Exploring Knowledge-Based Systems for Commercial Mortgage Underwriting

While the residential mortgage industry has benefited from automated mortgage applications and underwriting, the commercial mortgage industry still relies heavily on manual underwriting. The paper aims to present the state of research in the domain of knowledge-based systems (KBS) and commercial mortgage underwriting and to identify the challenges in commercial mortgage underwriting by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR). The SLR uses the review process outlined by Kitchenham and includes a hybrid coding approach to analyze the data. The paper finds that KBS and ontologies to automate commercial mortgage underwriting were not studied yet. It also identifies several challenges in mortgage underwriting in data, process, and underwriting categories. The findings of this paper can be used for further research in the field of commercial mortgage underwriting and KBS. KBS appear suitable to address the identified challenges and can be integrated into information system automation or artificial intelligence (AI) implementations for commercial mortgage underwriting.