Steve Smith and Finicity are helping to lead an industry-wide transformation in underwriting, away from manual and toward digital.
Smith co-founded Finicity and serves as the company’s CEO. Finicity developed and deployed a variety of products for the mortgage lending industry, 
including the company’s Verification of Assets and Verification of Income solutions.
According to the company, digital verification has the potential to cut the underwriting process from as many as 70 days to 10 days, while making it easier on both the borrower and the lender.
Over the past 12 months, Finicity announced integrations of its asset verification solution into the digital lending platforms of 11 key industry players: Capsilon, SimpleNexus, Lender Price, Mortgage Cadence, Blue Sage, BeSmartee, Ellie Mae, Advanced Data, MortgageHippo, Black Knight and DataVerify.
And the company expects more of these types of arrangements to come in the near future.
Finicity was also chosen to participate in Fannie Mae’s pilot for Single Source Validation, which is an enhancement to the Desktop Underwriter validation service that leverages bank account data collected via a single asset report to validate income, assets and employment.
Finicity inked direct data exchange agreements with two major banks: USAA and Capital One. Last year, the company signed similar deals with Chase and Wells Fargo.
Finicity was honored as one of the 2018 HW Tech100, an award reserved for the housing industry’s top technology companies.
What has been your secret to success?
“Truly becoming an agent for innovation and change requires that you understand market disruptions and gather data while always trusting your instincts and gut. Most times, you have to press forward and ignore the noise, naysayers and entrenched thinking, and you almost force your will on change.”
