If your credit costs are outpacing your loan volume and revenue, you’re not alone. Lenders across the country are struggling to absorb rising credit bureau fees, verification charges, and compliance requirements as loan production and profit margins remain tight.
Mortgage origination costs have increased by 35% over the past three years. And while most lenders are feeling the pinch, some manage these pressures better than others. The top 25% of lenders average just $6,900 per loan, compared to the bottom quartile’s $16,500. This 2.4X cost differential reveals an important truth: You can’t control every factor that drives your credit costs, but you can control more than you think.
Below, we’ll break down several proven strategies to help you cut your credit spend and uncover untapped savings as industry prices continue to climb.
Table of Contents
Why Costs Keep Climbing: Industry Trends and Regulatory Pressures
Before diving into the cost-saving strategies, it’s important to understand why credit is becoming more expensive. Some underlying drivers behind rising costs include:
- Inflation and increased labor costs – Many credit bureaus and verification providers are raising their prices to account for broader economic pressures, from rising labor costs to ongoing inflation.
- Heightened compliance expectations – According to a Q3 2025 report, mortgage fraud risk continues to rise, increasing 8.2% year-over-year. This is just one example of why credit providers are investing more money into data verification, monitoring, and system safeguards. Naturally, these elevated compliance costs are reflected in their latest prices.
- Vendor consolidation – Over the past decade, mergers and acquisitions have reduced the number of verification providers. With fewer options to choose from, lenders have less leverage in price negotiations.
As a mortgage lender, you can’t do much to mitigate these factors, but there are still meaningful ways to streamline your credit spend.
What You Can Control: Optimization, Bundling, and Workflow Efficiency
As a mortgage lender, you have agency over many aspects of your credit ordering process, including when you pull reports, who you allow to initiate orders, and which products you rely on. You can optimize these factors by:
#1 Adjusting Your Timing to Reduce Premature Orders and Re-Pulls
Many lenders don’t realize how much money they lose by ordering credit reports and verifications too early. By delaying these orders until after an applicant meets certain criteria, you can:
- Prevent premature pulls
- Lower your re-pull frequency
- Reduce your overall credit spend
Determining the ideal position in your lending pipeline to pull reports requires careful analysis. That’s where Certified Credit can lend our expertise. Having evaluated hundreds of lenders’ workflows, we can help you refine your timing strategy to reduce waste and improve cost efficiency.
Read More: What Does It Mean to Maximize Credit Cost Recovery?
#2 Tighten Up Your User Permissions
Along with timing, it’s essential to review your software system’s user restrictions. All too often, lenders assume they’ve set up thoughtful user permissions, only to learn that their LOS isn’t enforcing those rules the way they expected.
Consider a lender who believes their tri-merge report ordering is reserved for underwriters. If their LOS permissions aren’t configured correctly, unqualified loan officers may still be able to order high-cost reports for early-stage borrowers, quietly inflating their credit spend month after month.
You can resolve this permission problem and significantly reduce your credit spend by:
- Auditing who can order what within your LOS and credit platform
- Clearly defining which report types should be used at each borrower stage
- Setting and testing strict ordering restrictions to prevent accidental or early pulls
Read More: How to Optimize Your Mortgage Lending Workflows For Better Business Results
#3 Prioritize Integration and Product Bundling
As we mentioned earlier, top-performing lenders are highly skilled at finding creative ways to save. According to Freddie Mac’s 2024 Cost to Originate Study, these top performers invest in “systems that better integrate tools and data from different parts of the process.”
Finding tools that talk to each other is easier when you partner with a solutions provider that prioritizes seamless connectivity, like Certified Credit. We specifically design our solutions to integrate with leading LOS so you can access your applicant and borrower data from one place. Better yet, bundling multiple solutions from the same provider can unlock even greater savings.
At Certified Credit, our technology suite offers a wide range of tools you can mix and match to fit your workflow, including:
- Customizable credit reports
- Credit score improvement tools
- Automated prequalification
- Automated lead generation tools
- Automated verification of income and employment (VOE)
- Automated UDM
- Fraud and risk mitigation solutions
- Flood zone determinations
- Property and valuation tools
- Underwriting compliance
- Settlement services
Our team can help you identify which solutions will best serve your lending workflows and secure the most cost-effective pricing. As you bundle our solutions, you can streamline your billing and simplify your vendor management.
#4 Employ Advanced Automation
At Certified Credit, many of our solutions feature advanced automation. Automating key lending workflows can cut your loan origination spend by:
- Streamlining the time you spend on tedious tasks
- Reducing unnecessary credit pulls and re-pulls
- Moving applicants to the next steps at the ideal times
- Minimizing manual verification work and follow-ups
For example, many of our clients reduce their credit spend by using SmartSelect to automate their credit report ordering. This innovative solution allows you to pull reports from one credit bureau at a time. If an applicant satisfies your criteria with a one- or two-bureau report, Smart Select will automatically request the next bureau. Meanwhile, applicants who fall short of your standards won’t incur any additional costs.
Read More: Before the Credit Pull: How Smarter Identity Screening Saves Lenders Time, Money, and Headaches
Leverage Automated Milestone Ordering
Another way you can save time and money is by leveraging milestone ordering for Undisclosed Debt Monitoring to automatically trigger monitoring at the optimal point in your lending process.
You can configure it to activate once a borrower reaches a specific stage, such as after initial underwriting approval or complete application submission. This ensures you’re monitoring borrowers who are genuinely progressing through your pipeline, not those still in early exploration.
This helps your team, because they no longer need to manually track when to order UDM or determine the appropriate timing for each file. The system manages it automatically, ensuring consistent coverage across all loans and reducing the risk of oversight. You’ll catch undisclosed debt issues before closing while avoiding unnecessary monitoring costs on files that don’t advance beyond pre-approval.
This automation reduces administrative burden and allows your team to focus on meaningful borrower interactions rather than process management.
Real-World Ways to Save: How Lenders Reduce Spend With Smarter Workflows
With these four strategies in mind, let’s take a look at how they work in practice. Here are two real-world examples of how Certified Credit clients have successfully reduced their credit spend through smarter workflows:
Example #1: Client Eliminates Duplicate Pulls Through Proper User Controls
One of our clients was struggling with unpredictable credit costs that varied significantly by branch. They assumed their loan officers were limited to ordering soft pulls or prequalification reports until borrowers submitted applications and met specific milestones.
After a detailed audit, our team discovered that their LOS permissions had never been properly configured to enforce these report restrictions. Instead, any user with access could order a full tri-merge at any point in the process, even before an application was submitted.
After correcting this user control issue and implementing milestone-based restrictions, the lender saw a notable reduction in unnecessary credit pulls and fall out, which lowered their credit spend and facilitated reliable forecasting for the first time in years.
Example #2: Client Reduces Fallout Waste By Delaying VOEs
Another one of our clients routinely ordered instant VOEs during the early stages of their application process. After reviewing their lending workflows, we suggested delaying instant VOEs until after borrowers pass key milestones, such as providing a clear intent to proceed with the loan, submitting supporting documents like pay stubs, or attempting to log into their payroll provider directly.
By first requesting supporting documents or verifying that borrowers can access their payroll accounts before ordering paid instant VOEs, this lender substantially reduced how much they spend on verification fees for fallout files without sacrificing their loan quality or borrower experience.
Example #3: Right-Sizing Verification Orders: A 90% Reduction in Supplement Costs
Another one of our clients was ordering account supplements on nearly every file, driving up costs and creating unnecessary work for their processing team. They assumed supplements were required to maintain compliance and loan quality standards.
After analyzing their workflow, we discovered they were ordering supplements at a rate that far exceeded industry norms. More importantly, many of these verifications weren’t necessary at all.
We recommended implementing a more strategic approach: requesting bank statements or mortgage statements directly from borrowers before ordering paid supplements. By shifting the initial burden to borrower-provided documentation and reserving supplements for cases where statements couldn’t be obtained or required additional verification, this lender reduced their supplement orders from 1,000 to just 100 over six months. This change significantly lowered their verification costs while maintaining the same level of loan quality and compliance.
Read More: Cutting Costs & Building Business with Prequalification & SmartSelect
Certified Credit’s Approach: Partnership, Transparency, and Fair Pricing
The mortgage industry has an abundance of vendors promising “efficiency,” “cost savings,” and “better borrower experiences.” At Certified Credit, we go one step further by explaining exactly what these buzzwords mean and how they’re achieved.
We can help offset your rising credit spend with our:
- Partnership model – We are deeply committed to our client’s success. That’s why we align our incentives with our lenders, offering performance-based pricing models and personalized workflow optimization support.
- Transparency – Vendor pricing is often complex by design. At Certified Credit, we pride ourselves on providing clear invoices, transparent pricing, and honest assessments of what your mortgage lending business truly needs to succeed. We want our lenders to feel empowered—not kept in the dark.
- Bundled solutions – Real cost efficiency comes from solving multiple workflow challenges at once. Our solutions help you do just that while taking advantage of bundled pricing perks.
Read More: Certified Credit Wins TMC’s 2024 Lender’s Choice Award for Best Customer Service
When Margins Are Tight, Smarter Credit Makes the Difference
In summary, credit costs may be on the rise, but that doesn’t mean your budget has to stretch with them. You can regain control by focusing on your workflows, products, and permissions. All you need is the right strategy and the right partner.
By partnering with Certified Credit, we can help you:
- Uncover and reduce hidden waste
- Avoid unnecessary credit pulls
- Automate key lending workflows
- Strengthen your financial forecasting
- Improve your borrower experience
Ready to gain control over your credit spend? Reach out to Certified Credit to schedule your credit consultation today!
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do credit reports typically cost mortgage lenders per loan?
Credit costs vary significantly across the industry. According to Freddie Mac’s 2024 Cost to Originate Study, top-performing lenders average around $6,900 per loan in total origination costs, while less efficient lenders may spend up to $16,500 per loan. The specific cost of credit reports and verifications depends on your workflow, timing, and which products you use throughout the lending process.
Why are credit bureau fees increasing for mortgage lenders?
Credit costs are rising due to several industry-wide factors, including inflation and increased labor costs at credit bureaus, heightened compliance requirements driven by rising fraud risk, and vendor consolidation that has reduced competition in the marketplace. According to a Q3 2025 report from Cotality, mortgage fraud risk alone increased 8.2% year-over-year, requiring credit providers to invest more in verification and monitoring systems.
When is the best time to pull a credit report during the mortgage process?
The optimal timing varies by lender, but many lenders reduce costs by delaying credit pulls until applicants meet certain qualification criteria rather than ordering reports immediately. This prevents premature pulls on borrowers who won’t proceed and reduces the frequency of costly re-pulls. A detailed workflow analysis can help determine the ideal timing for your specific lending process.
What is SmartSelect and how does it reduce credit costs?
SmartSelect is an automated credit ordering solution that pulls reports from one credit bureau at a time. If an applicant’s score meets your criteria with a one- or two-bureau report, the system automatically stops there, avoiding the cost of pulling from all three bureaus. For applicants who don’t meet your standards, SmartSelect prevents unnecessary additional pulls, helping you avoid waste on unqualified borrowers.
How can user permissions help control credit spending?
Improperly configured user permissions often allow staff to order expensive tri-merge reports when cheaper alternatives would suffice. By auditing and restricting who can order specific report types at each borrower stage, lenders can prevent costly accidental pulls and ensure that high-cost reports are reserved for qualified applicants at appropriate pipeline stages.
Should I order verification of employment (VOE) early in the application process?
Delaying instant VOE orders until after borrowers demonstrate clear intent to proceed can significantly reduce verification costs on fallout files. Consider requesting supporting documents like pay stubs first, or verifying that borrowers can access their payroll accounts directly before ordering paid instant verifications. This approach maintains loan quality while eliminating unnecessary spending on borrowers who don’t complete the process.
What are the benefits of bundling mortgage technology solutions?
Bundling multiple solutions from a single provider delivers several advantages including better system integration, streamlined data access, simplified vendor management, consolidated billing, and often more competitive bundled pricing. According to Freddie Mac’s 2024 Cost to Originate Study, top-performing lenders invest in “systems that better integrate tools and data from different parts of the process,” which contributes to their lower per-loan costs.
How can automation reduce my mortgage origination costs?
Automated workflows cut origination costs by streamlining repetitive tasks, reducing unnecessary credit pulls and re-pulls, moving applicants through the pipeline at optimal times, and minimizing manual verification work. Features like milestone-based ordering can automatically trigger services like Undisclosed Debt Monitoring at the right stage, ensuring consistent coverage without administrative burden.
Sources:
Freddie Mac. 2024 Cost to Originate Study.
https://sf.freddiemac.com/docs/pdf/cost-to-originate-full-study-2024.pdf
Reuters. US labor costs rise slightly above expectations in second quarter.
HousingWire. Cotality reports 8.2% rise in mortgage fraud risk during Q3.
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/mortgage-fraud-risk-increase-2025/
