Finicity is part of the Mastercard family. Our open banking platform provides the financial data you need.

In today’s world, a business’s success rests on if they can provide the best and quickest service to their customers. With the evolution of social media, big data, and technology at everyone’s fingertips, consumers have come to expect a more personalized and seamless experience with any product or service. The financial services industry is no exception. As consumers’ expectations evolve, it’s more important than ever to adapt to their needs in order to differentiate your business from the competition. 

Financial data aggregation is crucial to providing the best customer experience possible. Financial data aggregators and their open banking platforms, like Finicity, give institutions, fintechs and other financial services providers the ability to provide more personalized services to their customers, fostering a more comprehensive and convenient system. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what financial data aggregation is and how it can benefit financial institutions and their customers. 

What Is Financial Data Aggregation?

Financial data aggregation is a lot less confusing than it sounds. The process involves compiling information from different accounts—including bank accounts, credit card accounts, investment accounts, loans and other financial accounts—into a single place. Once this information is collected, customers can see the entirety of their finances in one easily accessible platform, making all financial decisions that much easier.

At their core, financial data aggregators provide third parties with the APIs they need for consumers to permission access to the data in their accounts. With the rise of online banking, data aggregation is not just a more convenient way to access financial information: it’s the future. More people than ever before are transitioning to mobile banking as confidence in technology grows, and this trend will only continue as open banking becomes the norm and more innovative and convenient tools are released. 

How Does a Financial Data Aggregator Benefit Financial Service Businesses?

Financial institutions and financial services providers can benefit greatly from financial data aggregators. Not only does providing a more convenient solution to your customers guarantee their satisfaction and loyalty to your business, but it also helps you draw in new customers and stay ahead of the competition. The better your service is, the happier your customers will be, which makes them much more likely to choose your services over another’s. 

Data aggregation allows financial institutions to provide the best service out there as customers will have access to more comprehensive wealth management, faster payment processing, and personalized financial advice with less hassle. Whether it’s an in-house app or service or a third party fintech app or service. 

Can Consumers Use Financial Aggregation Tools? 

Consumers are growing increasingly interested in financial aggregation tools to help them budget. This is especially true of Generation Z consumers, who, as one of the youngest generations, represent the future of financial services. 

Customers are most interested in using financial aggregation apps to do the following:

Maximize the Benefits of a Financial Data Aggregator

Why would a financial app or service want to use a financial data aggregator? Well, there are countless benefits for both financial advisors and consumers. Let’s take a closer look at some of these benefits. 

Benefits for Financial Services and Financial Advisors

Bankers and financial advisors know how important it is to provide great customer service. Not only does financial data aggregation help them provide a better experience to their clients, but it can also help them be more efficient and productive. Using a financial data aggregator provides data that can help do the following:

Benefits for Consumers

A consumer wants the best service possible with the quickest results. Financial aggregators can help provide this service while delivering other significant benefits. As apps and services are better equipped to view a comprehensive summary of a customer’s financial situation, they can provide faster credit decisioning and more comprehensive data to their customers. Data aggregation also benefits consumers, enabling them to do the following:

What Is the Future of Financial Data Aggregators?

As the demand for more comprehensive financial services grows, financial data aggregators and open banking platforms will continue to empower apps and services to help consumers make more informed decisions. Consumers are turning to digital solutions due to the pandemic, and they are unlikely to turn back to more traditional financial services once the dust settles. Competition will continue to grow as institutions strive to provide or curate the best and most convenient services in the market. This is why it’s so important to invest in the future by finding the right financial data aggregator for your organization.

Finicity is on the cutting edge of financial data aggregation software. With an open banking platform that makes connecting to your customers’ financial information simple, Finicity empowers you to give your customers the best experience possible in an ever more competitive environment.

Data aggregation is paving the future of financial services by giving consumers the power to make more informed decisions. Learn more about Finicity’s open banking platform and how it provides data to propel innovation in financial services and empower consumers.

The mortgage application process should be easier. It should be more accurate. It should involve less risk and less fraud. It shouldn’t be a slog for borrowers or for lenders. It should be as convenient and streamlined as we’ve come to expect from other modernized, digital experiences. 

Transforming the entire underwriting process is a massive undertaking. And while Finicity already provides solutions across all the primary segments of mortgage lending, today we’re reaching another milestone by streamlining the verification of assets, income, and employment into a one-touch, GSE-accepted experience. I’m excited to introduce Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS), the faster, more accurate, more empowering verification experience for both lenders and borrowers.

What Is MVS?

Mortgage lending underwent a historic transformation in 2020. Problems that had been minor cracks in the mortgage lending experience became chasms as lenders had to rapidly adapt to physically-distanced workflows. But despite the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuing economic fallout, and record-breaking volume—which, while temporarily obscuring them, does not eliminate the cracks—certainly accelerating the need for a new mortgage experience, that need was already apparent. 

Paper-based mortgage processes take more time—something many lenders are already lacking with today’s high volume—and they’re more prone to fraud. Slower, less streamlined solutions also reduce organizational agility, preventing lenders from keeping pace both when the market is booming and when the market again normalizes. And the high-friction paper-chases are annoying for borrowers that are already acclimated to fast, convenient, digital solutions. 

We wanted to deliver a mortgage lending experience that exceeds the expectations of today’s borrowers while also enhancing outcomes and agility for lenders and their stakeholders. That’s why we designed MVS to deliver a one-touch, GSE-accepted digital verification of assets, income, and employment. Now you can complete all necessary verifications in one seamless process. It’s a fast, secure, anytime-anywhere experience that gives the borrower control over their financial data while also providing the lender with a real-time, accurate picture of the borrower’s financial health. 

MVS is powered by Finicity’s open-banking platform. This means that mortgage lenders get access to extended lengths of real-time data, analyzed and categorized thanks to advanced data intelligence. We also assure the most accurate data and keep the consumer at the center of the data-sharing experience with clear transparency and the ability to dispute reports. Access to reliable, real-time, multi-sourced, and even cross-verified data enables the most accurate verifications, setting you on your way to get rep and warranty validation from GSEs and investors. 

And because every lending use case and process is unique, we’ve designed MVS to be flexible and accommodate everything from refinancing to new purchases, including both qualified and non-qualified mortgages. We’ve also made it easy for mortgage lenders to integrate MVS into their workflow with several flexible integration options.

All of these features come together to build a consumer-centric lending experience that improves ROI for lenders.

Why Should Lenders Use MVS?

MVS is more than a product, it’s a partnership with Finicity that enables lenders to benefit from our open banking platform and our market-leading, secure connections to financial institutions. Through those connections, lenders can get the accurate data necessary to verify assets, income, and employment, and enhance their overall decisioning and underwriting processes. And with GSEs tightening their rep and warranty relief policies due to COVID-19’s impact on consumer income and employment, lenders will need the most reliable data from the most reliable sources.

MVS enables a digital mortgage experience, allowing lenders to reap the benefits that come from digital streamlining. In fact, validating assets, income, and employment digitally can cut up to 12 days off the origination process. MVS takes digital streamlining even further by completing these verifications with only a single borrower interaction. You can then refresh those verifications at close at no cost and without reengaging the borrower. With MVS, you complete more originations in less time—time that’s crucial for lenders to remain agile in a crazy, high-volume year like this. More time opens room for more originations and more commission.

The convenience of digital verifications and the simple, streamlined consumer permissioning process also enhances the lending experience for borrowers and helps them leave more satisfied and more likely to refer their lender to friends and family. MVS’s seamless and customer-centric digital experience enables lenders to distinguish themselves, especially against digital laggards, and gain a competitive edge.

We’ll also set you up for success with Finicity’s Adoption Best Practices training so you can hit the ground running and start reaping the rewards of a streamlined, digital mortgage process. 

With MVS, everybody wins. 

Don’t settle for yesterday’s mortgage lending experience. You deserve better. And so do your borrowers. Use Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service to build the foundation of your enhanced mortgage lending experience. Find out how to integrate MVS into your mortgage lending process and to learn more about how Finicity provides other mortgage solutions in prequalification, underwriting, funding enablement, secondary quality control, and servicing.

One-touch, GSE-accepted verification of assets, income and employment reduces loan process by up to 12 days

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – February 25, 2021 – Finicity, a Mastercard company and leading provider of open banking solutions, today announced its one-touch Mortgage Verification Service (MVS), enabling lenders to provide the simple, easy experience that today’s consumers and lenders are looking for in mortgage origination. The solution allows consumers to permission data, quickly and easily, so lenders can verify assets, income and employment in a single interaction with borrowers that takes seconds or minutes instead of days or weeks. The verification is accepted by both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in place of cumbersome manual loan documentation.

While mortgage lending has rapidly moved toward a digital experience, the verification process has largely remained a manual, paper-driven process. By reducing the burden of manual methods of documentation, Finicity may help shave 8-12 days off the origination process for rapid loan closing while also increasing accuracy, improving profitability, and creating a better experience for both lenders and borrowers.

Through Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service, Finicity’s open banking platform leverages high value data available from financial institutions and payroll processors to provide accurate, real-time insights into a borrower’s current assets, income and employment. The solution offers flexible flows for different mortgage lending use cases — from refinancing to new purchases, qualified to non qualified mortgages.

This innovative service creates a simple, fast, FCRA-compliant verification experience that empowers consumers to digitally permission use of their financial data with one touch, through Finicity Connect, to rapidly validate key financial suitability requirements of a mortgage application. This is perfectly aligned with Finicity’s mission to empower both lenders and consumers while helping consumers benefit more from their own financial data. 

“We are streamlining mortgage lending significantly, reducing costs and shortening the time needed for the overall loan origination process,” said Finicity CEO and Co-founder Steve Smith. “With Finicity Lend, our ultimate goals are to help mitigate risk for lenders, create an improved consumer experience, and ultimately increase overall financial inclusion by helping borrowers better prove their creditworthiness.”

GSE Accepted

The Finicity Lend Mortgage Verification Service is accepted by both GSEs as a valid demonstration of a borrower’s assets, income and employment. Lenders are able to use Finicity verification reports for automated assessment and receive representation and warranty relief using Freddie Mac Loan Product Advisor® asset and income modeler (AIM).  Fannie Mae accepts Finicity mortgage verification reports for automated assessment within Desktop Underwriter® validation service through Day 1 Certainty®. 

“Freddie Mac has been at the forefront of advancing the digital mortgage experience that today’s borrowers have come to expect,” said Rick Lang, Single-Family Vice President of Strategy and Integration at Freddie Mac. “Our data-driven strategy helps produce safer loans and reduces the paper chase so our clients can speed up underwriting and bring borrowers to the closing table sooner.”  

“At Fannie Mae, we’ve been pioneering the digital technologies that will make the borrowing experience faster and easier for borrowers,” said Chuck Walker, Vice President Digital Alliances and Distribution at Fannie Mae. “Manually providing verification documents is a time-consuming and stressful process, so addressing asset, income and employment verification is central to moving the industry toward the ideal digital mortgage.”

What the Industry is Saying

Finicity clients and partners are already weighing in on Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Services (MVS):

“At Sierra Pacific Mortgage, we were excited to be a participant in the rollout of this enhancement to the lending process”, said Gary D. Clark, Chief Operating Officer at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.  “Continued improvements to the lending process is an important initiative at Sierra Pacific Mortgage, and one that elevates the consumer experience is a win-win for everyone.”

“As we began utilizing this new service, it quickly became clear how much it would improve the lending process for both our loan officers and borrowers”, said Patrick Gardner, Principal of Vellum Mortgage.  “Digitizing the mortgage process not only creates a faster, smoother experience for the borrower, but we’re also seeing significant cost savings and an increased volume of loans that we’re able to close.”

“For consumers, our focus is on delivering a fully mobile, fully seamless homeownership journey that’s centralized in one connected platform.  For lenders, SimpleNexus promises flexible efficiency that doesn’t get in the way of doing business.  Our integration with Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service delivers on both fronts with GSE-accepted verification of assets, income and employment in one easy interaction,” said SimpleNexus Chief Product Officer Shane Westra.

See MVS in Action

Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service  will be available across multiple LOS/POS platforms. See our MVS solution live at the following events: 

To learn more about Finicity and its commitment to fast, reliable and high-quality data, visit www.finicity.com. 

About Finicity

Finicity, a Mastercard company helps individuals, families, and organizations make smarter financial decisions through safe and secure access to fast, high-quality data. The company provides a proven and trusted open banking platform that puts consumers in control of their financial data, transforming the way we experience money for everything from budgeting and payments to investing and lending. Finicity partners with influential financial institutions and disruptive fintech providers alike to give consumers a leg up in a complicated financial world, helping to improve financial literacy, expanding financial inclusion, and ultimately leading to better financial outcomes. Finicity is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. To learn more or test drive its API, visit www.finicity.com. 

It may be that the worst is yet to come regarding a credit crisis and long-term economic hardship. According to a survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers Finicity conducted last November, people stated they were just as concerned about their credit in the wake of job losses or financial hardship near the end of 2020 as they were during the initial onset of the pandemic. In fact, more than two-thirds (65%) of respondents said they are concerned their credit score will go down in the next six months because of the pandemic.

Read the full article.

Finicity CEO and C0-founder Steve Smith discusses open banking and data strategies and how to continue to drive innovation forward in the fintech industry.

Read the full interview. 

ICE Mortgage Technology™, the leading cloud-based loan origination platform provider for the mortgage industry, announced today the winners of its 2021 ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Awards.

The ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Awards recognize the most creative mortgage lending companies who are pushing the envelope by creating extraordinary, customized solutions with ICE Mortgage Technology to achieve their business goals with exceptional results.

The 2021 ICE Mortgage Technology Innovation Award winner for Lenders’ Choice for Innovative Service Provider is Finicity (with Waterstone Mortgage).

“With a year of unexpected challenges, these industry-leading and resilient companies customized our ICE Mortgage Technology solutions to utilize automation technologies and data-driven insights to excel during a demanding year,” said Joe Tyrrell, president, ICE Mortgage Technology. “We’re proud to recognize these exceptional winners who showed agility, flexibility and persistence as our industry continued to pivot throughout 2020.”

You can read the full press release here or more about the winners here.

You can also read about how Waterstone Mortgage and Finicity worked together to experience a 10-15% monthly boost in digital verifications. Providing asset data sooner in origination process, saved loan originators’ time, and simplified the entire borrower experience.

Wriiting in The Paypers Voice of the Industry, Matthew Driver, Executive Vice President, Services, Asia Pacific, Mastercard, discusses Open Banking and the importance of data decency, ethical data usage, and how consumer-centric data sharing has the potential to unlock new opportunities within financial services.

Read the full article here.

Rebecca Ayers sits down with Finicity CEO Steve Smith who explains how FCRA regulation simultaneously protects the consumer and open banking innovation.

Read the full article. 

Finicity releases detailed analysis affirming that data aggregators should be deemed CRAs and subject to FCRA requirements

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – February 11, 2021 – Finicity, a Mastercard company and leading provider of open banking solutions, has produced a detailed whitepaper with analysis showing why the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) should apply to providers of data aggregation services (“data agents”) in certain circumstances. 

The FCRA protects consumers by establishing and protecting the right for individuals to dispute inaccurate data in consumer reports and get those errors fixed. The growth of consumer-permissioned data sharing in lending, insurance, and employment means that FCRA compliance will become a critical component of consumer protection. 

“As Open Banking puts consumers in control of their financial data and gives lenders a more complete view of consumers’ creditworthiness, it’s critical that the sharing of financial data is conducted fairly, accurately, and with the utmost transparency,” said Steve Smith, Co-founder and CEO of Finicity. “Leveraging the protections of the FCRA will provide a vital regulatory framework that gives everyone in the financial ecosystem confidence in all of these areas, as well as manageable, familiar compliance standards for the data agents behind growing aggregation capabilities for underwriting use cases.”

Lenders have increasingly relied on new forms of financial data, such as information about a consumer’s bank account transactions, which can enable better, more effective credit-decisioning for lenders. This data supplements the traditional credit score to expand the lenders’ view of a borrower’s financial health, and ultimately stands to increase financial inclusion. Not only does this financial data give lenders a more thorough credit review process, it also empowers consumers with control over their own financial data, which they can grant or revoke access to. 

“With the emergence of third-party data aggregators and their ability to provide financial data for the purposes of credit decisioning, FCRA compliance is essential to protecting the consumer,” said Chi Chi Wu, Staff Attorney with the National Consumer Law Center.

Finicity believes this new credit process also necessitates that it function in concert with fair reporting principles: data should be accurate, consumers should have access to their own data, and they should know when and how their data is used. 

In December 2019, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the federal banking agencies released an Interagency Statement on the Use of Alternative Data in Credit Underwriting. In the Interagency Statement, the agencies recognized the consumer benefits of considering cash flow data in credit decisions and noted how consumers “can expressly permission access to their cash flow data”—through data agents—to enhance transparency and consumer control. 

The CFPB is expected to propose new rules around consumer-authorized access to financial data in early 2021. 

To learn more about Finicity, its data services, and its commitment to fast, reliable and high-quality data, visit www.finicity.com. 

About Finicity

Finicity, a Mastercard company, helps individuals, families, and organizations make smarter financial decisions through safe and secure access to fast, high-quality data. The company provides a proven and trusted open banking platform that puts consumers in control of their financial data, transforming the way we experience money for everything from budgeting and payments to investing and lending. Finicity partners with influential financial institutions and disruptive fintech providers alike to give consumers a leg up in a complicated financial world, helping to improve financial literacy, expanding financial inclusion, and ultimately leading to better financial outcomes. Finicity is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. To learn more or test drive its API, visit www.finicity.com.

Finicity CEO Steve Smith writes about how tomorrow’s leaders will be the companies that put consumers at the center of the conversation — helping them be more connected to their data, have more control and feel empowered to make the best financial decisions for themselves.

He specifically focuses on the credit review process and how open banking will make a difference. Read the full article at Forbes.