In early-2017, while scouring the lending industry for inefficiencies to resolve using software, Stephen learned from several loan officers how broken the process for retrieving an applicant’s income data was: it could take 2 weeks or longer to ultimately collect the income info required. The emergence of fintech underscored what Stephen saw as an opportunity - automated income verification.

And in light of the heavily regulated lending universe, it felt like there may be less friction serving an affiliated market space. So Stephen explored the idea of migrating the technology to the property management industry.

During this exploratory phase in the summer of 2017, Stephen met with Mark, a serial entrepreneur and investment property owner/manager. Over a series of meetings and research spanning several months, and after committing to the opportunity and its potential, Stephen and Mark teamed up as technical and business partners to cofound The Closing Docs.

Today, The Closing Docs handles automated income verification for over 600,000 properties and vehicle lending companies across the United States.