Ask almost anyone who has bought a home and they will tell you the financing was the worst part. Weeks of waiting. Documents requested twice. A process that seemed designed to wear them down at the exact moment they were making the largest purchase of their life. Ben Anderson has spent his career inside that machine, closing more than $4 billion in loans, and his diagnosis is direct. The slowness was never really about the borrower. It was about the limits of doing everything by hand.
That is the part Anderson believes artificial intelligence is about to change, and faster than most expect. The U.S. mortgage market still originated more than $2 trillion in loans in 2025 on infrastructure that, by most accounts, has gone largely unchanged for decades. Anderson sees that not as a reason for caution but as the size of the opportunity.
From Days to Minutes
The technology to read income, assets, and credit and return a decision almost instantly already exists. What has been missing, Anderson argues, is the willingness to rebuild the process around it rather than bolt it onto the old one. Early industry pilots hint at the scale of the change: in some consumer lending deployments, the time from application to a standard approval has fallen from several days to under an hour, according to industry analyses of AI-native origination. Anderson’s prediction is that a genuine, qualified approval in about a minute is not a marketing line but a near-term reality.
A one-minute approval is not science fiction, it is an engineering problem, and the engineering is mostly solved,” Anderson says. “The industry just has to be willing to let go of the old process.
Why Speed Lowers Cost
A faster approval is not only a convenience, in Anderson’s view. It is the mechanism that brings the price of a mortgage down. When the process is slow, every manual step carries a cost, and that cost lands on the borrower through fees and wasted time. Strip those steps out with AI and real expense leaves the system. That is the logic behind one of Anderson’s favorite claims, that AI will lower the cost of housing, not by changing what a home is worth, but by removing the expensive human overhead that sits between a buyer and the keys.
AI does not change what a house is worth. It changes what it costs to get into one.
The Borrower Most Likely to Benefit
Anderson frames the stakes around access. He wrote a bestselling book, “Homeowner Now: The 7 True Steps of Homeownership,” because he believes ownership remains the most reliable way ordinary people build lasting wealth. The barrier, he says, was rarely desire. It was a path that was confusing, slow, and priced out of reach for too many families. AI attacks all three problems at once, making the process clearer, faster, and cheaper, and in doing so widens the door to first-time and underserved buyers who get squeezed out by friction.
The people who lose in a slow, expensive system are almost always the ones with the least room to absorb it,” Anderson says. “Make the process fast and cheap and you do not just help the industry, you help the family that almost did not qualify.
A Bet on Access, Not Just Efficiency
Anderson runs Low Rate Co as what he calls The AI Mortgage Company, and he leads Cindie.ai, the platform automating the work that once consumed an originator’s entire day. He knows the bolder version of his forecast unsettles parts of his own industry. A one-minute approval and a cheaper route to ownership read as a threat to any business that depends on the process staying complicated. He sees it the other way. Asked how he wants to be remembered, he does not lead with production numbers. He says coach, teacher, and father, and he says he wants to be known for helping the mortgage industry evolve rather than defend the way it has always worked.
The professionals who help build that faster, fairer version of the business, he believes, will be the ones borrowers trust for the next twenty years. Through Ben Anderson 365 he intends to bring as many of them along as he can.