Chirimar says the companies still using AI as a coding assistant are already falling behind
Every mortgage company has been assessing the best way to integrate new technology and artificial intelligence into its current processes.
Some of the AI enhancements work with current software to make the process easier, smoother, or faster. However, now that the tech continues to evolve, some companies are deciding that AI as an add-on to existing programs might not be the right solution.
One company decided to take a different path, building a development engine that runs almost entirely on AI, with human engineers reviewing what the system produces rather than writing any code themselves. The ground-up approach allows the company to craft tech to pave highways forward rather than patching potholes along the way.
Sourabh Chirimar (pictured top), CEO of The Mortgage Office, said the company has been reinventing itself since it was founded in 1978, and the latest reinvention was rethinking how the company would embrace the new technological age.
"TMO re-founds itself every five or seven years," Chirimar told Mortgage Professional America. "Our capacity to change, our capacity to innovate — that's what we all take pride in. It's a big privilege to lead a company that has been able to reinvent itself."
What they built
Chirimar said a rapid improvement in technology earlier this year allowed the company to rethink the path forward.
"In February this year, there was a massive transformation in capabilities," he said. "The pace is so fast that just keeping up is a bit of a task for the engineering team. But good engineers, once they got to that initial pain of it, they are absolutely in love with how things work today. Because now it's taken care of all these small things that were more about discipline and more about understanding syntax. And it's letting people build."
To take advantage of that new leap in technological capabilities, The Mortgage Office opened an innovation lab in San Mateo, California, tasking a small team with building a new product from scratch using AI, with no human writing a single line of code.
The team built what Chirimar describes as an AI coding engine, a scaffolding and framework driven by AI that generates all the code, while engineers act as governors rather than producers, reviewing the output and keeping the process on track. The engine is fed context from product teams, customer feedback, and roughly 10,000 customer calls the company logs each year.
When the company measured the output against what it had been producing under a basic AI-assisted coding model, the results impressed company officials.
"The development pace of this process was almost 40 times what we were doing when we were doing basic AI-assisted coding," he said. "We were five to seven times faster than the top quartile of Elite DORA metrics. So that has been one of the most successful things we've pulled off."
He said that increase in speed means that it’s not the technology holding back the pace of development.
"The real game now is being clear about what you want to bring to the market," he said. "It's not about what you can execute anymore. You can execute anything. The bottleneck is clarity and customer feedback. The bottleneck is not execution on code."
Human element still needed
Chirimar said the same principle that shaped the San Mateo lab is how he thinks the mortgage origination process itself should eventually be redesigned.
The mortgage process is still largely manual in ways that most borrowers and lenders take for granted. A loan application comes in, and what follows is a long back-and-forth between the loan officer, the processor, and the borrower as documents are requested, reviewed, and followed up on.
His view is that an AI agent can handle 80 to 90% of that process, with humans stepping in where judgment or intervention is needed rather than managing each step themselves.
"We believe this process can be done in an agentic way where an agent does the heavy lifting," he said. "Humans pivot to the role of being governors of the process as compared to executors. They let the agent do its work and make sure the process stays on the right path, intervening when needed. Otherwise they just review and keep moving."
The company serves approximately 1,200 customers, and Chirimar said he is seeing those customers build small customizations using vibe coding tools and connect them to The Mortgage Office's API engine rather than waiting for the company to build every feature for them.
"We see our offering becoming very agentic, but also very open in terms of APIs," he said. "At any point in time, anything can be taken in and out of our system into whatever innovation hub you're building there. We are not getting in the way of innovation. We believe this will be a partnership between the customer and us as we move forward."
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