Google LLC is jumping into the mortgage industry with the launch of a new artificial intelligence-driven cloud service aimed at helping lenders reduce the time it takes to process loan applications.

Announced today, Lending DocAI is the latest addition to Google’s suite of Document AI tools that read and extract insights from various business documents. Sudheera Vanguri, a product manager at Google Cloud, said in a blog post that the mortgage industry is crying out for innovation.

That’s because the average lender typically has to process hundreds of pages of paperwork manually for each application they receive. That takes lots of time, which adds thousands of dollars to the cost of issuing a loan.

“In this industry, borrowers and lenders have high expectations; they want a mortgage document processing solution catered to improving operational efficiency, while ensuring speed and data accuracy,” Vanguri said.

Lending DocAI tries to do that. The service is powered by several unique machine learning models that have been trained to extract data from the specific kinds of documents used in mortgage lending. It helps automate the review process so lenders can access the information they need to make their decisions more quickly.

The benefits of Lending DocAI are threefold, Vanguri said. First, the service helps to improve operational efficiency by automating document data capture and ensuring the accuracy of things such as tax statements, income and asset documents. Second, it improves the home loan experience for both lenders and borrowers by reducing the complexity of the process, enabling applications to be processed more easily across each stage of the mortgage lifecycle. And third, Lending DocAI helps to support lenders’ regulatory and compliance requirements with data access controls, data residency and customer managed encryption keys.

Some customers in the lending industry have already enjoyed these benefits. Digital mortgage software firm Roostify Inc. has integrated the service into its platform and has been working with customers to develop and test the offering with real loan applicants, with Google incorporating lots of feedback to refine the tool along the way.

“The mortgage industry is still early in transitioning from traditional, manual processes to digitally enabled and automated, and we believe that transformation will happen much more quickly with the power of AI,” said Roostify founder and Chief Executive Rajesh Bhat.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE said that by using AI for tasks such as document processing, companies can expect to see some big productivity gains.

“The cloud enables cheap AI and Lending DocAI is a sign of Google’s willingness to push into specific vertical use cases, such as the mortgage industry,” Mueller said. “As with all new offerings, adoption and practicality will be determined by early adopters.”

Image: Google