Income and Employment Data as a Service

I recently jumped on the bandwagon and took the opportunity of low interest rates to refinance my mortgage. I didn’t expect an easy process but thought it’d be less work because we were using our existing mortgage lender. However, it was far from it, it was painful. They reasked for everything: employment offer letter (hard to obtain when you founded your own business), W2, paystub, bank statements, tax filings, ownership in my company, and insurance information. The total came out to 68 items! And the worst part might have been the secured email portal my bank was using, which required me to login and tediously download and upload documents and send correspondence. Every. Single. Time.

Ultimately, we got our house refinanced, but the end-to-end process of five painful months was frustrating. It was a good thing interest rates continued to stay flat or drop, had the Fed decided to increase interest rates, the lengthy period would have been real dollars lost. 

What was even more unsettling, was the process of my bank verifying that I worked at the company I founded: 

Bank Agent: “Our verification team is having a hard time contacting your HR from Pinwheel, would you be able to provide a verifiable company contact number for your HR, so we can get the employment verification completed.”

I provided them with the email of our Head of Ops

Bank Agent:“Hi, would you be able to provide the contact information, I will have to submit it to the call team which is a third party that will perform the call verification”

Me: “Hi, I have provided you with their email address but let me know if you need me to send again”

Bank Agent: “We need their phone number. We can only verify by calling them.”

Talk about not being very secure or easily gamed. The current system is antiquated and not optimized to handle today’s consumers.

In contrast, Pinwheel’s Income and Employment Data products link your payroll data directly to the lender, through an API, providing employment verification and income data such as paystub history and wages earned. Pinwheel eliminates the need to download and upload numerous documents to an antiquated web portal or provide the phone number of someone at your company to verify your employment. Instead, this “source-of-truth” information is seamlessly verified by you leveraging your existing payroll or employer credentials so you can transact faster and more securely, speeding transactions in time-sensitive situations like refinancing a mortgage. The benefits extend to companies too. Because everything is done programmatically and without having a middleman, our service saves many hours of manual verification time. 

If your company would like access to our Income and Employment API, shoot me a note or reach out to sales@getpinwheel.com.