Among the many tedious steps in the mortgage manufacturing process, verification of income and employment (VOIE) might top the list of challenges for lenders.
Ethan Winchell’s company, Truework, aims to remove these headaches. The San Francisco-based firm was founded in 2017 and has sprouted into a major mortgage technology partner. When Truework was acquired in April by Checkr, it had raised $125 million in seed funding and had a valuation of $480 million.
Winchell, a 2025 HousingWire Rising Star, sat down for an interview earlier this week at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual convention in Las Vegas to discuss his company’s priorities as it seeks to help lenders lower costs and overcome tech hurdles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Neil Pierson: You founded your company when you were 25, so what do you feel like you’ve learned in the ensuing years and how have you become a better leader in that time?
Ethan Winchell: If you wake up every morning and something annoys you, your two choices are to fix it or to recognize that you’ve chosen to prioritize fixing something else, and so you’ve got to stop complaining about it. I really like having that amount of agency over your work on a day-to-day basis. It’s how I continue to sustain motivation.
From a leadership perspective, it’s really about trying to transmit that message to as many people as possible in the organization. When things exist for no particular reason, often my invitation is to just poke at it, see what comes out the other side and not have these sacred cows.
I think that mindset is helpful in this industry, which has big ambitions and big responsibility but moves slowly. I don’t think anyone can say that it moves fast.
NP: It sounds like innovation is a big part of what you do. Do you have to accept failure along the way and learn from it?
EW: Our approach there is kind of like Apple’s. They’re never really the first adopter of a new technology, but what they do create is the most customer-focused, easy-to-use manifestation.
That’s very much part and parcel of how we think about bringing innovation to a mortgage customer base. How we think about innovation is, how can we solve a customer problem 10x more effectively because of secular tailwinds of technology getting better all the time?
The customer problem is inclusive of how their compliance team is going to run the change management to bring this tool in. You need to think about all the things that your customer needs to go through to bring your technology to market — not just a shiny thing that’s going to exist in a prototype but not actually hit the mark when it comes to deployment and production.
NP: Truework reported that it’s now working with eight of the top 10 originators in the country. Can you dive into what your conversations with these companies are like? Are there a lot of similar pain points?
EW: The No. 1 pain point is people spend too much money on income, employment and asset validation. And you see this every time there’s a new cost-to-originate survey — production costs only seem to go up. Somehow, we’re spending more money on technology and more money on people to produce a loan than we ever have before.
A lot of people will buy software or buy data. They’ll struggle with the change management process and they’ll have this data that’s not optimized into their workflows, so they’re not actually removing any duplicative labor expenses. They just end up with both of these costs going up.
Another big problem that our customers come to us with is, they try to go down the path of, ‘Let me build out a waterfall.’ It’s really, really hard. There’s no silver bullet. There’s always new tools coming online that allow different data sources — like all the great work the GSEs are doing with single-source validation — but that is not going to work 100 times out of 100.
Our hypothesis is that it’s always going to be messy. You need six or seven different data sources to validate income, assets and employment, and you shouldn’t have to care how that gets done. You should care about knowing your borrower’s capacity so you can run your DTI calculation, know if they qualify for the product or not, and focus on sales.
NP: Can you talk about what you’re doing to differentiate yourself from competitors in the VOIE space? What is Truework doing that no one else is?
EW: I would actually say we do not compete with anyone in this space. What we compete with is really the status quo. Equifax’s Work Number product has been the industry standard and still is the industry standard.
The status quo for a lender for a long time was, I will run the Work Number on loans where I need income and employment validated. I will get a percentage of those that they have in their database, and when I can’t get them, I will then collect a document, and when it’s time to fund my loan, I will pick up the phone and call that employer.
That’s a six-step process that you’re managing just to do asset, income and employment verification. And that requires technology sophistication that, whether you’re doing it through partners or whether you’re doing it for yourself, it’s a big project to manage.
So often, people say, ‘I’m not going to buy Truework right now. I’m going to just try to make my status quo a little bit better, because I heard this other new vendor is going to do this thing for me.’ Then they’ll come back two years later and say, ‘I tried it. There’s a lot of work and I’m still not where I thought I was going to be. Can you guys just manage this whole funnel?’ I wish we could save those people the two years of going down this path, because we’ve seen it so often.
We have customers like PennyMac. They are an incredibly high-performing loan production outfit. They found they cannot build this themselves. They have to rely on vendors to do it. And when they relied on us, they were able to save 20%, 25% on their production expenses relative to income. That’s a top-of-the-mark company, ton of volume, very sophisticated team, very competent technology experts, and still we were able to drive a meaningful outcome for them.
