Mortgage lenders using AskMax no longer need to be database engineers. They can ask for — and receive — business intelligence in plain English.
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Mortgage lenders using a new AI tool from Maxwell no longer need database engineers to write queries to glean insights about the inner workings of their business that can make them more profitable and efficient. They can ask for — and receive — business intelligence in plain English.
The mortgage tech provider’s AI tool, AskMax, is a new capability within Maxwell Business Intelligence, which the company debuted last summer.
Maxwell Business Intelligence is a turn-key solution enabling managers and executives to analyze loan origination and production, back office efficiency and bottom-line loan financials without having to be experts in structured query language (SQL). Results are accompanied by charts and graphs when appropriate
AskMax, announced Wednesday, makes Maxwell Business Intelligence even more accessible and easier to use, Maxwell co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Rutul Davé told Inman.
Rutul Davé
“One thing we noticed as we started to give people access [to Maxwell Business Intelligence] was that they loved that it was plug and play, in the sense that they did not have to hire a whole team of experts” to get data insights. “They could literally plug it into their loan origination system, essentially the backend, and these reports would be readily available to them.”
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But data “is only good if you’re actually looking at it,” and using it to get the right answers, Davé said.
While using the Maxwell Business Intelligence interface is easier than writing SQL database queries, it still requires the user to drill down through menus to find the information they’re looking for. Sometimes users would ask Maxwell to create specific custom reports for them.
That got Davé and his team thinking: Maybe they could use AI to take the questions that lenders have about their own business and turn them into SQL database requests.
AskMax is a natural language interface to databases that “never existed before,” Davé said. “I think a few other industries are trying it, but definitely not in the mortgage industry.”
So what kinds of things can lenders do with AskMax? They can, of course, do the things that Maxwell Business Intelligence was designed to do, such as:
- Analyze loan origination and production metrics to make forecasts and smart decisions about loan officer training and borrower engagement.
- Streamline operations with real-time views of processing speed and capacity, team utilization, and loan file quality.
- Analyze closing costs and tolerance cures to gain insights into gains (or losses) per loan.
But lenders are also using AskMax to query Maxwell Business Intelligence in ways that its developers hadn’t envisioned — helping them continue to improve the tool.
A query that a lender submits to AskMax “obviously solves a problem that somebody has,” Davé said, but in some cases, “we only learned about that problem because we created this interface where you could ask a question, right? As a product developer, I love it.”
Maxwell Business Intelligence, which Davé said is used by about 10 percent of the company’s clients, analyzes data from multiple sources including the lender’s own loan origination system (LOS), and Maxwell Point of Sale, the company’s configurable and customizable closing platform.
But it can also pull market insights, trends and forecasts that build on data sources that include the Maxwell lending network.
That capability can help lenders compare how the loans they provide and the borrowers they serve compare to the overall market, and whether they want to adjust their marketing strategies to better target particular segments, such as first-time homebuyers.
The Denver-based company’s other offerings include Maxwell Diligence, which lets lenders outsource their quality control and due diligence, and Maxwell Fulfillment, which provides staffing and technology support to lenders who want to outsource their mortgage processing, underwriting and closing.
Co-founded by Davé and CEO John Paasonen in 2015, Maxwell says it now provides services to more than 300 mortgage lenders, banks and credit unions. A $52.5 million raise in 2021 allowed Maxwell to hire new talent in its product, engineering, sales and marketing departments.
Last year’s acquisition of LenderSelect Mortgage Group, aimed at expanding the company’s secondary market trading platform, Maxwell Capital, was followed by a deal to acquire Chicago-based digital mortgage lending platform Revvin, formerly MortgageHippo.
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