HFS Horizons: The Best Service Providers for Mortgage Reinvention, 2025

The mortgage industry is shifting from headcount-heavy tactics to innovation-led execution, fueled by automation and AI. The 2026 outlook for the industry looks steady, buoyed by easing mortgage rates, incremental affordability gains, and a modest rebound in housing activity. As AI and automation move from the edge to the core, 2025 marks a long-overdue reset for the industry. The old playbook of cutting costs and slashing headcount won’t cut it anymore. Sustainable growth now hinges on transformation. Mortgage lenders are racing to protect margins, unlock capital, and modernize to differentiate, and they’re turning to service providers to meet these goals. This study explores how those providers are enabling the transformation needed to get there.

The HFS Horizons: The Best Service Providers for Mortgage Reinvention, 2025 report assesses how well service providers help mortgage clients across the globe embrace innovation and realize value across three distinct Horizons.

• Horizon 1 is functional digital transformation: The ability to drive digitized processes to improve business outcomes such as cost reduction, speed, and efficiency across elements of the mortgage value chain.
• Horizon 2 is enterprise transformation: Horizon 1 + enablement of the OneOffice model of end-to-end organizational alignment across the front, middle, and back offices to drive unmatched stakeholder experience and enterprise modernization.
• Horizon 3 is ecosystem transformation: Horizon 2 + ability to drive the OneEcosystem impact via collaboration across multiple organizations with common objectives around driving completely new sources of value.

This research evaluates the capabilities of 15 service providers across the mortgage value chain based on a range of dimensions to understand the why, what, how, and so what of their service offerings.

It highlights the value-based positioning for each participant across the three distinct Horizons. It also includes detailed profiles of each service provider, outlining their facts, strengths, and development opportunities.

The report is global in scope and offers critical insights for mortgage companies, service providers supporting mortgage clients, and ecosystem partners.

HFS Horizons: The Best Service Providers for Mortgage Reinvention, 2025

Note: All service providers within a Horizon are listed alphabetically
Source: HFS Research, 2025

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