Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise overseen by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is enlisting data analytics giant Palantir in a new partnership aimed at cracking down on mortgage fraud.
Under the agreement, Palantir’s technology will be deployed to uncover fraud in mortgage packages before they reach Fannie Mae. Priscilla Almodovar, president and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae, said the tech will allow the organization “to see patterns quicker.”
“We’re going to be able to identify fraud more proactively, as opposed to reactively,” Almodovar said during a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to be able to understand the fraud and stop it in its tracks. And I think over time, this really becomes a deterrent for bad actors, because we’re creating friction in the system when they do bad things.”
FHFA Director Bill Pulte, who also serves as chairman of the Fannie Mae board, said the financial crimes division that monitors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “is only able to root out crime that it gets made aware of.” Palantir’s red-flag approach, meanwhile, tips off those investigators to conduct probes they otherwise might not have known to launch.
Almodovar recalled an exercise where Palantir’s technology was given four actual loan files to assess. The tech, she said, scoured the “reams of paper” and identified instances of fraud in 10 seconds. The same exercise could take human investigators roughly two months.
With $4.3 trillion in assets, Fannie Mae presents as an exceptionally attractive target for fraud. Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, said that by leveraging his company’s technology, the fraudsters will be pushed to other countries.
“Why defraud America when you can go somewhere else that won’t buy or implement actual technology that works?” he said.
Karp noted that the technology’s approach is a forward-looking one in which “unique patterns of fraud that heretofore have not been detected” are flagged “while simultaneously making sure the data is not being used in a way that customers would not want.”
“That is a transformational difference between how these things were done in the past or could be done [versus] how they can be done now,” he added.
The Trump administration has turned to Palantir early and often this year, particularly in the defense space and in immigration and customs enforcement. Karp was a top cheerleader of Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government via DOGE, and his company’s fortunes have risen considerably over the past several months.
There could be more business for Palantir to come from Fannie Mae and potentially from its counterpart, Freddie Mac. Pulte signaled Wednesday that the mortgage fraud tech deal could be the first of many collaborations between the data-miner and the housing GSEs.
“There’s a lot of things that are going on with title insurance, with mortgage insurance, with mortgages in general, in terms of AI,” Pulte said. “And so I think we have really scratched the surface with Palantir on mortgage fraud, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see us … enter into [other] partnerships with Palantir. We’re also talking with [Musk’s] xAI about some different AI stuff.”
