The Impact of LoanPASS's Flexible Loan Decisioning Technology on a Traditional Industry

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

29 Jan 2025

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In an industry limited by outdated technology, Mike Lewis and his team at LoanPASS have achieved something significant: they have developed a loan decisioning engine that not only matches but surpasses the capabilities of solutions supported by hundreds of millions in institutional capital. As President of LoanPASS, Lewis has leveraged his 25-year industry experience to create a technology platform that’s proving more adaptable, efficient, and powerful than many established competitors.

“We designed it with three core principles in mind,” Lewis explains. “It was designed to be the fastest decisioning tool amongst all of its competitors, it would be fully customizable, and it would allow decisioning against any product or lending product vertical – not just mortgage lending products, but virtually anything with an interest rate.”

The company’s journey began in 2019 when Lewis joined BlockGen Corporation, LoanPASS’s parent company. After an initial attempt to revamp existing proprietary software proved challenging, the team made a bold decision to build an entirely new solution from scratch – a move that would ultimately showcase their technical prowess and deep understanding of market needs.

What differentiates LoanPASS is its approach to loan decisioning. While traditional engines require lenders to submit guidelines to providers who then hard-code new products into their systems – a process that can take weeks and significant investment – LoanPASS has built a versatile system that lenders can configure to deploy complex new loan products themselves in hours or even minutes.

This technical achievement becomes even more impressive in specialized lending markets like non-QM loans and business-purpose lending, where traditional solutions struggle with complexity. The platform can handle everything from conventional mortgages to intricate construction loans with extended terms, bridge loans requiring after-repair value calculations, and reverse mortgages – making it the first pricing engine in the U.S. capable of comparing forward and reverse mortgages side by side.

“Where we’re really excited is providing these lenders – mortgage lenders, banks, and credit unions – with tools that help sell themselves to real estate professionals,” Lewis says. “This is a tool in their tool belt that gives them the ability to say, ‘Here’s how we’re different because we can pivot with the market.'”

The real-world impact of their technology is striking. One national lender with 95 branches was able to reduce their product update process from 20-25 hours per week to just 30 minutes. More impressively, when the same lender needed to launch a unique construction product with unconventional terms that their previous provider couldn’t handle, the LoanPASS team configured and deployed the solution in just two hours. Since then, the lender has successfully originated and closed hundreds of these loans – businesses that would have been impossible with their previous technology.

What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that it comes from a relatively small, focused team. Rather than rushing to market with a minimum viable product, they’ve taken the time to build something truly robust and comprehensive. Lewis credits their success to a combination of strategic focus, technical excellence, and unwavering support from their founder.

“Building a SaaS from scratch is incredibly expensive and capital intensive because you’ve got to hire really top quality people with unique and specialized skills,” Lewis notes. “It’s a cool product, but at the end of the day, the value is in all of the people. That is where the value is.”

The results speak for themselves: in a market dominated by legacy providers, this nimble team has built a solution that’s winning over sophisticated clients and handling complex loan products that stymie their larger competitors. But they’re not stopping there. Building on its technical foundation, LoanPASS is now setting its sights on revolutionizing automated underwriting. “We’re excited about being able to offer large independent mortgage bankers, banks, and credit unions their own portfolio automated underwriting decision engine,” Lewis explains. “We want to take that decision process where underwriters can do one loan a day to where they can do five or six a day.”