Lendi lodgements grow amid downturn as AI rollout accelerates

Its performance comes against what the company described as a mortgage market constrained by higher interest rates and deteriorating consumer confidence.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data showed that new housing loan commitments, excluding refinancing, fell 5.4 per cent by number and 5.2 per cent by value in the June quarter.

Speaking with The Adviser, Lendi Group chief executive Sebastian Watkins said the smaller brand’s performance demonstrated the combined contribution of several operational improvements, rather than a result attributable solely to Guardian, its agentic AI customer experience.

“Everyone’s reporting significant declines, the Lendi business on the same number of brokers, the same headcount grew 20 per cent on the same quarter last year. I would say it’s not just Guardian; Guardian is one experience that helps,” Watkins said.

The group positioned Lendi as its innovation engine, developing and refining capabilities, products and customer propositions before extending them to Aussie.

That approach places Lendi approximately six months ahead in agentic AI development and deployment, with the group seeking evidence of customer satisfaction, product-market fit and commercial traction before scaling new capabilities.

More lodgements from a similar flow of leads

The improvement is not simply a story of generating more inquiries, with Watkins stating that Lendi was converting a broadly similar flow of leads into more business.

“What we’re seeing is about the same level of brokers and leads, but what we’re seeing is more deals from those leads and more deals from those brokers,” he said.

“If you look at the average broker before they were on these experiences, they were doing eight to nine lodgements a month, and now they’re doing 13 to 14 lodgements a month.”

Watkins said the combination was improving both the use of broker capacity and the proportion of inquiries progressing into transactions.

“It’s because the brokers are more efficient, and we’re able to extract more conversion from the leads, so we’ve got a bunch of agentic tools for our brokers as well,” he outlined.

While Guardian is a prominent part of the rollout, Watkins cautioned against treating any single experience as the explanation for Lendi’s results.

“It’s not one single experience that’s given us these results, it is a confluence of things, where it provides the most value today is it’s taking those new customer inquiries, and it’s giving them in a natural experience that mimics a conversational experience,” he said.

Watkins said that Guardian’s ability to analyse lender and policy information helped build customers’ confidence and readiness to proceed before they entered a broker’s workflow.

“It understands every lender, every lender policy, every government policy, every state policy and can recite it within seconds,” he said.

“Why we’re seeing good results today is a new customer can come to us at any hour of the day, they can talk without filling in arduous amounts of forms and talk conversationally, and you can get all the information that you would need right up front.

“First of all, it takes that customer out the market, it builds intent, so they’re ready to act and transact sooner, and then it puts better qualified customers into our brokers’ orbit.”

Watkins said this significantly reduced the time brokers spent on initial discussions that might not develop into an application.

“Today, we can handle all of that with the agents, and I put them through to brokers when the customer wants to speak to a broker,” he said.

Taking tested capabilities into the larger Aussie business

Lendi’s results provide an early indication of what the group hopes to achieve across Aussie, where a larger share of its lending volume sits.

Watkins said the gradual testing process explained the approximately six-month development gap, with the transfer of experiences into Aussie already underway and further benefits expected.

“We need to be confident that they’re working before we bring them across. So we are confident that we’ll see is, as we start to bring all of these experience[s] across into Aussie, the Aussie business will definitely see all those benefits,” Watkins said.

Watkins also acknowledged that the technology could not yet support the complete customer journey across every scenario, setting a financial-year-end goal for full coverage.

“We can’t take a customer the whole way through across all scenarios. By the end of this financial year, our goal is to enable that, and the broker will be able to use as much or as little of that process as they want,” he said.

Watkins said the group intended to preserve established communication preferences, with technology supporting the broker’s work in the background.

“If a customer says, I don’t want to talk to anyone but you on the landline, in that world, what will happen is the broker will be recording and transcribing the call,” he said.

“That would then be dropped straight into our AI tools; the AI tools would package up the deal in the background, but the customer is still just talking to our broker on the mobile.”

Human relationships remain central to the AI strategy

While Watkins expects more tasks to be handled by agents, he believes customers will continue to value a human relationship even as the processes behind that relationship change.

“I think where us humans will play a very important role, I think humans will still want a human interface; they just, they’ll care less about how the work is done,” he said.

That outlook also informs his assessment of how the broker proposition could evolve.

“Where brokers used to add value was two very specific things: we used to add value at the relationship level, and then we would also be experts in credit,” he said.

He argued that the second component would change substantially as AI became capable of supplying industry and lender information, predicting a much smaller need for brokers to retain that knowledge themselves.

“Now the second part of that, there’ll be no need for that, there will be no need to have any industry or lender knowledge,” he said.

Watkins’ expectation is that technology will shift the emphasis of the broker’s contribution, adding that finding customers and maintaining relationships would remain essential.

“Where our brokers will be insanely important is that relationship. They will want, they will need to look after their customers, they will need to find their customers, they will want to support their customers,” he said.

[Related: FBAA launches new strategy to strengthen broking’s human advantage]