Designing an embedded income workflow inside a lender broker portal
Company
Prudent AI
Role
Sole Designer
Industry
AI · Mortgage Tech
Scope
Web App
Product screens are under NDA
This case study focuses on my process, decisions, and outcomes. Detailed screens and interactive prototype are available upon request during interviews.
SUMMARY
A self-serve broker portal — powered by Prudent AI's income intelligence engine.
TPO Connect is a broker portal concept designed for mortgage lending workflows. I worked on a solution to embed Bank Statement Analyzer directly into the lender’s TPO portal so brokers could upload borrower documents, validate completeness, calculate qualified income, and submit cleaner files to internal lending teams.
The goal was simple: reduce manual work, reduce back-and-forth, and help brokers move from document collection to decision-ready submission in one workflow.
The problem
In broker-driven mortgage workflows, qualified income calculation often sits inside a fragmented process. Brokers gather documents, internal teams review them later, missing items get flagged through follow-ups, and income is reworked across departments.
That creates three major problems:
Submission quality depends too much on manual review,
Brokers don’t get enough confidence before handoff,
Internal teams spend time chasing preventable issues.
This slows down the loan pipeline at one of its most critical points.
The opportunity
Instead of treating income analysis as a separate downstream task, I explored how it could become part of the broker’s natural workflow inside the portal they already use.
The opportunity was to make the TPO portal do more than collect files. It could help brokers:
Upload and organize borrower documents,
Verify document readiness,
Calculate qualified income using actual financial data,
Submit a more complete file to LOs and AEs.
This slows down the loan pipeline at one of its most critical points.
MY APPROACH
I designed the experience around one product principle:
Bring the analysis to the workflow instead of moving the user to another system.
Rather than positioning Bank Statement Analyzer as a separate tool, I integrated it as a natural extension of the broker portal experience. This reduced context switching and made the feature feel operational, not optional.
The workflow was designed to support three moments:
Entry from the TPO portal
A broker should be able to access the analyzer directly from the portal navigation without breaking flow.
Document-driven validation
The experience should help brokers understand whether the submitted file is complete enough for income analysis, reducing avoidable follow-ups later.
Qualified income confidence before submission
The output should help brokers move forward with more certainty, instead of relying on manual interpretation and downstream correction.
Key design decisions
I designed the experience around one product principle:
Embedded, not external
A broker should be able to access the analyzer directly from the portal navigation without breaking flow.
Workflow over feature exposure
The focus was not “here is an analyzer.” The focus was “here is how a broker gets from documents to a cleaner loan submission.”
Reduce dependency on internal hand-holding
The design intentionally shifted more clarity upstream. Brokers could validate and prepare files earlier, which reduces unnecessary dependency on downstream teams.
Trust through structure
Because this touches qualified income, the product needed to feel reliable and operationally serious. I designed the experience to emphasize clarity, readiness, and confident submission over visual novelty.
OUTCOME
The final concept repositioned the broker portal from a submission interface into a more intelligent workflow layer.
It helped answer a practical business question:
How can we reduce preventable underwriting friction before the file even reaches internal review?
By embedding income analysis directly into the TPO journey, the experience created a more efficient path for both sides:
Brokers get more autonomy and confidence,
Lender teams receive better-prepared files,
And the process becomes less dependent on repetitive clarification loops.
Product screens are under NDA
This case study focuses on my process, decisions, and outcomes. Detailed screens and interactive prototype are available upon request during interviews.