Jacksonville mortgage firm partners with AI engineers to build custom tools for lenders (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — A Jacksonville mortgage advisory firm is positioning itself as a bridge between mortgage companies that want to use artificial intelligence and the engineers needed to build it.
BlackWolf Advisory Group has formed a partnership with Authority Partners, an Irvine, California-based AI transformation and product engineering firm, to help mortgage lenders and servicers identify, develop and deploy AI tools without creating their own internal technology teams.
The partnership comes as mortgage companies face growing pressure to automate operations but often lack a clear path from identifying a potential use for AI to putting a compliant system into production.
“The timing was driven by our clients,” BlackWolf founder and Managing Director Mirza Hodzic (pictured above) told the Business Journal. “Nearly every servicer conversation over the past year has included the same question: We know we need to do something with AI, but who actually builds it?”
Hodzic said the advisory and engineering sides of AI implementation have traditionally been handled by separate firms, creating a disconnect that can stall projects before they are completed.
“The advisory answer and the engineering answer have historically lived at different firms, and that gap is where AI projects in this industry go to die,” he said.
The companies spent about 10 months developing the combined delivery model before formalizing the partnership, Hodzic said.
Under the arrangement, BlackWolf will evaluate a lender or servicer’s operations, technology and readiness for AI adoption. The Jacksonville firm will then recommend whether the company should purchase an existing vendor product, enhance a current platform or develop a custom system.
When custom development is the best option, Authority Partners will design, build and implement the technology, including the system integrations, controls and compliance safeguards required in the heavily regulated mortgage industry.
“Our teams build and deploy software in complex environments every day,” Authority Partners client executive Faris Nizamic said in a statement. “Together with BlackWolf, we help organizations adopt AI in a way that delivers practical value without disrupting critical business processes.”
The partnership is targeting areas including workflow automation, compliance monitoring, data reconciliation, reporting, borrower communications and servicing technology.
Hodzic said the most immediate opportunities are in document-heavy and repetitive processes such as loss mitigation intake, borrower correspondence and the reconciliation of servicing data.
“Those functions combine high volume, defined rules and enormous manual effort, which is exactly where AI performs today,” he said. “They are the internal processes where automation frees experienced people for exception handling and borrower engagement, where human judgment actually matters.”
BlackWolf and Authority Partners have several projects in the pipeline, primarily involving midsized lenders and servicers that need customized technology but are unlikely to hire their own software development teams.
Hodzic said confidentiality agreements prevent the firms from identifying clients, but early demand has been concentrated in workflow automation, servicing oversight tools and data reconciliation.
The cost and timeline of each project will depend on its size and complexity. Hodzic said engagements begin with a fixed-cost assessment aimed at determining where AI can provide measurable business value.
A focused solution would typically move from design to production, while a broader platform build would be completed in phases over multiple quarters, he said.
“It depends on scope, and any firm quoting a flat number before understanding the operation is telling you what you want to hear,” Hodzic said.
The partnership is also emphasizing regulatory compliance and limits on how AI can be used in decisions affecting borrowers.
BlackWolf’s work includes mortgage servicing compliance, and Hodzic has direct regulatory experience with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He said compliance, cybersecurity, borrower privacy and model accuracy will be incorporated into each system from the beginning rather than reviewed after development.
“Our standing rule is that AI does not make consequential borrower decisions unsupervised: It processes, drafts, and flags, and a person owns the outcome,” Hodzic said. “Every solution ships with the documentation and audit trail an examiner would expect, because we build assuming someone will eventually ask to see it.”
The partnership could also become a growth driver for BlackWolf in Jacksonville, where the company is headquartered.
Hodzic said Jacksonville’s concentration of mortgage servicing companies and industry professionals makes the city a natural base for the firm’s expansion. BlackWolf expects to add senior servicing practitioners as its project volume grows, he said.
“BlackWolf was founded here, and Jacksonville is one of the most concentrated mortgage servicing markets in the country, so this partnership positions a local firm as the front door for AI adoption across that industry,” Hodzic said.
Authority Partners has more than 450 professionals across 30 countries, with development centers in Sarajevo, Istanbul and Santo Domingo. BlackWolf provides advisory and implementation services across mortgage servicing compliance, operations and technology.
Photo courtesy of Mirza Hodzic, Managing Director and Founder, BlackWolf