Victor Ciardelli says Rate’s new $100M AI mortgage platform will solve ‘persistent customer challenges’

After two years of optimization efforts, Rate CEO Victor Ciardelli talks about the public launch of the Rate Intelligence AI-powered lending platform.

Chicago-based Rate was the eighth-largest mortgage lender in the country during the first half of 2024, according to estimates from Inside Mortgage Finance. On Wednesday, the company implicitly announced its intentions to grow its market share by launching Rate Intelligence, an artificial intelligence-driven lending platform.

In its announcement, the company explained that Rate Intelligence has been working behind the scenes for the past two years to help originate billions of dollars in loans. Through employee feedback and work with its technology partners, Rate has optimized the platform and is ready for a broader marketing push to consumers.

In an email interview with HousingWire News Editor Neil Pierson, Rate president and CEO Victor Ciardelli offered more details about the work that went into the platform, along with its role in making the mortgage process more efficient for borrowers and mortgage professionals alike.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Neil Pierson: Given that other major lenders like Rocket and UWM have recently launched AI-based business initiatives, does it feel like this is only the tip of the iceberg for some major industry shifts in speed and costs? Do you closely analyze your competitors on major projects like this and, if so, what have you learned in this instance?

Victor Ciardelli: There is a profound shift taking place in the mortgage industry. AI is not just a trend — it’s reshaping the landscape of every industry, including home financing. But to be clear, we have been out in front of this for a few years.

At Rate, we don’t necessarily track or follow our competitors’ moves closely. I had the vision for Rate Intelligence almost five years ago and then worked with my team to establish the foundation for what we’re doing in the market today. Make no mistake, we are leading the charge in technological innovation, having rolled out the first digital mortgage platform.

Rate Intelligence is the culmination of this forward-thinking approach. It’s a platform built to tackle the most persistent customer challenges — complexity, wait times and uncertainty.

Pierson: What kind of time and manpower has Rate spent on building its new platform? What business partners have you engaged with in creating something that works better for the mortgage professional and consumer?

Ciardelli: Rate Intelligence has been years in the making, born from an intensive collaboration between our in-house team and top-tier AI and fintech partners, especially Gateless Inc. We leveraged their smart underwriting technology to accelerate approvals, ensuring that Rate Intelligence meets the demands of today’s fast-paced mortgage market.

Additionally, with Prajna Inc.’s generative AI capabilities, Rate Intelligence enhances enterprise efficiency and improves customer support, especially in areas like loan servicing. Throughout the development process, we worked hand in hand with our staff to develop and perfect it. We created committees that met daily and relied heavily on feedback from our best people.

We’ve invested over $100 million in building the Rate Intelligence platform, including technical development and strategic partnerships to ensure this platform works for today’s mortgage market and future-proofs the industry.

Pierson: What kind of feedback have you solicited from your company’s processors, originators and underwriters in developing this system and ironing out some of their pain points? And in the context of AI vs. human capabilities, do you expect these advancements to slow down the pace of hiring at Rate?

Ciardelli: For the past two years, we’ve been steadily integrating Rate Intelligence across our business, refining and scaling the technology to prepare for this transformative launch. During this time, we have funded $15.5 billion across more than 40,000 loans using this technology.

We’ve maintained an ongoing dialogue with our loan officers, underwriters, processors and operational leaders throughout its development. While AI automates many repetitive, time-consuming tasks, it doesn’t replace human expertise — it enhances it. Rate Intelligence empowers our team to focus on higher-value tasks. This technology significantly boosts efficiency, reducing loan approval times from weeks to just minutes and saving approximately $900 to $1,200 per loan.

We don’t anticipate a hiring slowdown. Instead, we’re shifting our focus to roles that provide greater strategic value, ensuring that our human talent works alongside technology to deliver the best customer outcomes.

Pierson: You say that Rate Intelligence will “eliminate unnecessary steps in the loan origination process.” Could you offer more specific details on that, and do you have a goal for the typical application-to-closing timeline?

Ciardelli: Rate Intelligence is designed to strip away the inefficiencies that have long weighed down the mortgage process. One of the biggest innovations lies in automating real-time tasks like credit, income and asset analysis, which removes bottlenecks and slashes wait times.

For example, our platform uses intelligent automation to simultaneously review key financial documents, such as pay stubs and W-2s, reducing the need for multiple rounds of manual review. The result is a smoother, faster journey from application to closing. While the industry standard for closing is typically 30 to 45 days, Rate Intelligence has cut that timeline by 30% to 50%. In some cases, we’ve already seen approvals happening in mere minutes, giving buyers a crucial edge in today’s competitive market.

Central to Rate Intelligence is its ability to automate one of the most complex and error-prone aspects of mortgage processing — income calculation. The system extracts the necessary information to calculate income in accordance with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guidelines. In fact, our partnership with Gateless offers the opportunity for possible representation and warranty relief through Freddie Mac’s AIM solution.

Pierson: On the servicing end, what kinds of difficulties have your customers experienced in the past and how is the new platform built to address them? And do you expect enhanced customer satisfaction from your servicing book to potentially drive future refinance or purchase business?

Ciardelli: Servicing needs can range from a simple question of loan balance or where to send a payment to obtaining annual tax documentation. By using Rate Intelligence AI and automation, we elevate our servicing professionals’ abilities to address the most complex issues while empowering our customers to instantly address the rest quickly, efficiently and accurately — which historically has been done very poorly in the mortgage industry.

This enhanced service and continued engagement ensures that our customers will likely return to us for their refinancing needs or when purchasing their next home. In short, Rate Intelligence transforms servicing into an opportunity platform for long-term relationship building, helping us foster connections that last far beyond the initial transaction.