Blend Income: LO-Level Permissions and Loan Team-Initiated Workflow

Beta Release Date: 03/29

Prod Release Date: 04/26

Note: This feature is scheduled to release to beta environments on 3/29 for customers who have already enabled Blend Income in their environments.

Purpose of Update and Benefit
There are two new features coming to Blend Income that will help give lenders greater control over when and who can trigger income verification. 

• LO-Level Permission - Ability for user admins to configure permission to verify income by loan team user

• Loan Team Workflow - Ability for LO to verify borrower income via a button in the lender application

This feature has been enabled in the beta environments for all Blend Income customers and will be enabled in production environments on April 26. Any current Blend Income customer who would like to enable this feature in production before that date may do so by reaching out to Blend Support or their Blend representative. 

Lenders who have not signed up for Blend Income may reach out to their Blend representative to learn more about our solution.

Current Behavior
In the current state, Blend Income prioritized borrower-initiated income verification methods. Therefore it was not possible to initiate income verification from the lender application. 

New Behavior

Blend Income customers will now be able to allow their loan teams to manually order income verification from the lender application. In addition, lenders will be able to configure who can order income verification at the LO-level with a new user permission. 

LO-level permissions
There is a new user permission called “Permission to run verification of income” that controls who on the loan team has the ability to verify income through the Loan Team-Initiated VOI pull. A lender’s Admin users, or Blend Support, can change this setting within the Roles section of the Admin panel in order to permit or restrict access to this feature. 

Loan-Team Initiated workflow

Loan team members will need to collect the following information in order to activate the workflow: 

• Social Security Number (SSN)

• Date of Birth (DOB)

• Present Address

• Consumer Report Consent

After entering the above information in the application, loan team members should navigate to the Employment section and click on the “Verify Employment” button on the top right. 

This will reveal a modal called “Verify Employment.” Lenders will have the ability to indicate that they have received the borrower’s consent to obtain income and employment data. This is a required field, and you will not be able to proceed without obtaining this consent. NOTE: A similar checkbox appears at the bottom of the Borrower information section of the lender application. If the box has been checked in that section, the box in this modal will be checked as well. 

To proceed, lenders will click the “Verify” button in the bottom right of the modal. 

On the “Income Verification Results” page, Blend will present any income and employment data that we were able to locate from the data provider. At first, the Employer will show “Verifying” and the Status will say “Pending.” Lenders will need to refresh their page using the browser’s refresh button to see the final results on this page. Afterwards, the Blend Income Report will be accessible via the “View Docs” link.

Alternatively, lenders can navigate to the Docs tab to find the results. 

If there is a successful hit, the Employment section of the lender application will pre-fill with the borrower’s income and employment data. 

For applications with co-borrowers, the experience is similar to the single-borrower experience, with these exceptions: 

1. SSN, DOB, Present Address, and Consumer Report Consent will need to be collected from both borrowers.

2. There will be two separate consents, one for each borrower. Loan teams will need to check both to confirm that consent was received.

3. The verified income reports will appear for each borrower in the Income Verification Results page, and in the docs tab.

4. If there is a successful hit, the Employment section will pre-fill with both borrowers’ income and employment information.

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