Lendsmart, which took home Best of Show honors in its FinovateFall debut last year, announced a new partnership with Freddie Mac this week. The digital lending platform has integrated with Freddie Mac Loan Product Advisor, the firm’s automated underwriting system, to improve the loan origination process for both lenders and borrowers by reducing processing time.

“Lendsmart’s software predicts the credit and underwriting conditions required in the loan origination process by pinning them to a borrower’s data in real-time rather than making the borrower wait 45 days to get an email from the underwriter,” Lendsmart founder and CEO AK Patel explained. “We’re also shaving off weeks in the letter of explanation process.”

Headquartered in New York City, Lendsmart combines an AI-powered digital lending platform with a home buying marketplace to save lenders time, help them increase productivity, and grow their profits while providing both the lender and the homebuyer with a “next-generation digital experience,” in the words of Lendsmart COO Philip Gem George.

Lendsmart’s platform centralizes and unifies all parties in the mortgage process while automating manual tasks to ensure accuracy, reduce risk, and keep costs low. George noted during the demo of Lendsmart’s technology at FinovateFall that the automation ensured that homebuyers are only asked for information that cannot be readily accessed from the documentation. This further accelerates the process and relieves some of the burden typically felt by homebuyers during the origination process.

And as Freddie Mac VP of Business Partner Integration Kevin Kauffman added, technology like that available from Lendsmart helps financial institutions keep up with the expectations of their increasingly digital-first customers. “Today’s lenders and borrowers expect a seamless digital process that isn’t burdened with administrative tasks or excessive timelines,” Kauffman said. “Partnering with Lendsmart allows Freddie Mac to provide the latest technology that satisfies out mutual clients’ needs.”

Founded in 2019, Lendsmart was among the many fintechs that helped facilitate PPP funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, partnering with Griffin Technologies to offer banks and credit unions an end-to-end solution to enable them to process more loan applications while identifying and pursuing qualified small business leads. “With financial institutions struggling to manage the high number of applications and small businesses in need of immediate funds,” Patel said when the partnership was announced last spring. “We saw an opportunity to speed up and simplify the mostly manual process by using our existing technology.”

Lendsmart began the year raising an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from INV Fintech. In addition to its New York headquarters, the company also has an office in India.

Photo by Michael Tuszynski from Pexels