Pulling a credit report inside BNTouch is a feature most loan officers learn about a month too late. The CRM lets you initiate a credit poll on any borrower record without leaving the platform, either by manually clicking the Pull Credit button on the mortgage record or by setting an automated marketing campaign to perform the pull as a campaign step. The resulting PDF gets stored to the borrower’s documents tab so anyone on the team can review it, and the CRA (consumer reporting agency) you use, along with the login credentials and the default CRA for campaign-based pulls, is configured once in Options.
The pull lives in the mortgages tab on every borrower record. After activation, “when you open a client’s record in the mortgages tab, you will see a new sub tab [for credit pulls]” [6PWPchr0kyw m1]. Click into that sub tab and you have the option to request a manual pull right then.
This matters because the alternative most teams default to is pulling from a separate CRA portal, downloading the report, then uploading the PDF back to the CRM. That round-trip burns ten minutes per file and creates two places where documents can sit instead of one.
Two ways to initiate a pull
The walkthrough lays out two patterns:
Manual pull
“You can either manually request the credit poll or perform it as part of an automated marketing campaign” [6PWPchr0kyw m1]. The manual path is one click on the mortgage record, the system runs the request, and you get the result back as a PDF that drops onto the borrower’s record.
Campaign-based pull
The more interesting pattern is embedding the credit pull as a step inside a marketing campaign. “You can also select this option when editing an existing campaign step using the step method drop down menu underneath the step editor” [6PWPchr0kyw m2]. Imagine a new-lead campaign: day zero email, day two SMS, day five trigger a soft credit pull automatically once the borrower has consented. That last step happens without a loan officer manually firing it.
The PDF storage detail that saves your file later
After the pull completes, you have two destinations for the report. “[Save the] pdf file to your local computer for your own records, or click copy to documents to send the pdf to the client’s documents sub tab” [6PWPchr0kyw m3]. The copy-to-documents path is the one to default to. From the demo: “This can make the information available to your co-workers for review” [6PWPchr0kyw m3]. Translation: when an LO is on PTO and a processor needs to see the credit report on a file, it is already on the record, not on someone’s laptop.
Configuring the CRA and the default for automated pulls
One administrative detail to set up before you turn on campaign-based pulls. The Options panel lets you configure which CRAs you work with and which one is the default for automated pulls. “You can also set one cra as the default option, which will be used for campaign-based credit polls” [6PWPchr0kyw m4]. The reason this matters: if you pull from three different bureaus across different scenarios, the default ensures your campaign-step pulls never go to the wrong vendor.
Per the demo: “For each cra that you work with you can enter account login details to make them [available]” [6PWPchr0kyw m4]. So credentials get stored once in BNTouch instead of an LO juggling three separate vendor logins.
A specific scenario where automated pulls earn their keep
A loan officer working a refinance opportunity gets a new lead from a Facebook ad on Tuesday morning. The borrower fills the form, drops into a new-lead campaign in BNTouch, and gets the welcome email immediately. Day three, the campaign sends a soft-pull consent form to the borrower’s email. Day four, once the consent comes back signed via e-signature, the next campaign step initiates the automated credit poll from the default CRA. By the time the loan officer follows up by phone on Friday, the PDF is already on the file and the loan officer is having a numbers conversation, not a “we still need to pull your credit” conversation.
How this differs from the Credit Pull Alerts module
Worth naming because the two features sound similar. Credit Pull Alerts is a separate module that monitors when one of your existing borrowers gets their credit pulled by another lender, then alerts you so you can call them before they close with someone else. The credit pulling feature covered here is initiating your own pull on a borrower in your pipeline. The two work together: you pull credit on borrowers in your pipeline today, and Credit Pull Alerts tells you when someone else is pulling credit on your existing book.
Review log and account configuration
BNTouch keeps a credit pull activity log so you can audit every pull that ran on the account. “You can review credit pull activity and configure account and [settings here]” [6PWPchr0kyw m3]. Useful for two reasons: compliance reviews against the FCRA permissible-purpose rule, and operational sanity-checks when a campaign starts running pulls you did not expect.
Honest limits
You still need a CRA account. BNTouch does not provide credit data itself. It plugs into your existing CRA (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, MeridianLink, etc.) and uses your account credentials. The activation step is connecting that account.
Compliance is on you. The platform initiates the pull; the FCRA permissible-purpose requirement still rests with the loan officer running the campaign. Make sure your campaign-step pulls run only on records where you have a valid mortgage transaction in process and documented consent.
The walkthrough video does not specify whether soft pulls and hard pulls are configurable. If you need soft pulls specifically (e.g., pre-qualification stage where you do not want to ding the borrower’s score), confirm with the BNTouch team during activation that your CRA configuration supports a soft pull endpoint.
Try credit pulls inside BNTouch
If you want to see the credit pull feature configured against a CRA you already use, request a demo and ask the team to walk through both the manual and campaign-step paths. The integrations page covers other tools in the BNTouch stack.
