At AI Summit, Better, NEO execs discuss how partnership is driving productivity

Earlier this year, NEO Home Loans and Better Mortgage announced a partnership that combined Better’s AI-driven technology with NEO’s distributed retail expertise. The ultimate goal? To transform mortgage lending and find the balance of AI and human interaction in the loan process.

During Better’s earnings call in March, which covered data for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024, the company announced that since beginning production in January 2025, ‘NEO Powered by Better’ has served a total of approximately 220 families, equating to approximately $95 million of funded loan volume.

Of course, that was back in March. This week, Chad Smith, president and COO of Better, and Ryan Grant, president of NEO Home Loans, got together onstage at HousingWire’s AI Summit in Dallas to discuss the benefits of combining AI technology with human loan officers.

“When we first met with Better, I honestly didn’t think it made sense,” said Grant. “But once I saw their tech stack and how they could lower the cost of fulfillment, I realized they could be cheaper and more profitable than us. That got my attention.”

Establishing the partnership, both NEO and Better sought to answer how a consumer ideally shops for a mortgage. They found that the best balance between productivity and trust is that AI opens the door, but a human closes the deal.

“If not today, very soon in the future, we’re going to have our AI agents and our AI companions that are shopping for our groceries, shopping for our insurance… shopping for mortgages. And from everything that I’ve studied, it takes a very kind of open-ended system to be able to make those engagements where you have deep-level AI integrations,” said Grant.

For Grant, Better’s proprietary loan origination platform, Tinman, which is architected for flexibility with AI integrations, was what sold him on what he called the “last mile concept,” where a loan officer interacts with a borrower who has done their research and shopping with the help of AI.

“No one calls a loan officer to ask if they should buy a house,” Grant said. “They call when they know they need a loan. Our job is to meet them there with sound advice, strategy and guidance — not endless back-end tasks technology can handle.”

Beyond the partnership, both Grant and Smith agree that technology adoption is as much about mindset as capability. “We see disparity between teams that adopt new tools and those that don’t,” Smith said. “Fail fast, try new things, and keep your head in the right place.”

Grant believes the future will favor originators who pair strong personal branding with technology-enabled scalability. “We made a technology bet,” he said. “If we can remove 95% of what keeps originators from their genius zone, the opportunity ahead is huge.”