Virginia Credit Union reduces loan spend and increases productivity with Truework

Virginia Credit Union (VACU) is a nearly 100-year-old credit union that started in Richmond, Virginia and now serves members in all 50 states. As a longstanding financial institution, VACU offers their members a broad range of services, products, and resources that are easily accessible. 

With a focus on a best-in-class member experience, they continually seek ways to simplify complex financial processes—and one key area is the mortgage origination process. By leveraging Truework to remove manual efforts from the income and employment verification process, VACU has been able to drive increased efficiency in their production operation.

Summary

This analysis was completed by STRATMOR Group, an industry advisory firm, based on data comparing VACU with a range of other financial institutions and Independent Mortgage Banks. Based on the data analyzed from full year 2024, VACU spends $300 less (20% reduction) in their origination process, based on lower costs for services and higher productivity of their staff. Moreover, VACU was 45% more productive than peers in their fulfillment operation.  

While there are a lot of factors that can play into total cost efficiencies, one area that has plagued mortgage lenders over the last 3 years is the increased cost of verification services– both in terms of unrecoverable dollars spent with vendors and in terms of time and resources their teams are spending facilitating the verification process. 

VACU is leveraging automated verification services with Truework in both their Point-of-Sale (POS) process and in their post-ITP (intent to proceed) process via the Loan Origination System (LOS). The impact of leveraging automated services across these two key phases of the cycle contribute to the leading performance VACU shows in their production operation, highlighted by the total applications their team is able to work. According to STRATMOR, total applications per processor are 50% more than other financial institutions, and underwriters are 30% more productive. Further bolstering their efficiency is that they have 27% less underwriting touches per loan than the peer group.

Finally, VACU also sees the impact of automation in their processing speed: from Application to Intent-to-Proceed, VACU achieves an average of 2.5 days faster than peers.

Where and why do automated verification services come into play to support this performance?

Problem

Like most lenders, VACU’s mortgage processing teams had a variety of methods to gather income and employment verifications, including collecting documents, leveraging instant databases or third-party providers, and conducting manual verifications via phone calls and emails to employers. The fragmented process—marked by uncertainty around which methods to use, how long each would take, inconsistent vendor performance, and repeated back-and-forth with borrowers—ultimately caused negative outcomes for their organization, teams, and credit union members.

• 10k+ hours of processing team time was spent in the verification process
• $140+ dollars spent per application on vendor-based verifications

In addition, they felt a lack of support from their vendors when questions or difficulties arose. Alongside rising costs and increased turnaround times, their loan process was slowing down and negatively affecting their overall member experience.

Solution

In their search for a fast and cost efficient solution, VACU turned to Truework to automate the verification process and remove their dependencies on multiple vendors and manual outreach. Leveraging Truework’s one-stop verification solution enabled VACU to streamline their end-to-end verification process. Making these services available in both the POS and LOS further created consistency and predictability in the verification process for their entire team.

VACU’s application experience powered by Truework:

• Process: Borrowers complete the application through the Blend Point-of-Sale experience, leveraging Truework to automatically pull instantly available data across a database of 48M+ employee records. If a completed report isn’t found instantly, borrowers can grant permission to their payroll provider directly in the application experience.
• Impact: The embedded process removes transactional friction for the borrower, improving the total number of applications with complete and accurate income data. More applications with complete and accurate data enables VACU’s loan teams to make quicker decisions and reduces the amount of unnecessary time spent on loan production.

VACU’s processing experience powered by Truework:

• Process: Processors initiate requests in Encompass through our direct integration. Truework automatically takes the applicant information to verify against our database of instantly available employee records. If data is found, our internal engine validates the data for accuracy and completeness and returns a standardized report with a GSE number (if eligible). If applicant data isn’t obtained, the request is automatically triaged to Smart Outreach, an automated outreach solution leveraging a specialist team across a repository of 1M+ verified business entities and 12+ third-party providers. Processors track the request from start to finish, with transparent status updates throughout. 
• Impact: Expanding the waterfall to include Smart Outreach, VACU further reduced the time their teams were spending on collecting and verifying income and employment data, fully relying on Truework for hard-to-complete files where in-depth communications with the employer to verify additional details (e.g. guaranteed hours, increased pay rates) are necessary.

Outcomes

With Truework in place, VACU saw quicker turnaround times to complete verification processes, reduced costs, and significantly better customer support to help them process loans more efficiently. For mortgage processing teams, the transition to using Truework as the sole verification solution was seamless, with benefits across the board:

• Reduced costs on multiple verification vendors
• Higher Day 1 Certainty eligibility 
• Elevated support from Truework team, with responses within 24 hours
• Seamless integration with Encompass
for ease-of-use
• Improved loan processing efficiency
• Improved member experience