Credit Karma Acquires Approved in a Move to Modernize Mortgage Lending
Approved Founder and CEO Andy Taylor recently announced that Approved has been acquired by Credit Karma to build a consumer-facing digital mortgage experience for its 80 million members.
According to Taylor, “When we left Redfin three years ago to tackle the often painful and tedious process of getting a home loan, nearly everyone in the real estate space was focused on the front end: home search, finding agents and seeing homes. The industry had lost sight of the fact that a majority of lenders still used fax machines as a regular part of doing business.”
Approved was started “with a vision that borrowers could visit an open house not having even talked with a lender, find the home of their dreams, and get fully pre-qualified on their mobile device before a listing agent offered them a business card. After all, why should they have a better customer experience buying a pair of shoes than spending $500k+ (or more) on a home they’ll own their whole life?” he says.
So, why Credit Karma? “Working with Credit Karma gives us the resources and immediate scale to accelerate our mission-driven work, reaching significantly more homebuyers than we could have imagined when we started. Credit Karma shares the same DNA that made us proud to work at Redfin, with unrelenting attention to how technology can improve the financial lives of its members.”
Things are changing in the industry and brokers best be prepared to innovate to keep up.
