A loan officer wraps a thirty-minute call with a borrower three weeks before settlement. Same evening, the same borrower walks into a competing lender’s office and lets them pull credit. The first sign you get is a hard pull on someone else’s tradeline three days later, by which point the call you needed to make should have already happened.
Credit Pull Alerts inside BNTouch flips that timing. Your CRM gets notified the moment another mortgage lender pulls credit on a borrower or partner you have on file, with no manual monitoring on your end. The setup takes ten minutes if your data is clean. Here is exactly how it works and how to configure it.
The alert fires when a borrower in your CRM has their credit pulled for a mortgage by a different lender. The BNTouch team’s framing on video is unceremonious: “Your customer has had their credit pulled for a mortgage by a different lender. So you’re going to want to reach out and understand why that person has been cheating on you with a different lender.” That is the use case. You get the alert, you make the call, you save the loan.
The data each record needs before alerts can fire
The bureau requires five fields per record. If any of these are missing, that record gets skipped, no alert ever fires, and you do not get told it was skipped. Audit your data first.
First name
Last name
Date of birth
Social security number
Mailing address (street address, city, state, and zip code as separate fields)
The mailing address has to be the full set of four components, not a free-text blob in one field. If your import was sloppy and the city/state/zip got concatenated into the street line, you will need to parse it out before alerts will trigger on those records.
Where to find the module and turn it on
Two paths to the same destination, depending on which video you have watched:
Path one (newer demo). “Navigate to the options page in the CRM. Locate the module with the title Credit Alerts. Click the title.”
Path two (older demo). “Head over to your options and you’re going to type in credit.” The search-in-options approach is faster if you have a long options page.
Either path lands on the same activation panel. You enable the module, accept the cost terms, and pick the monitoring scope.
Monitoring scope: all records, groups, or selected sequences
Three scope options. Pick deliberately, because the cost scales with the count of records being monitored.
All mortgage records. “This option will include all mortgage records in the monitoring. Any borrower who pulls a credit report from a mortgage provider will appear in the alerts.” Catch-all. Highest coverage, highest monthly count.
Groups. Scope by group membership. If you maintain a group like “active borrowers” or “preapproved past 90 days,” the module monitors only those records. Coverage scales with how disciplined your group management is.
Selected marketing sequences. Scope by who is in an active campaign. Borrowers in a rate-watch nurture, for example. Tight scope, lowest count, narrow coverage.
The pattern most BNTouch users settle on is groups, because the “preapproved” and “active pipeline” groups are the ones with real downside if a competitor pulls credit before you do.
Where the alerts surface inside the CRM
The dashboard. “Some of the alerts that you have in your dashboard, they are going to be the credit pull alerts that are just released.” From there, each alert ties directly to the borrower record. Two clicks from the dashboard to the file.
If you want to push the alert further out, the standard pattern is to tie a campaign step trigger to the alert event so an SMS or task fires automatically to the loan officer the moment the alert lands. We will cover the campaign step tie-in below.
What the loan officer does in the first ten minutes after an alert fires
The mechanics of the alert are the easy part. The harder part is what you say when you call the borrower. Here is the script we have seen working in production at multiple BNTouch shops, written for the case where you have an active preapproval on the borrower and they just let a competitor pull credit:
“Hi [borrower]. I saw [activity that prompted the call, kept vague]. I wanted to check in. Are you still in the market for that [program type] loan we talked about? I want to make sure we are still the right fit, and if there is anything I can clean up on the rate or the structure, I would rather hear it from you than read it later. What is going on on your end?”
Specific enough to land. Not so specific that you tip off the borrower that you are tracking their credit activity. The competitor lender will not have called yet because most of them do not have credit pull alerts on. You have a window measured in hours.
Pairing Credit Pull Alerts with Equity Alerts
The credit module is one of three alerts that live in the same UI panel. The full set from the BNTouch dashboard is: Credit Alerts, Equity Alerts, and Listed Properties Alerts. The three are sold individually, so you can run credit without running equity if budget is tight. The team is explicit about this on video: “If you want to just get equity and not the credit alerts or vice versa, you certainly can.”
The strongest combination for a retention-focused loan officer is Credit + Equity, because Credit catches active shopping behavior, while Equity catches refi opportunity before the borrower has thought to shop. We cover Equity Alerts in detail in the refinance tools post.
Common setup mistakes
Three patterns we see when a Credit Pull Alerts module is on but not generating alerts:
Missing SSN or DOB on a chunk of records. Older CRM imports often dropped these. Audit a saved search of records with empty DOB or SSN before you turn on monitoring.
Mailing address concatenated into the street line. The bureau matching requires the four address components as discrete fields. Run an import cleanup before activation.
Scope set to a group that does not exist. A scope tied to a renamed or deleted group fails silently. After you enable, run a quick eyeball test by opening the Options panel and confirming the scope group still has the expected count.
The economic version of the argument for Credit Pull Alerts
A loan officer who closes $48M annually at a 50 bps shop earns $240K in commission. Losing one preapproved borrower to a competitor is roughly a $4,000 commission hit on an average $400K loan. If Credit Pull Alerts saves two loans a year that would otherwise have walked, the module pays for itself eight times over before you count the relationship value of the borrower for the next refi cycle.
This is why the team built it. The math is not subtle.
Turn it on inside the BNTouch demo
If you do not have BNTouch yet and want to see the Credit Pull Alerts dashboard on a live account, request a demo and ask the team to walk you through the alerts panel specifically. The full Credit Check Alerts page covers the data fields and cost structure in more detail.
