Innovation Challenge 2025 spotlights AI, retention tools

September 20, 2025 9:31 AM

DIGMO judges 2025.jpg — Left to right: Julian Hebron, Jonathan Kunkle, John Wines, Will Adams

Artificial intelligence and borrower retention took center stage as 20 tech firms competed for top honors in the Innovation Challenge at Digital Mortgage 2025.

New homeownership portals, voice agents and lead generation tools all may find their way onto mortgage technology stacks if they are not already there.

The annual contest isn't just a showcase, it's a proving ground, with industry veterans judging entrants on both polish and market impact.

Serving as judges were Julian Hebron, founder of The Basis Point; Jonathan Kunkle, vice president, sales engagement — West for Freddie Mac; and John Wines, chief strategy officer at Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group. Overseeing the proceedings was Will Adams, senior vice president, head of sales at Lendingtree, sponsor of the Innovation Challenge and provider of a $10,000 grand prize awarded to the winner.

Scroll ahead to see the digital tools that caught the judges' attention — including the winning entry — along with the rest of the standout competitors.

Lyndsay Magre

Aduvo

Product: Aduvo
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenters: Lyndsay Magre, Travis Lewis

Described by the presenters as a "hands-free marketing machine," the Aduvo platform connects to a user's LOS and can create automated email campaigns from borrower data within the system to help with customer retention. When preset conditions occur, from changes in loan status to interest-rate drops and birthdays, a campaign is triggered to send out appropriate messages. Judges thought the tool would serve mortgage brokers particularly well in their marketing efforts.

Cloudvirga

Product: Tropos
Mortgage segment: Originations
Presenters: Carissa Orozco, Christopher Sayre

A point-of-sale system that sits on existing tech stacks, Tropos is designed to support institutions with a range of lending products. Lenders can use it for everything from reverse mortgage and investor loans and can customize Tropos to fit the unique needs of each product. Branding on the portal is also configurable to align it to the way companies, vendors or individual loan officers market themselves, a feature the judges appreciated.

Cotality

Product: One Homeowner
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenters: Terri Davis, Erin Johnson

The One Homeowner platform is a portal that a mortgage lender can offer to their customer. The platform not only tracks the value of a property but helps the homeowner manage it, in addition to holding mortgage and insurance documents and taking inventory of items, so residents can stay on top of future maintenance. A white-label solution, One Homeowner is designed to keep lines of communication open between borrower and loan officer after the first close, with the latter able to follow the homeowner's journey and prepare to rush in when signs show they may be considering a refinance or other type of home lending product. Judges appreciated how One Homeowner might turn out to be a solution for recapture.

DocMagic

Product: DocMagic One
Mortgage segment: Originations, underwriting
Presenters: Ron Carillo, Leah Sommerville

The DocMagic One loan dashboard allows a user to see the status of loans in their pipeline and measure the status of each transaction. Drilling down further, loan officers can find specific borrowers and determine tasks that need to be completed, generating document packages in seconds. An action log keeps track of all events and also issues validation audits to automatically maintain regulatory compliance.

Homebot

Product: Homebot
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenter: Ernie Graham

The portal provides a lender's customers with looks into their home equity levels and overall financial health and when the time appears optimal, promotes refinance opportunities. The Homebot also provides a nationwide home search for borrowers considering a new move, and when they list their existing properties, it can prompt an LO to create a personalized AI-generated deepfake marketing video that keeps them top of mind for return business.

Mario Palarca

Iron Mountain

Product: Iron Mountain Insight
Mortgage segment: Underwriting
Presenter: Mario Palarca

Aimed at back-office mortgage operations, Insight is a content-management system and repository that allows users to search for information within them and get questions answered thanks to its AI capabilities. Rules can also be built into enterprise workflows to provide analysis and recommendations in a compliant manner. A dashboard gives users a rundown of the tasks needed to be done in their entire pipeline.

Lemonade

Product: InsightAI
Mortgage segment: Training
Presenter: John Findlay

An education platform, InsightAI is able to create a knowledge base of documents uploaded by a user and subsequently grab information from them to create training content, ranging from a single module to full course. With prompts from the user, InsightAI is also able to produce articles with references back to the sources used to create them or turn content into scripts for video or games that Lemonade is known for. The system integrates with with different AI-backed video tools

Lender Price

Product: AILA (Artificial Intelligence Loan Assistant) Helper and Builder
Mortgage segment: Originations
Presenters: Dawar Alimi, Paul Orlando

The helper product provides answers to loan officer questions about specific mortgages to help LOs understand the types of loans potentially available to their customers, along with the underwriting guidelines. It also presents originators with options for near-miss products that their borrowers could qualify for with a few changes. AILA Builder allows users to change the appearance and style of Helper in minutes, so they can work with it in a way that suits their needs.

Ocrolus

Product: Inspect
Mortgage segment: Underwriting
Presenter: John Lowenthal

Ocrolus' Inspect compares documents provided by a borrower to their 1003 form, or uniform residential loan application, alerting underwriters of potential discrepancies and data mismatches. After review, the user can place the findings onto a need-to-do list and push it directly onto the Encompass loan-origination system. Judges appreciated Inspect's scalability and potential for cost savings from fewer errors.

Bobby Narang

Opensense

Product: Opensense
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenter: Bobby Narang

Opensense provides a platform that allows businesses to centrally manage the design of customized email signatures and electronic business cards that encourages click-throughs while remaining compliant. Integrations with scores of customer-relationship management systems makes it possible to also create personalized marketing campaigns.

PropIQ

Product: PropIQ
Mortgage segment: Originations
Presenters: Shivam Goyal, Sabhya Katia

A lead generation platform that aims to uncover potential home equity product originations or new purchases, PropIQ allows lenders to take a full view into their customers' financial profiles. The PropIQ platform tracks life events through social media and other data, while tracking local consumer trends to see if a borrower may benefit from a new loan. The strategy allows an originator to return to the customer with a personalized campaign thanks to integrations with their CRM.

Sagent

Product: Dara
Mortgage segment: Servicing
Presenters: Jennifer Johnson, Hunter Stair

Representatives of the loan servicing platform showed off Dara's ability to quickly update core loan data on modification requests, shortening the amount of time to deliver terms to borrowers from days to minutes. Using real-time data, servicers can quickly update borrower information and deliver new payment terms

Tidalwave

Product: Solo
Mortgage segment: Originations, underwriting
Presenters: Chris Olson, Diane Yu

Solo is able to take a conversation transcript or other unstructured data to prefill an application from a potential new borrower and run it alongside automated underwriter systems to obtain approvals. With access available to the loan officer and borrower, the Solo system also can verify or flag information submitted by the consumer, analyze it and provide a to-do list before application submission. The judges appeared impressed with the application of AI in a point-of-sale system.

Truework

Product: Qualified Income
Mortgage segment: Underwriting
Presenter: Zachary Ennenga

Truework's application allows underwriters to combine multiple income streams, applying a waterfall approach to alert them whether the information is usable or if further documentation is required. Judges complemented Truework on the clean user interface that makes the tool easy to use.

UIPath

Product: UIPath
Mortgage segment: Technology
Presenter: Ryan Ma

The UIPath tool helps enable lenders to create and orchestrate a streamlined end-to-end business tool, using an agentic AI bot that can support specific tasks as dictated by the user. The AI agent will be able to search for information in large-language models and provide results with a risk score and explanation of how it found its answer.

Zumigo

Product: Zumigo
Mortgage segment: Fraud prevention
Presenters: Tariq Ahmed, Madhu Vidali

Zumiga's platform analyzes borrower information taken from applications and validates it against trusted data sources, including mobile providers and credit bureaus. Loan officers receive a snapshot of metrics that comes with a trust score and fingerprint details, allowing them to verify or authenticate the borrower almost instantly. When a low trust code is detected, the system flags it and guides the officer on further steps to take. Presenters touted the potential for higher quality leads and better business outcomes thanks to the ability to verify data.

Verse.ai

Product: Verse.ai
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenter: Damien Swendsen

A conversational AI platform that enables personalized communication between lender and borrower to optimize sales outcomes by delivering messages at the right time, Verse.ai creates scripts for originators can use by phone, email or text after scanning lead information The tool also takes data from any correspondence and folds them into a customer relationship management system. Judges noted the value in having a platform that contacts a lead by text, given how infrequently calls from unfamiliar numbers are answered.

Left to right: Chance Jacobs, Joey Revier

Mortgage 365 - Third place

Product: Atlantis
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenters: Chance Jacob, Joey Revier

Atlantis is a marketing dashboard and engine that continuously runs against a company's borrower profiles to uncover the most promising, mortgage-ready leads specific to their ownn products. With the help of artificial intelligence, Atlantis creates reports on customer readiness and status, allowing the loan officer to prioritize leads and create personalized messaging campaigns.

CI&T - Second place

Product: AI Assistant
Mortgage segment: Originations
Presenters: Leslie Chang, Mark Hansen (both of CMG Financial)

A chatbot connected to Microsoft Teams and tapping into multiple AI platforms, CI&T's tool connects to the loan-origination system and enables the user to address changes and potential loan products based on updates to borrower conditions. Voice prompts can assess information, modify data and then create emails or other messages incorporating changes and deliver correspondence to the customer. Judges remarked how the AI Assistant can take the loan officer outside of the LOS.

Insellerate - First place

Product: Aithena
Mortgage segment: Marketing
Presenters: Josh Friend, Scott Roberts

Already in use at a leading mortgage company, Aithena is an agentic AI-backed voice software system that can call and communicate with customers, assist them in scheduling various types of appointments and advise them of any possible problems and reach out to new leads. Aithena's knowledge base was created after it "listened" and reviewed 180,000 hours of calls, the presenters said.