Four ways automation can help your credit union
As contrary as it may seem, using AI in your underwriting process can actually make the experience more human for your members. It’s faster, more accurate, helps you maintain compliance, and lets you approve more borrowers, while improving the experience they have with your credit union.
From broadening access to credit, to making the underwriting process more consistent, here are four ways automated underwriting can help your credit union.
1. Broaden access to credit
Fair and transparent credit should be accessible to everyone. In the United States, approximately 49 million people are left out of the credit system because they are difficult or considered impossible for traditional credit scores to assess. That’s because credit scores use just a few dozen variables to determine a borrower’s creditworthiness. This disproportionately affects immigrants, people of color, and low-income Americans because the limited set of variables used in credit scores doesn’t effectively describe them.
That barrier to credit doesn’t impact just the individual borrower — it affects their families and the generations after. According to the Urban Institute, young adults of color, particularly those in majority-Black or Hispanic communities, start adulthood with lower credit scores than their white counterparts. Decades of discriminatory practices in the American credit system are reflected in credit scores, which continue to perpetuate inequities in racial and generational wealth.
The solution to closing that gap includes many different parties, but responsibly increasing access to credit is a key part of the solution where all lenders should take heed. The legacy credit scoring system is broken, but AI-driven lending can help to fix it. By using more data, better math (i.e. machine learning), and adopting AI based on less-biased data sets, we can make strides in creating a fairer system.
On average, lenders that switch from using traditional credit scores to Zest AI's technology have been able to increase approvals for women, people of color, and other protected classes by 40 percent.
AI also makes it possible to automate more loan decisions, which not only speeds things up significantly but also makes underwriting more accurate and more consistent. This allows you to confidently automate approvals and say yes to more members — including those who would have been excluded by legacy credit scores.
2. Make auto-decisioning inclusive and consistent
Although it is unlawful to discriminate in lending practices, the problem still persists. Human beings have inherent biases, are subject to making mistakes, and will not always be completely consistent. Imagine your loan officers are having a particularly busy day with increased volume — the same logic and rigor for one loan application is much less likely to be applied from one application to the next. Things like that can lead to inconsistencies in the underwriting process.
It has been known for some time that automation can help remove unconscious biases from the lending process and improve access to credit. For example, a 2003 report by Susan Gates, Cindy Waldron and Peter Zorn showed there were higher mortgage application acceptance rates for low- and moderate-income households and neighborhoods, including people of color, when using AI-automated underwriting. Automated credit underwriting was first introduced by the GSEs in 1995 and was met with great skepticism, yet it proved to improve access to homeownership for millions of Americans. Greater automation leads to greater inclusivity, but its positive effects can be even greater when the model used to automate the underwriting process is more inclusive.
Machine learning, and the associated increase in automated underwriting it makes possible to ensure your lending decisions are consistent and accurate. However, we know that human-made artificial intelligence is not immune from bias or fallacies. That’s why it’s important to be purposeful in how you build your AI models. You want to ensure that you’re eliminating bias wherever you can so that you get a fair and consistent outcome.
3. Get a higher fidelity view of your borrower and fair lending automation
When you expand your credit risk assessment to consider several hundred data points rather than just a few dozen, you get a much clearer picture of your borrower and their ability to pay back a loan.
Credit scores provide a very un-nuanced view of the borrower using limited data. According to Business Insider, 65 percent of the U.S. credit scoring model is based on credit utilization and repayment history. Of course, credit utilization has a lot to do with how much credit you were given to begin with. Since many people of color have lower credit scores, they are given lower credit limits, and so their resulting utilization may be higher than their white counterparts — perpetuating a cycle of lower scores for protected classes.
We need to be as fair as possible given the history of discrimination and bias within the banking infrastructure. The main issue today with the US credit scoring system lies in the methods traditional credit scores use to calculate these proprietary, black-box scores. AI underwriting allow you to lend to borrowers who might have otherwise been overlooked. If we do that, we can bring over 40 million Americans back into the credit system.
With AI-enabled credit underwriting, we can incorporate more data points to assemble a more complete picture of borrower risk, and we can use better math to more accurately assess risk. Unlike traditional credit scores, the AI underwriting technology Zest AI deploys is completely transparent for more simplified fair lending audits.
4. Make your members happier
As we talked about in our last post, Take back your time with auto-decisioning, integrating AI into your underwriting process can make your members happier, because it increases the number of loans that can be auto-decisioned. You don’t want a member to wait around for a decision — wait too long, and they might go someplace else. Because AI is more accurate, it's possible to auto-decision more loans, and get a potential borrower an answer instantly.
The average credit union reports that it takes over 30 minutes for a borrower to get a decision on a loan. In the era of same-day delivery and personalized streaming services — that just doesn’t fly. By automating your underwriting process, you can have a decision within seconds. Not only are your members happier because they had a better experience, but you’ve also given them back their time, as well as your own, to focus on the things that matter most.
Think of the myriad of ways AI and automation have already been incorporated into your everyday life: Google searches, the ATM you use to get some cash, Netflix recommendations. We don’t necessarily notice these technologies as we use them, but we do notice when we don’t have them. Think about how much time it used to take to look something up manually instead of using Google, or the line at the branch we used to wait in to withdraw money, or the time spent at the video store in search for the perfect show to watch after dinner. Would you want to go back to the old way now that you know the alternative? Those extra seconds, minutes, maybe even hours, can drive significant changes in consumer behavior — consumers that credit unions want to serve before they turn to a more convenient solution.
Automation and AI have forever changed how we do many things, and it is time to adopt these technologies for lending so borrowers can get the most accurate and fair decision quickly. AI-driven underwriting can help you deliver this better and have a more humane member experience.
