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While COVID-19 has accelerated the move to digitise mortgages, we wanted to know what technological developments lie ahead in mortgages – and what’s on the wish list. Malavika Santhebennur asked providers what we can expect to see next.
We can expect to see continued automation across the industry, from both a lender perspective and a broker and aggregator perspective. Data and analytics could be used to reduce the number of steps we ask brokers and assessors to complete to improve our time to first decision and to significantly reduce rework – shortening our time to final decision and better understanding our customers to ensure we are providing good outcomes for brokers and customers.
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At a high level, automating credit assessment would not only reduce unnecessary delays, but provide more certainty for lenders and brokers because it’ll result in more consistent responses from us as a lender. Varied responses could sometimes occur because different people may look at different files in different ways and interpret credit policy rules slightly differently. Automating this process would result in fewer delays and improve consistency in the decisions. We’re attempting to eliminate a lot of the lower-level administrative tasks or oversight and deliver a finalised loan documentation to an assessor so they can focus on assessing the file for its creditworthiness.
We are looking to expand the number of valuations capable of being sourced through the Bankwest broker portal using our automated valuation model. Bankwest is continuing to seek and source data points to assist with processing, and we will extend the number of applications where we can utilise comprehensive credit reporting during the approval process.
From a technology perspective, our first priority is better integrating the application system that our brokers use with Bank of Queensland’s (BOQ) own internal platforms to enable us to provide an automated first decision within minutes of an application being received. We’re also working on delivering an online serviceability calculator that will save our brokers time, as well as introducing auto-decisioning of pricing requests submitted through the secure broker portal.
Technologies created by the open banking regime will change the broking landscape significantly. Further to this, we’re going to see continued automation and “technologicalisation” of the borrowing process and consumer interaction.
Over the past year, we’ve had general feedback from brokers that there’s been a significant reduction in the quality of experience provided by lenders to customers. As an industry, we need to look at how we utilise technology to improve the experience and reduce anxiety for customers throughout the mortgage process. I would like to see us going back to basics and using technology to get the foundations of the process right to deliver outstanding customer experiences. We’re working with global information services company Experian to introduce a new product origination platform later this year. This will cut the processing time for the average home loan application by up to 80 per cent.
Innovation and digitisation are driving rapid change in financial services. We see the future in highly personalised technology, which will help customers more intuitively manage their money, including their home loan. Data plays a huge part in developing highly personalised experiences, and we believe it will continue to remain integral in shaping the future of the mortgage industry. The continuous flow of data between systems or use of application programming interface will be another way in which we can deliver on our commitment to brokers in providing transparency and fast turnaround times. Additionally, artificial intelligence and machine learning are two of the biggest innovations in technology. We’re excited about using these techniques to improve our credit decisioning, for example, by spotting discrepancies in documents that aren’t apparent to the human eye.
We think the next technological development would be an automated approach to verification of identity (VOI) tools that is capable of facial recognition rather than users manually assessing photos and identification documents. This will save parties time, reduce errors, and provide a secure solution to VOI. This could possibly be used when signing electronic loan documents to provide an additional safeguard against adverse interests.
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