Brokers use Discrepency.ai as a Direct Connection Alternative to Plaid and Flinx

Mortgage brokers put in the legwork to get customers a great deal, and this usually involves reviewing their financial documents. The value of a broker isn’t just a better rate – it’s also trust, flexibility, and convenience. Many customers aren’t interested in using Plaid or Flinks to connect their bank accounts directly, and for many brokers, this is their opportunity to add value!

When clients want to work with a provider they trust, and brokers want to do accurate deals, custom document upload tools can be an ideal solution. 

Why Customers Don’t Always Trust Plaid or Flinks

Tools like Plaid and Flinks let customers plug banking information directly into your (or the bank’s) application. Plaid is a US based company that links financial apps (like Venmo or Robinhood) to bank accounts, with over 750,000 connections each day. Flinks is a Canadian company offering a similar service. 

For brokers, the benefit of using Plaid or Flinks is verified financial data, including bank balances, income, and transaction history. They’re a popular alternative to uploading pay stubs and bank statements – and many customers don’t trust them. For Plaid especially, a number of high profile lawsuits recently highlighted privacy concerns, especially around selling customer data. 

For any customer, inputting your own bank account information directly into a financial platform can feel risky. In Plaid’s case, courts objected to the fact that Plaid used the bank logo to make it feel like it was the user’s bank, giving them the false assumption that that’s what they were doing. Even if customers are comfortable, service from connectors might be flaky for some institutions, and certain institutions or regulatory environments don’t permit the integration. 

Alternatives to Direct Connection

Many customers don’t trust (or can’t use) services like Flinks and Plaid. The alternative for many brokers is a document upload platform for accepting documents. When customers can provide bank statements and pay stubs directly to their broker, the broker can take the difficult part – and the privacy risk – off their hands. 

However, reviewing financial documents like bank statements and paystubs can be time consuming and messy, especially when accurate results are essential on both sides of the deal. Privacy risks crop up again if documents are shared via personal emails – but a document upload platform can take care of privacy and speed at the same time. 

Fast income verification for pdfs is possible with technology like natural language processing (NLP). Since NLP tools can understand data in context, document upload solutions can label and capture financial insight, check them in the context of the document (ie. whether reported income matches transaction patterns) and flag inconsistencies. Brokers can upload documents from clients and use NLP to handle document parsing (to automatically extract income, bank balances, and dates), error flagging, and fraud detection – without a direct connection tool like Plaid or Flinx.  

Document Upload Spots Patterns, Gaps, and Red Flags (Without Giving Banking Info Away)

For brokers, choosing a direct document upload solution not only offers some of the same functionality as tools like Plaid and Flinks, it offers your customers some additional privacy. Bank statements, pay stubs, and tax filings are all sensitive documents that clients don’t always want to give away. A well-integrated solution for document processing can be the best of both worlds – eliminating the headache of manual review time, without giving the deal away.