Artificial Intelligence in Practice

34Experian: Using Artificial Intelligence To Make Mortgages Simpler

Experian is one of the world's largest consumer credit reference agencies, which means that businesses, banks and financial institutions rely on its help to decide, for example, whether we are a safe bet to lend money to.

It also means it holds a huge amount of data on us and our spending habits. Now it is applying artificial intelligence (AI) to this data to make more accurate predictions, but also to make our lives easier when it comes to complex financial transactions.

One area where it is concentrating its efforts is mortgages, and it hopes that by using machine learning it will cut down the time it takes to complete the lengthy process of applying for mortgages, leading to less stress and lower fees.

What Problem Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

Applying for a mortgage is a time-consuming and complex process. The average application involves coordinating information between a large number of agencies – buyers, sellers, surveyors, estate agents, solicitors, underwriters, mortgage brokers and lenders.¹

This is the reason why buying a property is often listed as one of the most stressful life events that we deal with.

Often work is duplicated between agencies due to inconsistencies in the way information is transferred, and of course that leads to higher fees, adding to the overall expense of the process to us as consumers.

Although the process has been streamlined to some extent due to adoption ...