United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), the second largest mortgage lender in the United States, recently announced that they accepted the very first mortgage payment made fully in cryptocurrency during September of 2021 and that they already had five additional cryptocurrency payments processed during the start of October.
By Andrew Senior
October 14th, 2021
During a conference call earlier in the year, CEO Mat Ishbia laid out the companies aims regarding crypto payments saying;
“That’s something that we’ve been working on, and we’re excited that hopefully, in Q3, we can actually execute on that before anyone in the country because we are a leader in technology and innovation.”
The completed mortgage payments made in September and October are ground breaking in several ways. They are not only the first payments made via cryptocurrency for UWM, but represent the first crypto transactions in the mortgage industry as a whole. While these handful of transactions only represent a pilot program for UWM, the company is making it crystal clear what their long term goals are. Ishbia went on to say;
“As we said last quarter, we were going to look into accepting cryptocurrency and test it to see if it’s a faster, easier and cheaper solution and thanks to our innovative technology team members, the transactions were successful. Due to the current combination of incremental costs and regulatory uncertainty in the Crypto space we’ve concluded we aren’t going to extend beyond a pilot at this time.”
Ishbia is clearly forecasting a world where crypto becomes much more widely recognized as an invaluable financial tool and is positioning UWM to be at the forefront of integrating various tokens into their ecosystem for us as payments. He went on to point out the innovative features UWM is bringing to market including the recent addition of UWM’s BOLT service. A fully enclosed self service platform that provides borrowers the ability to get approved for a mortgage in as little as 15 minutes and highlighted UWM’s commitment to further innovation by pointing out that the company has a team of over 1,200 technology experts who will continue to develop industry leading tools for clients with eyes on revolutionizing the mortgage industry as a whole.
UWM did not make the disclosure as to whether the company would hold crypto or convert the funds into fiat currencies. Ishbia did comment that the group’s first footsteps into the crypto world for transactions were made by accepting Bitcoin to start but would be closely studying the feasibility of allowing Etherium and other cryptocurrencies to be used in the future.
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