“People Helping People” in the Journey Home: Credit Union Mortgage Lending in the Age of AI

One of my favorite counterintuitive phenomena is that as information and choices become more abundant and accessible, the demand for curation explodes as humans search for guidance to make sense of the abundance. This is a phenomenon that many describe as the abundance paradox, the idea that endless access, information, or options creates increased demand for curation, taste, perspective, and guidance.

For example, the birth of the spreadsheet was met with a prophecy of the death of the financial analyst, a role previously characterized by its ability to accurately crunch complex numbers to create quantitative financial scenarios. However, instead of a modified assumption triggering a cascade of manual recalculations, a single tweak now flows through the system automatically. Financial analysis has effectively become free. As the cost of calculations approached zero, the financial analyst didn’t die, but the role evolved. The spreadsheet evolved the financial analyst into a trusted advisor, one that would run various calculations on behalf of the client to provide tailored financial guidance to help their clients make sense of the noise.

Artificial intelligence has ushered in a new era of abundance, one where the cost of accessing information has been made effectively free. The answers to all questions are now accessible via a chatbot with an ease that rivals that of everyday texting. The removal of the information barrier, which had long been a defining characteristic of many jobs, has caused many to question the role of humans in various aspects of our daily lives. For those in the mortgage industry, many have extended this line of thinking into questioning the role of mortgage lenders.

The truth is the role of the mortgage lender will change, as it has always changed with each new wave of innovation. However, one constant will remain: the role of the humans in the loop. The mortgage business is primarily a people-to-people business, and nowhere is that more true than the credit union space. I’m here to make a prediction that the role of humans in mortgage lending will become more important than it ever has before.

The Trust Threshold

The key insight is the future belongs to those credit union mortgage teams that are able to modernize their teams and products to combine the strengths of artificial intelligence with the empathy of human intelligence, creating super-intelligent mortgage teams that operate as trusted financial advisors that help unlock the dream of homeownership, which remains the core tenet of the American dream.

To understand why the human touch is actually gaining value, we have to look at how consumers behave when the stakes are high. Behavioral data from a recent HSBC and Ipsos study examined how individuals utilize AI for high-stakes financial tasks, and no investment is bigger than the decision to purchase a home. The study found that while consumers are comfortable researching with technology and AI, they eventually hit a “trust threshold” where machines cannot supplant human counsel. At the exact point of a final decision, consumers choose a human professional over AI by a massive 3-to-1 margin, with 80% explicitly demanding human reassurance before pulling the trigger on a major financial move.^[1]

AI efficiently generates an abundance of data, but humans are still fundamentally required to provide the conviction to act. The key challenge for mortgage teams then becomes twofold: how to provide the digital tools that allow homeowners to do their research, and how to translate the data from those tools into the personalized guidance only a human can deliver.

To jump-start the thinking on how credit union mortgage teams can evolve to position themselves for this new era, I wanted to offer two concrete first steps that growing and evolving teams can take today.

Relationship Building

Today’s housing market is one of the most challenging in recent memory. With home prices eclipsing income growth, the cost of homeownership rising, and economic uncertainty lurking on the horizon, current and prospective homeowners are in search of guidance more than ever before. Credit unions that maintain a presence at every stage of the homebuyer’s journey will build deep trust, positioning themselves at the front of the line when a transaction eventually takes place.

There is a massive opportunity to build these new relationships. For example, as the median age of buyers continues to rise, credit unions are facing a growing number of first-time buyers who have never owned property and lack established lending connections. On top of this fact, because the average age of homeowners has continued to increase, the number of transactions that the average homeowner performs has declined. Meaning that even for current homeowners, they seek guidance for things like managing refinancing, navigating hardship, and capitalizing on record amounts of home equity.

Prior to the arrival of new technologies, offering this level of guidance was only possible through scaling human capital by growing loan officer count and deploying expensive data analysts, often benefiting the mega-banks and mortgage lenders. However, credit union teams that choose to utilize AI solutions are able to scale personalization through technology, therefore leveling the playing field. Deploying modern, dynamic homebuyer education tools that sync with a member’s entire financial picture to provide tailored guidance is now a possibility thanks to the rise of AI tooling that is able to synthesize the data and help owners act on the insight. Whether it is a first-time homebuyer budgeting for their first home or a current homeowner analyzing refinancing scenarios, credit unions that deploy these tools will provide the guidance that homeowners seek and in exchange provide the mortgage team with insights that will ensure that they are able to provide the right message to the right homeowner at the right time, when the need for a mortgage transaction stands to benefit the homeowner. Synthesizing these insights is also made possible through AI, helping to ensure that mortgage teams are spending their time delivering the human guidance and not analyzing the data.

This echoes a similar point raised by Peter Benjamin in his piece titled “How Credit Unions Can Turn Post-Purchase Engagement Into a Retention Engine”.^[2] The truth is with the right tools, credit union LOs can remain increasingly relevant and sought after in today’s mortgage market.

Credit union mortgage teams that can reach out to the right homeowner with the right message at the right time will be the ones that continue to grow in the AI era.

Serving the Modern Earner

The benefits of automation are best manifested when a profile can be pattern-matched against previous profiles and data points. However, when it comes to non-standard profiles or data points, automated systems struggle, leaving room for human discernment to thrive.

In the mortgage market, this means that loan types most prone to automated processing and underwriting are most likely conforming and government loans. These mortgages have a well-defined rule set intended to have systematic definitions to outline if a homeowner qualifies for the risk that the entity is hoping to underwrite. For a while, because most homeowners fit the traditional W-2 income profile, this worked.

However, when we look at demographic data, there is a growing population of current and future homeowners that derive their income from non-standard sources: gig workers, contractors, and small business owners. This growing demographic represents a growing opportunity for credit union teams to find ways to surface products that suit the modern earner, such as bank statement and asset-based loan programs. Today, nearly half of the American workforce derives some of their income from freelance or contract work, a number that is likely to only grow. Notably, 43% of Gen Z workers participate in the gig economy, and they are choosing freelancing over traditional full-time W-2 employment at a higher rate than any previous generation.^[3]

So while automation may have the highest potential to automate workflows associated with conforming and standard government loans, there is a growing opportunity to remain relevant in the growing gaps of non-conforming and non-government lending. Reaching these homeowners requires a personal understanding of their needs and goals, and providing the relevant loan product to match their needs, something that cannot be automated but is instead curated. The growth of this borrower profile will require more loan officers, more underwriters, and more processors to help teams scale to address this growing need.

The Future of “People Helping People” in the Journey Home

In a period of so much change, it’s helpful to find solace in the constants that have persisted over time. Times change, technologies change, but the one thing that doesn’t change is human desires and nature. It is for this reason that the abundance paradox has come to exist: humans desire clarity amongst noise.

In today’s world, where poll after poll indicates that homeownership remains part of the American dream, consumers are searching for guidance on how to bring their dreams to life.

The great news for credit union mortgage teams is that mortgage lending has never been about the transaction; it’s always been a manifestation of the mission of “people helping people”. By adapting modern AI-powered tooling that allows personalization at scale, credit unions can gain additional touchpoints into a member’s life, building trust that will lead to lifelong relationships. The human touch also manifests itself when understanding homeowner needs and having the products that match their needs, as opposed to conforming to a rigid templated structure. The future of the mortgage market belongs to credit unions who are able to create personalized experiences for homeowners, allowing them to feel heard in a sea of noise.

^[1] HSBC & Ipsos, Trust in Technology: How consumers engage with artificial intelligence for high-stakes financial decisions, 2024.

^[2] Peter Benjamin, “How Credit Unions Can Turn Post-Purchase Engagement Into a Retention Engine,” ACUMA News, June 2026

^[3] Statistics sourced from Upwork’s Freelance Forward annual workforce study and McKinsey & Company’s American Opportunity Survey regarding independent contractor trends and generational participation in the gig economy.

The information reported in this document, financial and otherwise, should not be construed as either legal or investment advice, nor does it represent the views of ACUMA, its Board of Directors, its staff or its members. The author presents information current at the time of publication and is designed to educate ACUMA members and others interested in the credit union mortgage lending industry.