For real estate investors, securing capital quickly can determine whether a project succeeds or falls through. Traditional private lending relies on manual underwriting processes, where reviewing financial records, tax documents, and property disclosures takes hours or even days. These administrative delays create operational bottlenecks, stalling approvals and forcing investors to wait for crucial funding.
Fintech lender New Silver is addressing this friction with its new AI-assisted underwriting agent. The automated tool processes and validates uploaded loan documents in under one minute, significantly accelerating loan evaluations. In this Executive Q&A, Kirill Bensonoff, CEO of New Silver, discusses how this technology works, how it changes the lending workflow, and what automated underwriting means for real estate investors across the United States.
Q: What specific operational bottlenecks in traditional real estate loan underwriting led New Silver to develop an AI-assisted underwriting agent?
Kirill Bensonoff: Document review has always required real attention to detail and been a drag on timelines. The team could spend two or three hours on one file just sorting paperwork to check that everything matched our requirements. As we’ve grown, we started asking what it would take to give our team that same level of accuracy without asking them to spend hours of manual review on every file. We built the agent to close that gap, so the paperwork can move at the same pace as a good deal.
Q: Your new tool reviews and validates loan documents in under one minute. How does the AI process multiple documents concurrently while verifying data against the client’s application?
Kirill Bensonoff: Each document doesn’t wait in line behind the one before it. When a client uploads a file, whether that’s a bank statement, an insurance certificate, or a whole HOA package bundled into one PDF, the AI agent reads it, figures out what it is, and splits it apart if it needs to be. From there, each document gets handed off to its own review process running inside the agent, all running at the same time instead of one after another. A person can only look at one page at a time, but the agent doesn’t have that limit, so ten documents get checked in less time than it used to take to check one.
Q: Immediate feedback is a core feature of this new system. How does real-time document verification help clients resolve issues faster during the application process?
Kirill Bensonoff: In the past, feedback arrived once a team member reached that document in their queue. Now, the agent can flag things the moment a document comes in, so clients get that same quality of review within a minute instead of waiting for their file’s turn in the queue. If an ID has expired, or the insurance coverage falls short of what we require, they know right away and can fix it before it holds up the rest of their file. When it comes to real estate, timing can be just as important as the numbers on a deal, so getting that feedback loop down to minutes changes what’s actually possible for an investor working on a tight timeline.
Q: From an internal management perspective, how does turning document review into an automated pipeline allow New Silver to scale its lending capacity?
Kirill Bensonoff: A higher loan volume used to mean a bigger team, and it took months to get someone fully up to speed. Now a lot of that work, such as the sorting, the checking, the back and forth on paperwork, can happen entirely automatically. Our team still looks at the edge cases and has the conversations with clients, but they’re not burning hours on the tasks that don’t need a person anymore. We can grow quickly without adding a large number of people to the team.
Q: Fast approvals are crucial in private lending, but risk assessment remains paramount. How does automated document validation support portfolio performance and consistency at scale?
Kirill Bensonoff: Speed only matters if the underwriting behind it holds up. The goal was for the AI underwriting agent to apply our existing rules with total consistency on every file, so our team could focus on the areas that need human judgment. The agent checks every document against the same standards every time, and we’ve found that it catches small details that are easy to miss when you’re moving through many files by hand. A human still makes the final call where it’s needed, but the documents in front of them have already been verified by the agent, so their review is faster and better informed.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you see AI technology continuing to shape the private lending space for real estate investors?
Kirill Bensonoff: Document review was the natural starting point because it’s high-volume and rules-based, but more aspects of the lending process are becoming quicker, some are even instant. Private lenders will need to look at rebuilding the whole pipeline around speed and certainty, not just automating one step of it. Real estate investors are increasingly choosing certainty of execution over a marginally better rate, and that’s going to keep tech-first platforms pulling further ahead.
Automating the document review phase marks a clear shift in how private lenders evaluate loan applications. By replacing manual paperwork checks with parallel AI verification, New Silver cuts document review times to less than sixty seconds. This speed allows internal teams to handle higher loan volumes while providing real estate investors with immediate status updates and faster access to capital.
As speed and execution certainty become essential in competitive real estate markets, tech-enabled lending platforms will continue to set the industry standard. New Silver demonstrates how targeted automation removes traditional funding delays without sacrificing underwriting accuracy. By modernizing capital delivery, the company helps investors capture opportunities and strengthen local communities nationwide.
To learn more, visit www.newsilver.com
