Are there ECOA or Fair Housing considerations for what an AI receptionist can ask or say to borrowers?

For Mortgage Brokers

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Reg B) and the Fair Housing Act restrict discouraging applicants or discriminating based on protected characteristics, race, national origin, sex, familial status, religion, and several other categories, and this applies to every borrower-facing touchpoint in your business, phone intake included, not just the formal application. Voksha's qualification script is built to ask only objective, credit-relevant questions: income, employment, credit range, down payment, property type and location, and loan purpose. It doesn't ask about, infer from, or use characteristics like race, familial status, or national origin to route, screen, or deprioritize a caller, which mirrors how a compliant loan officer or intake form is already required to operate. It's also configured to never state or imply a credit decision, approval, or denial during intake, since ECOA's adverse action notice requirements apply to actual credit decisions made by your licensed lending side, not to a scheduling and screening call. Brokerages that operate in or near a designated Fair Lending or CRA assessment area sometimes have additional internal policies about geographic steering language, and those get built into the script during setup the same way they'd be built into a front-desk training manual, so the AI's questions and responses match your existing fair lending compliance policy rather than introducing new language your compliance officer hasn't reviewed. If your brokerage has a fair lending training program for staff, it's worth having your compliance contact review the qualification script once during setup for consistency.