Wholesale lender says it's made a big breakthrough in the industry's tech revolution
The next time you get a phone call from your mortgage broker that interest rates have dropped, and it might be time to refinance, it might not be a human being calling you at all.
United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) has announced a new AI-powered loan officer assistant to supplement its human brokers. The announcement was made Thursday by Mat Ishbia, president and CEO of UWM, during the company's annual broker gathering, UWM LIVE!, in Pontiac, Michigan.
“The AI stuff that we’re doing, it’s not just the best in the industry, it’s the best in America,” Ishbia told Mortgage Professional America. “This has never been done, ever. This is not prompted AI. This is generative AI that has a conversation back and forth with a person.”
The AI loan officer assistant, which the company has named Mia, was developed by UWM’s in-house technology team. It can answer inbound calls, make outbound calls, ask and answer questions, take messages, schedule appointments, and collect callback information.
“It can do 100,000 concurrent calls at a time,” Ishbia said. “For a small loan officer who’s done four loans a month for the last three years, that’s 144 loans in three years. If rates drop next Thursday to 5.75%, all 144 of those loans should be refinanced. What does a normal loan officer do? They’ll call nine of them. They’ll wait for seven others to call in. That’s 16 of them, and they’ll write 10 loans. They usually do four, and they do 10, so things are great.
“What Mia will do that day is call all 144 of them for you. Out of those, maybe 19 are interested in and schedule a meeting with you the next day. And you’ll get a summary of every single call that was made. So overnight, brokers become competitive.”
The company emphasizes that brokers won’t have to worry about missed calls or stepping away from work to attend family functions. Brokers will receive a dedicated phone number for all communication and marketing touchpoints, and can customize Mia’s name to fit their needs.
Part of the partnership with Google
Jason Bressler (pictured top), chief technology officer at UWM, was the head of the in-house team that developed the project. He notes that even their new partners at Google weren’t sure UWM would be able to develop this as quickly as they did.
“Mia is a technological revolution,” Bressler said. “We signed a partnership with Google. From a standpoint of how big this actually is, from a technical standpoint, Google said there’s no possible way you can do this, this quick. They were like, ‘Slow down. It’s not possible at the scale of 50,000 people, giving 50,000 phone numbers and inbound lines and making all these calls and doing it concurrently. You can’t do it.’
“I’m like, ‘You’re a partner at UWM. We’re going to figure it out together.’ And we did. Granted, it was mostly us dragging them along with us. But that’s what we do.”
Both Ishbia and Bressler noted the speed at which the technology was being developed and said to expect enhancements to the system to be developed at a rapid pace.
“There’s guardrails right now on Mia,” Bressler said. “We’ll continue to expand those guardrails as Mia continues to grow. This isn’t a 2027, or 2026 [project] – this is within the next few weeks. As we get feedback, as we make sure she’s behaving exactly the way that she should and doing the right things, yeah, she can expand. This is literally just the beginning of what Mia is capable of.”
Ishbia said that the addition of Mia wouldn’t necessarily reduce the number of employees at UWM, but it might allow them to fill open positions more slowly.
United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), the country’s largest wholesale mortgage lender, is bringing its servicing operations in-house, triggered in part by Rocket’s acquisition of one of its subservicers, Mr. Cooper.https://t.co/22eGMSnJzr
— Mortgage Professional America Magazine (@MPAMagazineUS) May 1, 2025
“In the future, we won’t have to hire as fast,” he said. “We have a lot of people here. I don’t care if you’re the best company in the world, 150 leave every month because someone moves, someone gets pregnant and decides not to come back to work. Real life stuff happens. So we’ve always been hiring for attrition.
“But with that said, we’re building out the tech stack, we’re adding servicing in-house, so now that’s more people. So I don’t really expect our headcount to go down because of this. I expect our headcount to be flat, but I can do more business.”
Mia will follow do-not-call registry rules
UWM notes that Mia can make three types of automated outbound calls. It will call 20 days after the loan closes to remind borrowers of their first payment due date. A second call will be made 180 days after closing and every 90 days thereafter to help the loan originator stay in the borrower's mind.
Finally, if interest rates drop, Mia will contact borrowers to let them know that rates have dropped, and that they could be eligible to refinance.
Ishbia notes that customers can opt out of the AI calls in the same way they can opt out of any follow-up sales calls.
“All the same laws are followed,” he said. “Whether it’s a person or an AI, nothing’s changed.”
“We actually have a stopgap in place that if a borrower says, ‘Please don’t call me again,’ it automatically goes to our do-not-call list,” Bressler added. “We follow the do-not-call registry. We’re compliant in everything that we’re doing.”
The company notes that if a brokerage uses more than one wholesale lender, only the loans tied to UWM would trigger this feature, unless the broker decides to upload the other clients to the Mia platform.
While Mia cannot discuss specific rates because it is not licensed to do so, it can ask and answer key questions, leave voicemails, and send conversation summaries.
Brokers can also tell Mia to reach out to clients in bulk at any specific time and filter by lead type. After the calls are made, Mia will generate a recap of the calls completed, including the number of successful ones.
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