The Human Side of Mortgage Lending: Anna DeSimone's Mission for Transparency and Fairness
Thirty years after authoring groundbreaking books on lending discrimination under President Clinton’s White House executive order, mortgage industry expert Anna DeSimone has witnessed both progress and persistent challenges in fair lending practices. Now, as the author of the newly released “Closing the Gap in Homeownership—Re-writing the Rules Against Mortgage Discrimination” and an independent industry consultant, DeSimone brings decades of hard-won insights to the intersection of technology and fair lending.
“Nothing has changed,” DeSimone states frankly, reflecting on three decades of work in mortgage lending discrimination. Her perspective comes from extensive firsthand experience, including founding and leading a compliance auditing company that reviewed more than 1.5 million mortgages, conducting landmark discrimination studies with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and providing expert testimony in numerous predatory lending cases.
The current state of mortgage lending reveals a troubling reality: nearly half of all mortgage applications never make it to closing. DeSimone’s research shows that borrowers often walk away due to feeling overwhelmed by the process and lack of clear information. “When you throw that loan too quickly into an AI system, and three weeks later, it spits out extremely complex disclosures… people get angry and they say ‘nobody told me that my grandfather, who’s giving me $50,000 as a gift, has to produce his own bank statement.’ This is what discrimination is. It’s not about what the lender says or does. It’s about how the customer feels.”
The industry’s economics have shifted dramatically, creating new pressures that affect service quality. “The average mortgage lender is only earning a $701 per mortgage, and the compliance cost $10,000 per mortgage,” DeSimone explains. “Ten years ago, those figures were $7,000 earnings per mortgage and $700 for compliance.” This reversal has pushed many lenders toward automation and cost-cutting measures, often at the expense of customer experience.
While technology companies promote new solutions, DeSimone observes that most focus solely on profitability rather than improving customer outcomes. Her research into discrimination extends beyond consumer-facing issues to include systematic problems affecting industry professionals themselves. “I have gone and presented testimony at HUD in Washington defending a black-owned mortgage broker,” she shares. “I proved that he was being manipulated by a puppeteer who was a mortgage investor that was choosing the appraisals, providing fake pay stubs, providing fake verification of deposits, manipulating the whole deal.”
DeSimone advocates for a return to proven practices that prioritize customer education and support. Her extensive experience training mortgage professionals has shown that comprehensive pre-purchase counseling and homeownership education are crucial for successful outcomes. This approach, combined with properly trained lending professionals who can guide borrowers through the process, has historically produced the best results.
The solution, in DeSimone’s view, lies in balancing technology with human expertise. Her own training system, used on millions of loan applications, required 40 hours of comprehensive instruction to ensure lending professionals could effectively serve diverse borrower needs. “People have different ways of getting paid, different ways of paying their bills, different ways of handling money,” she notes, highlighting why standardized automated systems often fall short.
Looking ahead, DeSimone sees demographic shifts that will require fundamental changes in lending practices. With multiracial households growing 280% in the past decade, the industry must adapt its educational and lending approaches to serve borrowers with diverse financial traditions and circumstances. Her latest book, “Closing the Gap in Homeownership,” addresses these challenges, offering insights into how the industry can better serve an increasingly diverse borrower population while maintaining necessary compliance and risk management standards.
For DeSimone, the path forward requires a renewed commitment to customer education, comprehensive training for industry professionals, and technology that enhances rather than replaces human interaction. After four decades in the industry, her message remains clear: true progress in fair lending requires empowering both borrowers and lending professionals with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed.
