerged as a solution to challenges in data collection for lenders, helping reduce drop-off rates while improving the customer experience.
• As open banking continues to advance, docs + digital data collection will continue to play an important role in modern underwriting.
• Regardless of the data source or loan type, AI is enabling lenders to improve efficiency in the underwriting process and helping customers get funding from their financial service providers more quickly.