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A digital mortgage platform that currently employs 35 staff is looking to significantly scale up its service team and is on the lookout for ‘Cert IV’ qualified mortgage professionals.
Uno Home Loans went live in mid-2016 and caters to borrowers eager to use an online platform for their home lending needs. The digital platform is supported by a team of 12 qualified brokers who help clients digitally via phone and email.
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Uno founder and CEO Vince Turner told The Adviser that the group is starting to see settlements across “a good spectrum of deals”.
“We have added a few more lenders to the panel. We added Liberty late last year. We have plenty of depth in product and policy. We have been doing construction deals, we have done larger complex deals. It’s not just vanilla loans. We have had some multimillion-dollar deals. It’s not just young people and refinancing,” Mr Turner explained.
“We’ve been educating people who come to the site that, just because we have digital tools that doesn’t mean you have to do it all yourself. We have experts who can negotiate with a bank and do all the things you would expect from a broker, it’s just that they are not available face-to-face,” he said.
Mr Turner said busy professionals have flocked to Uno over the last few months, attracted by its flexible business hours; support staff are available between 8am and 10pm on weekdays and 8am to 6pm on weekends.
The group is expecting a significant increase in volumes over the next nine months and is now looking to grow its support team.
“We have started hiring again. We are expecting to grow our volumes by four to five times in the next nine months. The service team will have to scale. We will be moving into a new office and will double the headcount of our service team in the next six months,” Mr Turner said.
“We expect those roles to come out of the industry. If they are coming in as an expert they will come out of the industry, because they will need to have the experience.”
Mr Turner explained that there are three key roles involved in the online mortgage process.
“We have what we call an associate adviser, someone who is on a career path to be an adviser. We get them to get a Cert 4 but they don’t specifically require it for their job because they provide general support and help follow up with clients and put together the basic file.
“That then gets handed across to a coach or an expert, who are full Cert IV with five to eight years’ experience in mortgages or mortgage broking.”
These ‘experts’ must have a strong credit background and are responsible for pulling together the credit proposal. Uno also has an in-house compliance manager to ensure all decisions meet responsible lending requirements.
“The final role is an application administrator, who works closely with the bank,” Mr Turner said.
Mr Turner spent 10 years in mortgage software development and says he worked with many successful brokers who had a very high work and service ethic.
“That’s really how we model our business. Our differentiator is that we have very strong controls over our own technology. We think the digital part of the experience will be an important differentiator for the audience we are going after,” he said. “We are already starting to see that.”
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