Is Your Credit Provider Helping You Optimize Your Spend?

If you have a long-standing relationship with your credit provider, you may assume that your costs are under control. However, even trusted partners can introduce subtle price adjustments and other inefficiencies that slowly inflate your credit spend over time.

With today’s thin profit margins and rising credit reporting costs, you simply can’t afford to take a “set it and forget it” approach to vendor management. So ask yourself: When was the last time you examined your credit reporting invoices line by line?

Below, we’ll explain the core components of credit spend optimization and how to determine whether your current credit provider is driving meaningful improvement or simply maintaining the status quo.

Table of Contents

What Optimization Really Means: Efficiency, Insight, and Partnership

Many lenders think that optimizing their credit spend simply means selecting a provider that offers the lowest price. While pricing is an important factor, it’s not the only one that matters. True optimization involves finding a credit provider that helps you spend smarter—not just less.

To optimize your credit spend, look for a provider that prioritizes the following:

#1 Efficiency

Efficient credit partners proactively work to minimize waste in your workflows without compromising speed or loan quality. Use these questions to assess whether your current processes are as lean and cost-effective as they should be:

Am I ordering my prequalification reports cost-effectively?
Am I pulling more hard credit reports than necessary?
How often do I order credit reports for applicants who don’t close?
Is my provider helping me align my credit pulls with applicant intent?
Can I order verifications of income and employment (VOEs) automatically?
What types of VOE vendors do I have access to (instant-hit, CPD, etc.)?
Do I order verifications or undisclosed debt monitoring (UDM) prematurely?
Is my credit partner helping me forecast future costs?

Are you ordering undisclosed debt monitoring (UDM) reports but still seeing a high percentage of loans fall through? If you’re experiencing around 23% fall-out after ordering UDM, it may signal that you’re ordering too early in your pipeline, before borrowers are truly committed to moving forward.

Small tweaks in timing, such as waiting longer to order a VOE or UDM, may help you reclaim a significant portion of your spend without changing the products you rely on.

#2 Insight

Along with efficiency, effective vendor partners also provide clear insight into your lending workflow data with detailed invoices. By analyzing your monthly spend reports, you can identify areas of potential leakage and more accurately forecast future costs.

Unfortunately, many credit providers issue invoices that are unnecessarily long, vague, and complex, making it difficult to determine where your dollars are going. At Certified Credit, we strive to bring clarity to your credit spend with our:

Itemized invoices – We make it easy to review your invoices line by line to determine exactly what you’re paying and why.
Product-level usage data – We can provide detailed breakdowns of how often your mortgage lending business uses each credit product or service so you can make informed adjustments.
On-demand reporting – Our reporting can allow you to filter your lending data by branch, product, or loan officer to help you quickly identify notable spending patterns and areas for improvement.

#3 Partnership

As a busy mortgage lender, you may not have the time or expertise to optimize your credit spend on your own. That’s where a trusted credit partner can assist. The right credit provider should act less like a vendor and more like an advisor by taking the time to understand your workflows and proactively improve them.

At Certified Credit, we regularly help our clients optimize their workflows and tech stacks to cut costs. For example, you may be able to reduce your expenses by swapping out some hard pulls for files without score, which cost significantly less per report. Or perhaps you can save by automating key processes, from your prequalification to your credit report ordering and VOE.

We offer several solutions to help you do just that, including:

Smart Select, which helps you streamline your credit reporting costs by ordering from one bureau at a time and only upgrading reports for applicants that satisfy your minimum credit thresholds.
Cascade Prequal, which automatically prequalifies applicants according to your pre-set eligibility criteria and shares their submission data with your loan origination system.
Cascade VOE, which automatically orders verifications of applicants’ income and employment history from your custom list of vendors in your preferred order.
Cascade UDM, which continuously monitors active applicants’ credit activity during the quiet period, so you can ensure a smooth closing process, prevent loan fallout and repurchase demands, and reduce your Refresh Report expenses.

3 Questions to Ask Your Credit Provider

Now that you know what qualities to look for in a credit provider, you may be wondering how to evaluate your options. Simply ask the following questions:

#1 “Is my company being charged fairly and transparently?”

Most credit providers claim to offer fair pricing. But true fairness requires transparency, and that starts with clear, itemized invoices that show exactly what you’re paying for and why.

A high-quality provider should also be willing to walk you through any charges that fluctuate month to month, so don’t hesitate to ask about fees or “pass-through” costs that appear on your invoices.

#2 “Are we leveraging bundled or performance-based solutions?”

Next, see if your current provider offers discounts on bundled services. By leveraging credit reports, verifications, and other risk mitigation tools from the same vendor, you can often enjoy lower prices through reduced administrative overhead.

Along the same lines, seek out a credit partner that employs a performance-based pricing model. This pricing structure ties your fees to your workflows’ efficiency, rather than your total order volume. Thus, you’ll pay less when you reduce waste and redundancies.

At Certified Credit, we regularly review our clients’ performance data to identify cost-saving opportunities. We also offer bundled solutions and tiered, performance-based pricing so you can leverage strategic discounts and only pay for the products and services you truly need.

#3 “Is my provider helping me forecast and manage future costs?”

Credit invoices offer valuable insight, but they only reflect what has already occurred. To truly optimize your credit spend, you need a provider who can help you anticipate and prepare for what’s ahead, based on trends in your:

Pipeline volume
Credit pull patterns
Product mix

Certified Credit’s team can review your product usage data on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. We can also analyze how shifting market conditions may affect your future spending so you can combat potential cost leakage before it impacts your profit margins.

Certified Credit: Custom Reporting, Comprehensive Support, and Strategic Cost Control

At Certified Credit, we believe that lenders deserve a credit partner who acts as an extension of their team. With our innovative technology and pricing transparency, our goal is to help you protect your profit margins no matter what the mortgage market throws your way.

Here are the three pillars of our credit partnership:

#1 Custom Reporting for Complete Visibility

Having worked with hundreds of lenders across the country, we understand that every lender’s workflows are unique. That’s why we can provide customizable reporting dashboards that translate raw data into actionable insights.

These reports provide complete visibility into your spending, so you can make data-driven decisions about your ordering practices. For example, if one of your branches consistently pulls more prequalification reports than others, you can examine whether they may be pulling reports too early.

#2 Dedicated Support That Goes Beyond Basic Service

As a leading mortgage solutions provider, we’re passionate about innovative technology. However, we also understand that tech tools are only as useful as the customer support behind them.

To ensure you get the most out of our products and services, we’ll pair you up with a dedicated account manager who serves as your direct point of contact for your questions, optimization requests, and ongoing guidance. You’ll also enjoy access to our award-winning client success team, which:

Answers over 95% of calls within 30 seconds or less.
Responds to 95% of emails within an hour (often in less than 10 minutes).
Has an average of 10+ years of industry experience.
Is located 100% on-shore.

Whether you need help troubleshooting a tech issue or identifying opportunities to improve your workflow’s performance, our team is here to support you every step of the way.

#3 Strategic Cost Control

Finally, we help our clients control their costs through strategic automation, bundling, and performance-based pricing. For example, our Cascade line of automated solutions can streamline your expenses and save time by reducing your manual workload.

Along with Cascade, we also offer a robust suite of:

Credit score improvement tools
Fraud and risk mitigation solutions
Flood zone determinations
Property and valuation tools
Underwriting compliance
Settlement services

Thanks to our extensive, end-to-end suite of mortgage technology solutions, you can meet nearly all of your technology needs under one roof, simplify your vendor management, and enjoy the cost-saving perks of product bundling and performance-based pricing.

Optimization Starts With the Right Partner. Not Just the Right Price!

To sum it up, lenders often evaluate credit partners by their pricing alone. While cost is a crucial consideration, the lowest-rate vendors don’t always provide the best value. Instead, you should partner with a credit provider that provides transparent pricing, cost-saving solutions, and consultative support.

At Certified Credit, we provide the enterprise-grade tools and personalized support you need to gain a clear view of your credit spend. More importantly, we take a proactive role in helping you optimize your operational expenses over time.

Ready to optimize your credit spend? Schedule a credit consultation with Certified Credit today!

Sources:

Milliman. Mortgage market and housing trends – Q1 2025.

https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/mortgage-market-and-housing-trends-q1-2025

HousingWire. Credit reports will be at least 20% more expensive in 2025, frustrated mortgage execs say.

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/credit-reporting-costs-to-rise-20-or-more-in-2025/

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