What's in the Openfund Report — for brokers, lenders, and borrowers

The Openfund Report is a six-page document that the platform generates automatically when a broker selects a lender offer. It exists for a specific reason. Private mortgage origination in Ontario produces a documentation problem that no single party in the transaction can solve on their own. Brokers cannot prove to clients that they shopped the deal. Lenders cannot verify that the borrower understood the suitability assessment before signing. Borrowers cannot tell whether the offer they received was competitive. The Report addresses all three gaps in one document.

The structural insight underneath the Report is that these documentation gaps are not three separate problems. They are one problem, viewed from three sides. Each party in the transaction operates with less information than they need, and the absence of shared documentation produces the same downstream behavior in each role. Brokers spend hours defending offers their clients are uncertain about. Borrowers shop deals their brokers already shopped. Lenders see funded offers come back for renegotiation when borrowers raise questions after acceptance. The Report closes the documentation gap, and the closing of that gap changes what each party does next. Transparency creates trust. Trust creates efficiency. Deals close faster because the friction between offer and acceptance drops.

The structure of the Report reflects how it is used. Two parts. The Product Suitability Assessment, written for broker compliance and signed by the borrower. The Competitive Comparison, written for the borrower and reviewed by the lender. The two parts share data — the borrower's information, the property, the offer details — but serve different purposes. This article walks through what each audience sees, why the section matters to them, and what changes when the document exists.

A note on when it generates. The Report does not exist as a separate workflow that the broker has to remember to produce. It generates at the moment the broker selects the winning offer — built from the application data, the offers received on the deal, and the broker's structured notes captured during the submission process. By the time the broker is presenting the file to the client for signature, the document is already done.

For brokers

The Product Suitability Assessment section is the part of the Report that matters most to the broker, because it is the documentation FSRA requires.

Approximately 65 percent of private mortgage files in Ontario have missing, incomplete, or inadequate suitability documentation. This is FSRA's own examination finding. The Suitability Assessment is the documented record that the broker assessed the borrower's circumstances, considered lower-cost alternatives, and recommended the private product for specific reasons. Without that documentation, the file is non-compliant — regardless of whether the recommendation itself was correct.

The Suitability Assessment section captures four things.

First, the borrower's credit profile visualized against the qualification benchmarks for prime lenders, B lenders, and private lenders. The reader can see at a glance why the borrower requires a private product rather than a lower-cost alternative. The data does the documentation work — the broker does not have to write a paragraph explaining the credit position when the chart shows it.

Second, the borrower's current and post-funding GDS and TDS ratios against the same benchmarks. This demonstrates the debt service position that informs the product recommendation and addresses the affordability assessment FSRA requires.

Third, the broker's structured rationale — the specific reasons the recommended product was selected. Where a borrower qualifies for a B lender product but requires a private product for non-credit reasons, such as property location outside B lender service areas or timeline constraints, the broker documents that rationale here. The structured notes field is what gets the file to the standard of “a reasonable third party reviewing it could understand why this mortgage was recommended.”

Fourth, the exit strategy. The broker writes this section, assisted by the platform. The exit strategy explains how the borrower returns to lower-cost financing at the end of the term — improved credit, completed renovations, business stabilization, property sale. FSRA's fourth desired outcome is that exit strategies be documented and communicated clearly. The Report formalizes this requirement.

The borrower acknowledges and signs the Suitability Assessment as part of the closing process. The signature is the audit trail. The broker now has a documented file that meets the standard FSRA examinations have found most files do not meet.

There are two efficiency outcomes that flow from this. The first is direct — the Suitability Assessment that currently takes thirty to forty-five minutes at the end of a deal is generated as a byproduct of selecting the offer. The documentation work is absorbed by the platform. The second is structural and matters more. When the borrower can see the market for their deal in the Competitive Comparison and the rationale for the recommended product in the Suitability Assessment, the broker does not have to spend the days between offer and signing defending the offer against the client's doubt. The borrower stops shopping the deal because the document already shows them the market. The closing ratio improves because the deals that would have died in the period between offer and signing now close on schedule.

For lenders

Lenders are not the primary audience for the Report. They do not generate it. They do not sign it. But the Report changes what arrives in their funding pipeline, and that change matters.

Every deal that funds through Openfund arrives with the Suitability Assessment complete and signed. The borrower has acknowledged the product recommendation in writing. They have seen the credit benchmarks. They have seen the GDS and TDS calculations. They have signed the exit strategy. The compliance documentation that lenders currently rely on the broker to produce — and that, in the 65 percent of files FSRA found inadequate, is the source of post-funding disputes — exists in standardized form for every deal.

The operational consequences extend in two directions.

Downstream, post-funding disputes drop. Disputes in private mortgages frequently turn on what the borrower understood at signing. The borrower claims they did not understand the rate, the fee, the maturity, or the consequences of the term ending without an exit. The lender holds documents that may not address what was disputed. The dispute escalates. The Report changes the starting position. The borrower signed a document that showed them the rate against benchmarks, the fee structure, the conditions, the funding speed, the exit strategy, and how the offer they accepted compared to other offers received on their file. The documentation gap that drives many private mortgage disputes does not exist on Openfund deals.

Upstream, the lender's offer-to-funded conversion rate improves. The period between offer acceptance and funding is where private mortgage deals frequently die — the borrower raises a concern, the broker comes back asking for a rate reduction or a condition change, the deal stalls while the broker shops a competing lender, the offer is withdrawn or renegotiated. The Report removes most of the underlying cause. The borrower who sees the offer's ranking against every other offer received does not have a credible reason to suspect the deal was not shopped. The broker who can show the documentation does not have to defend the offer to keep it intact. The lender whose offer was selected on competitive terms funds the deal without the renegotiation cycle that consumes operator time and erodes margin.

The Competitive Comparison section also functions as a credibility signal. It documents the number of eligible lenders the deal reached, the number of offers received, and where the funded offer ranked. Lenders whose offers are accepted on competitive deals can point to that ranking as evidence that their terms were chosen against alternatives rather than because the borrower had no other option.

For borrowers

The Competitive Comparison section is the part of the Report written for the borrower.

Private mortgage borrowers in Ontario are increasingly sophisticated, but they have historically had no way to verify whether the offer their broker presented was competitive. They take the broker's word that the offer was shopped. They sign documents they do not fully understand. They accept rates and fees without a reference point. The information asymmetry between the broker and the borrower is structural — there is no neutral source the borrower can consult to evaluate the offer they are receiving.

The section shows the borrower how many lenders the deal reached, how many of those lenders reviewed the file, and how many made offers. It shows the range of rates and fees across the offers received. It shows where the funded offer ranks against the others, by rate, by fee, by funding speed, by conditions. It presents the winning offer's full terms — amount, LTV, rate and type, amortization, monthly payment, estimated closing timeline, and the lender's profile. APR is calculated automatically by the platform as a combined cost-of-borrowing figure, not as a manual broker arithmetic that varies in accuracy across files.

For the borrower, the document does something specific. It removes the reason to shop the deal further. A borrower without the Report has only the broker's word that the offer was the most competitive available. That word is often reliable, but the borrower cannot verify it, and the rational response to an unverifiable claim about a significant financial decision is to seek a second opinion — call another broker, ask a family member, delay signing while researching. The Report replaces that uncertainty with data. The borrower can see the market for their deal in their hands. They can take the document to a lawyer or a second broker for review if they want to, and that second opinion has the information needed to be informed. The decision in front of them becomes a yes-or-no on a specific offer with full context, made with the information needed to decide, rather than a delayed decision driven by the suspicion that they should be looking further.

For borrowers in vulnerable financial circumstances — and FSRA's data shows that 39 percent of private mortgage borrowers are now classified as financially vulnerable, up from 22 percent in 2022 — this transparency is consumer protection in operational form. The vulnerable borrower is the borrower most likely to be harmed by an information gap. The Report closes the gap by default.

What changes when the document exists

The document's value extends beyond the documentation itself. Transparency creates trust. Trust creates efficiency. The borrower who can see the market does not need to shop the deal. The broker who can show the work does not need to defend the offer for days. The lender whose offer is selected on competitive terms funds the deal without renegotiation. Each party's confidence in the transaction comes from the same source — a document that gives all three of them the same view of what is happening. The compounding effect on closing ratios, funding speed, and operator time is what the Report produces beyond the compliance documentation itself.

None of this is theoretical. The 65 percent FSRA finding on inadequate suitability documentation is real. The information asymmetry between borrower and broker is real. The lender's exposure to post-funding disputes from poorly documented files is real. The renegotiation cycle that consumes operator time between offer and funding is real. The Report addresses each of these specifically — not as separate features, but as the natural output of a workflow where the data and the documentation are generated together.

Ontario's private mortgage market processed 65,233 transactions worth $32 billion in 2024. The market is growing. The borrowers entering it are increasingly vulnerable. The infrastructure has not kept pace. The Openfund Report is what that infrastructure looks like at the document level — generated automatically, signed by the borrower, and useful to every party in the transaction. The trust loop it closes is what changes the operational economics for all three.

Ringo So is Co-Founder and Head of Strategy and Growth at Openfund. He has built and operated mortgage businesses in Ontario for over a decade across brokerage, lender administration, and platform infrastructure.