The past year has seen the mortgage broking industry quickly adopt and implement technological advancements into day-to-day operations.
Lenders, aggregators, and brokers have been utilising an array of new tech to streamline, automate, and enhance efficiency in various aspects of the mortgage lending experience.
The days of manual processing appear to be approaching an end as the nation’s brokers clamour to take advantage of new advancements, not only saving them time and money, but ensuring that the client experience is better than ever before.
Lender tech
Ever since COVID-19 forced the hand of lenders to move to a digitised mortgage process – particularly for e-signatures and virtual identity checks - Australia’s lenders have been quickly integrating and adopting new technology into their operations to enhance their mortgage offerings.
For example, National Australia Bank (NAB) has its new Simple Home Loans system, which is accelerating approvals through auto decisioning. Around 50 per cent of all applications via Simple Home Loans now receive same-day unconditional approval, with 15 per cent of all broker home loans now submitted via the digital end-to-end platform. NAB’s executive for broker distribution, Adam Brown, recently revealed that the bank had even provided a broker-lodged Simple Home Loan for a self-employed borrower with unconditional approval in just 22 minutes.
Meanwhile, ANZ has been heavily investing in home loan processing capability, Westpac recently invested approximately $2 billion into technology simplification, while CBA is rapidly rolling out a swathe of digital offerings and tech tools.
Having a good tech stack is key to a growing mortgage book – particularly if the tech is broker-facing (which now writes 70 per cent of all home loans). Agile Market Intelligence’s broker surveys – including the monthly Broker Pulse and annual Third-Party Lending Report – consistently find that brokers particularly like lenders that have good loan monitoring tech in their broker portals (with CBA and Bankwest both receiving positive reviews for the technology stack) and those that offer a streamlined application process.
Many of the non-major lenders (including BOQ Group, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Bankwest, and AMP) have been updating their core platform and loan origination processes in recent years, with many more expected to follow suit as open banking and AI roll out further.
A major innovation that has been promising to radically change the mortgage tech space is open banking, via the Consumer Data Right (CDR). The CDR regime allows consumers to share financial information with their mortgage broker (through the ‘trusted adviser’ model) using a secure government-regulated channel, abolishing the need for insecure password sharing.
A major innovation that has been promising to radically change the mortgage tech space is open banking, via the Consumer Data Right (CDR). The CDR regime allows consumers to share financial information with their mortgage broker (through the ‘trusted adviser’ model) using a secure government-regulated channel, abolishing the need for insecure password sharing.
So far, however, the roll-out of open banking has been slow to come through the lending side of the mortgage process. Only one major bank (CBA) has so far turned on open banking for brokers, although it has been largely focused on data collection.
But the hope is that lenders will be soon able to pull CDR data and pre-populate mortgage applications using the secured data, avoiding the need for data entry duplication and reducing the risk of data tampering.
Given the system’s potential to improve the mortgage process – and the lags in its roll-out – Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia’s (MFAA) chief executive Anja Pannek recently urged the mortgage and finance industry to accelerate the transition to the CDR.
Aggregator tech
Of the aggregators, Finsure has been the pioneer in open banking, making it available to its brokers through a partnership with open banking specialist Frollo in January 2023.
The aggregator said at the time that its Financial Passport would not only reduce the time brokers spend on reconciliation and processing applications but also guarantee that they’re using bank-verified data as a “single source of truth” and provide better privacy protection for clients.
Finsure’s CEO Simon Bednar stated that open banking solves the problem of data inconsistency, while providing transparency across the entire applicant life cycle.
Other groups have been opening up their CRMs to fintech partnerships, with LMG recently partnering with Equifax to enable brokers to request automated employment income reports directly from MyCRM.
Meanwhile, software company Salestrekker – a specialist in CRMs – also recently rolled out “Australia’s first combined lending, origination and CRM platform”.
The overhauled platform – named Salestrekker 2.0 – covers mortgages, commercial, and asset finance tools to act as a broker’s single tech platform, removing the need for brokers to use multiple different systems for origination, workflow tracking, marketing, and servicing. Instead, it looked to save brokers' time and money and accelerate growth through simplifying, automating, and managing tasks all into one system.
