Why Smart Credit Pulls Are the New KPI for High-Performing Mortgage Teams

As a mortgage lender, you likely track your pull-through rate, average cycle time, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). If you want to supercharge your success, smart credit pulls are another KPI to add to that list.

Smart credit pulls help you shift your attention to the very top of your sales funnel, streamline costs, and allocate your attention to borrowers who are most likely to close. So, what are smart credit pulls? And why are they such a crucial KPI for successful mortgage teams?

Below, we’ll answer these questions and explore how smart credit pulls can help you cut costs, close more loans, and bolster your bottom line. After that, we’ll introduce an innovative solution that can help you employ smarter credit pulls with ease.

Table of Contents

Why Lenders Should Take a Smarter Approach to Ordering Credit Reports in 2025

Historically, many mortgage lenders ordered traditional tri-merge credit reports for every applicant. This allowed them to verify leads’ creditworthiness using a simplified, standardized workflow.

Unfortunately, the cost of a full tri-merge credit report has climbed substantially in recent years. Here are just a few of FICO’s recent price adjustments:

In 2023, FICO introduced a tiered wholesale pricing structure, ranging from $0.60 to $2.75 per score. This led some lenders’ total costs to spike by up to 400%.
In 2024, FICO switched back to a standard royalty fee of $3.50 per score. This fee applied to hard pulls and soft pulls, spiking prequalification costs considerably.
In 2024, FICO increased its wholesale royalty for mortgage originations from $3.50 to $4.95 per score, causing the cost of tri-merges to hit $4.35 per borrower and $8.70 per joint application.
From 2022 to 2024, total credit costs per closed loan climbed from $50 to $100-$200. After factoring in credit reports for applications that didn’t close, those average costs climbed from $510 to $725 per closed loan.

While these fees involve small numbers, multiplying them by hundreds or thousands of leads per year can inflate lenders’ operational costs significantly. These price hikes have already taken a toll on lenders’ profitability. What’s more, many industry experts expect credit reporting costs to rise by at least 20% in 2025.

Read More: Keeping Costs Down Despite Rising Origination Costs in 2025

Smart Credit Pulls: The Solution to Rising Credit Reporting Costs

Even if you invest a lot of time and resources into lead generation, many leads may not be ready to qualify with you the first time around. Spending a premium on these applicants’ credit reports simply doesn’t make sense.

Smart credit pulls help you cut costs and prioritize qualified leads, without sacrificing loan quality or underwriting standards.

What Makes a Credit Pull “Smart”?

Smart credit pulls stand out for their:

Cost control – Smart credit pulls should reduce your overall credit reporting costs and add more flexibility to your budget.
Customizable thresholds – Smart credit pulls allow you to evaluate applicants according to your unique eligibility criteria at scale.
Automated workflows – Smart credit pulls use automation to eliminate the need for time-consuming, manual reviews.

If you want all of these features in one solution, Certified Credit’s Smart Select has you covered. This innovative tool allows you to screen applicants using just one- or two-bureau reports first. From there, it will automatically upgrade to a tri-merge for applicants who satisfy your pre-set criteria.

Here’s how it works:

You select your starting order – With Smart Select, you can customize how many bureaus and which ones you order from first, whether that’s a single-bureau report from Experian, a two-bureau report from Equifax and TransUnion, or another combination.
You set your eligibility criteria – Rather than sifting through individual credit files yourself, you can let Smart Select vet them on your behalf. Simply designate your eligibility criteria, including your minimum credit score requirements, ZIP codes, bankruptcy history, delinquency status, default status, and foreclosure status.
Smart Select will follow your personalized parameters – With your preferences in place, you can let Smart Select take care of the rest. It will automatically upgrade reports for applicants who meet your eligibility criteria using your choice of these three options:
- 1 bureau → 3 bureau
- 2 bureau → 3 bureau
- 1 bureau → 2 bureau → 3 bureau

Adjust these settings as needed – Smart Select puts you in the driver’s seat of your credit reporting process. If you need to adjust your settings or ordering parameters, you can do so at any time.

As you can see, Smart Select acts like a digital gatekeeper for your lending pipeline, ensuring you only invest additional time and resources into borrowers who are statistically likely to close. In turn, this solution helps you avoid paying for full reports for applicants who don’t meet your criteria.

3 Powerful Benefits of Smart Select

Smart Select does more than just cut credit reporting costs—it also offers the following benefits:

#1 Improved Pull-to-Close Ratios

By reserving full reports for borrowers who meet your minimum thresholds, you can curate your pipeline and fill it with serious, creditworthy applicants. This can immediately boost your pull-to-close ratio, another critical KPI to monitor if you want to improve your profitability.

#2 Increased Attention for Creditworthy Applicants

Many lenders spend hours on applications that are doomed from the start. By eliminating these leads right away, Smart Select can help your team focus on high-potential borrowers instead, enhancing your borrower experience and subsequent retention rates.

#3 Bigger Budget for Other Endeavors

With today’s tight profit margins, every dollar you spend on unnecessary credit reports has a high opportunity cost. By streamlining your credit reporting expenses, you can allocate more of your budget toward strategic marketing and borrower education initiatives. Every tri-merge report you skip for an unqualified lead can free up resources to support a qualified one.

How to Implement Smart Select into Your Existing Workflows

Adding a new tool to your tech stack can be daunting, even if it boasts impressive benefits. Fortunately, we’ve made the integration process a breeze at Certified Credit.

Smart Select can integrate with your chosen loan origination system (LOS) in a few clicks. After that, all you need to do is:

Define your eligibility criteria
Select your preferred ordering parameters
Train your team
Track and optimize Smart Select’s performance

We offer comprehensive training so you can make sure your loan officers and processors feel confident using Smart Select before officially incorporating it into your workflows. Smart Select also provides robust data and analytics, enabling you to optimize your credit spend over time.

Read More: Beyond Words: The True Meaning of Good Service

How to Nurture Unqualified Leads?

Smart Select quickly separates mortgage-ready applicants from those who need to work on their credit. While you shouldn’t waste money on those who don’t qualify with you yet, that doesn’t mean you should write them off entirely after removing them from your eligibility pool.

Rather than discarding these leads for good, you can nurture them into eligible applicants with the help of our educational resources and credit score improvement tools:

Educational resources — At Certified Credit, we produce a wealth of helpful content for aspiring homebuyers. Here are just a few articles you can pass along to your applicants:

Whether you share this content or create your own, providing robust borrower education can bring more leads back into your lending pipeline when they’re ready to re-apply.

Credit score improvement tools — Along with offering general credit education, you can hone your competitive edge by providing your non-qualifying mortgage applicants with custom credit score improvement suggestions. ScoreNavigator can assist with this process. This powerful platform generates personalized action plans, simulates the impact of various credit decisions, and calculates the best day for you to re-pull applicants’ credit. In turn, it gives you everything you need to efficiently coach non-qualifying leads into mortgage-ready borrowers.

Pull Credit Smarter With Certified Credit

In 2025, rising credit report costs and tight profit margins are pushing lenders to rethink how they qualify and convert leads. Lenders with the most impressive performance are employing smarter tools at the top of the funnel. By tracking smart pull data alongside traditional KPIs, you can join their ranks and enhance your success.

At Certified Credit, Smart Select isn’t the only solution we offer that can help you cut costs, enhance efficiencies, and improve the borrower experience. Our full suite of products and services includes: