nCino Brings Broker Loans Into Its Retail Mortgage Platform as Wholesale Gains Ground

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Mortgage lenders that operate both retail and wholesale channels have long faced a technology problem that has little to do with originating the loan itself: the two sides of the business often don’t run through the same front door.

nCino is trying to change that.

The mortgage technology company has introduced TPO Experience, a new capability within nCino Mortgage Point of Sale that allows lenders using ICE Mortgage Technology’s Encompass loan origination system to accept loans submitted by third-party originators through the same point-of-sale infrastructure used by their retail operations.

The significance is less about giving brokers another place to submit loans and more about what happens after they do.

According to nCino’s announcement of TPO Experience, broker-submitted loans are assigned to a loan officer at the lending institution and synchronized with Encompass using the appropriate channel designation and third-party originator information. That allows the lender’s existing business rules for brokered loans to continue to apply.

For mortgage companies operating in both channels, the product is aimed at eliminating a familiar divide: separate systems, separate pipelines and duplicate workflows depending on whether the borrower came through a company loan officer or an outside mortgage broker.

One borrower experience, two origination channels

The distinction between retail and wholesale remains important operationally and economically.

The borrower, however, does not necessarily need to experience that distinction.

With TPO Experience, nCino says borrowers can use the same interface to apply, upload documents and monitor the status of their loan regardless of whether the transaction originated with a retail loan officer or a third-party originator.

That is the customer-facing portion of a larger technology issue.

A lender operating both channels can have one technology stack for its employed loan officers and another for brokers. Information then has to move between platforms while compliance, reporting and operational teams maintain processes for both.

nCino’s product is designed to move the point of entry onto one platform while preserving the wholesale designation when the loan reaches Encompass.

“Growth in the wholesale channel is putting more pressure on lenders to eliminate the operational divide between their retail and wholesale businesses,” Casey Williams, nCino’s general manager of global mortgage, said in announcing the product.

Williams described lenders dealing with two systems, two pipelines and workflows that require reporting to be stitched together before management can see the full book of business.

Encompass already has its own TPO infrastructure

There is an important distinction for lenders evaluating what nCino has built.

ICE Mortgage Technology already offers Encompass TPO Connect, its own technology for wholesale lenders and correspondent investors.

According to ICE Mortgage Technology’s TPO Connect product documentation, the platform allows third-party originators to deliver loans and documents into an Encompass pipeline, view pipelines and reports, order credit and automated underwriting, submit lock requests, electronically sign documents and monitor loan status.

So nCino is not introducing third-party origination capability to Encompass itself.

Instead, TPO Experience extends nCino’s borrower-facing Mortgage Point of Sale across retail and broker-generated business and then passes the brokered loan into Encompass with its TPO information intact.

That difference matters.

For a lender already using nCino as its retail mortgage front end, the proposition is not necessarily to replace Encompass’s wholesale infrastructure. It is to reduce the difference between the digital experience surrounding a retail borrower and one whose loan arrives through a broker.

The wholesale channel is big enough to force the technology question

nCino says wholesale originations represented more than one in five mortgages originated during the first quarter of 2026, citing Inside Mortgage Finance, and estimates that volume at an annualized $440 billion.

WRE News has not independently reviewed the underlying Inside Mortgage Finance dataset, so those figures should be understood as market estimates cited by nCino rather than government mortgage statistics.

Even without relying on that estimate, the strategic issue is straightforward.

A mortgage company capable of moving production between retail and wholesale channels has to decide whether the technology supporting those channels should remain equally divided.

The industry’s prolonged period of expensive mortgage credit has made that question more important. When origination volumes are constrained, redundant technology and operational processes become harder to absorb.

A platform capable of supporting multiple channels without duplicating every part of the workflow could therefore matter as much for cost control as it does for borrower experience.

This isn’t nCino’s first move to broaden its mortgage platform

TPO Experience fits into a larger expansion of nCino’s mortgage technology business.

The company acquired SimpleNexus in January 2022 after announcing the roughly $1.2 billion transaction in 2021. The mobile-first technology became an important part of nCino’s mortgage point-of-sale offering.

More recently, nCino has been extending the platform beyond the traditional borrower application.

In August, the company introduced Mortgage MCP, which allows lenders to connect compatible artificial-intelligence agents to the nCino Mortgage Suite using Model Context Protocol.

The company says those tools can perform administrative and loan-officer tasks within existing permission and audit frameworks, including user administration, pipeline management, borrower-record work and certain loan-processing activities.

In July, Cornerstone First Mortgage selected nCino’s Mortgage Point of Sale to support a network operating in 49 states through roughly 130 branches.

Taken together, the releases show nCino attempting to make its mortgage front end useful across more of the origination process rather than limiting it to the initial digital application.

The bigger battle is becoming the mortgage industry’s common front end

The mortgage technology market has spent years adding specialized tools to the origination process.

That has produced substantial innovation, but it has also left many lenders managing a collection of systems around a core LOS.

TPO Experience points toward a different competitive question: which platform owns the interface through which borrowers and originators enter the lender’s ecosystem?

Encompass can remain the system of record while another platform controls more of the experience surrounding it.

For nCino, supporting brokered loans makes that front-end position more valuable because a lender no longer has to restrict the platform to loans produced by its retail workforce.

“Retail and wholesale will remain different mortgage businesses. The technology underneath them does not necessarily have to remain separate.”

For ICE, meanwhile, Encompass TPO Connect already gives lenders substantial wholesale functionality inside the Encompass ecosystem.

The two products therefore should not be treated as identical.

The competitive and operational question for lenders will be how much of the origination experience they want consolidated around their LOS and how much they want handled by a broader point-of-sale layer connected to it.

What lenders should watch

TPO Experience is expected to become available to nCino Mortgage customers using Encompass later in 2026.

nCino also says it intends to support additional loan origination systems, although the company has not identified those providers or announced a timetable.

That expansion will be worth watching.

If the product remains primarily an Encompass integration, its immediate relevance will be concentrated among lenders already operating within that ecosystem. Support for additional LOS platforms would make the strategy considerably broader.

There is also a larger industry question.

Retail and wholesale mortgage lending have traditionally been treated as separate distribution channels, supported by different sales organizations, economics and technology.

They will remain different businesses.

But the technology underneath them does not necessarily have to remain separate.

That is the bet nCino is making.