Walker & Dunlop conducted an intensive week-long sandbox test of UpLink across its routine procedures. The goal was to validate the system’s performance and scalability across various document types: primarily loan documents, income notices, and SEC financial statements contained in large, complex PDFs.
During the test, the team retrieved a wide range of data points, including nuanced terms from multiple document types. With well-crafted questions, UpLink successfully reduced false positives and accurately pulled data, allowing for quick verification and deeper quality control. The automation of Snip creation, approval workflows, and easy spot-checking helped replace manual efforts while maintaining traceability for audit and compliance purposes.
"UpLink helped us turn hours of manual compliance work into minutes. We no longer need to open every file or manually search for figures—everything is searched, snipped, and ready for review. It has significantly reduced both preparation and reviewer time."
Dylan Chaikin
Manager, Financial Reporting
The primary use case involves compliance reporting for Fannie Mae (The Federal National Mortgage Association, USA), which previously required several hours of manual review across financial statements, third-party reconciliations, and supporting PDFs. Using UpLink, the team consolidated all relevant documents into a single staging area, ran the questions, and completed the work in about 30 minutes - including upload and coordination, and review time. The actual data retrieval took just minutes, drastically reducing both staff and reviewer effort. This contrasts with the 4-5 hours it would take for preparers to manually collect documents, extract data, and prepare workpapers.
UpLink transformed a tedious, human error-prone workflow into a streamlined process, eliminating the need to open and search each file manually. Additionally, its snip traceability and review marking features provided a new level of documentation integrity and reviewer assurance.
Looking ahead, the team at Walker & Dunlop is exploring additional AI-driven possibilities within DataSnipper. They expect UpLink to play a critical role in improving compliance, streamlining financial reporting, and validating its loan servicing data at scale. The servicing system includes several thousand rows and multiple data fields per loan, and the team’s vision is to use UpLink to automatically validate every data point against original documents. This initiative has the potential to dramatically improve data integrity, enhance audit preparedness, and reduce manual data entry risk across departments.
The team plans to utilize UpLink to automatically validate and document its review and tie out of its SEC financial statements, potentially eliminating a significant amount of time and effort expended by the team on a recurring basis and significantly improving the quality of documentation and audit readiness.
