There’s been an explosion of new tech in the broking industry the past few years, with fantastic innovations and solutions being offered to help brokers write more loans, more efficiently. We take a look at some of the flashy new tech bringing mortgage broking into the 21st century
There’s a digital revolution going on in the broking industry at the moment. After decades of slogging away on manual processes, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped accelerate the digitisation of many of the cumbersome administrative processes that brokers have had to endure.
With this digitisation has come a raft of new technologies that are becoming godsends to mortgage brokers by freeing up time, reducing inaccuracies, and improving data security.
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In last year’s tech issue (April 2022), we were talking about digital IDs, e-signatures, open banking, and how aggregators had begun acquiring or building new tech to help brokers write more loans more quickly. This year, we’re looking at a range of stand-alone fintech companies that are dedicating their efforts and resources to making a broker’s mortgage broking process more efficient.
Pre-settlement tech
One of the big success stories of the past 18 months that has many brokers singing their praises (see page 4 for more) is Quickli. Established in 2021 by co-founders Eric Dill (broker) and Angus Keatinge (software engineer), the duo put their heads together to help brokers speed up the preliminary assessment process.
Bringing more than 20 lender calculators into one subscription-based interface, the platform delivers fast results and relevant policy insights for even complex scenarios.
Brokers can run a client’s data through the platform and see a snapshot of what their debt-to-income ratio, product rate, assessment rate, HEM expenses, surplus, and capacity are for a range of lenders.
Speaking at the Better Business Summit 2023, co-founder Mr Keatinge said: “Most people in our team spent a lot of time working with brokers. And so what we’ve done is we’ve picked a problem that was the stickiest part in many brokers’ workflows: preliminary assessment.
“Quickli is a serviceability calculator that works across your panel of lenders. What makes us different is the fact that we are accurate, with data accurate for every lender you use. So we can completely change your preliminary assessment process … We’ve made it much faster, much easier and much less painful.
“It can save you hours on deals and allow you to spend more time building your business delighting your customers and less time on tricky deals.”
Indeed, brokers have taken it up in their droves, with more than 5,000 brokers now on platform to help quickly gauge which lenders might be best for their clients before doing a full assessment.
According to Quickli, it can save brokers 20 minutes to two hours per deal (depending on the complexity of the scenario) and that is only expected to increase as it deepens its funds position calculator and its product comparisons.
Diversification
For brokers who are looking to diversify with minimal effort, there’s a range of new tech available to them, too.
LoanOptions.ai has been quickly adopted by brokers looking to add more services to their clients.
The platform is one of Australia’s first artificially intelligent loan marketplace for all asset and equipment financing as well as personal loans, and unsecured business lending.
LoanOptions.ai was founded two years ago by Julian Fayad who identified a need in the market to create a fair and transparent loan marketplace.
It’s designed to integrate with a mortgage broker’s existing website to help them facilitate and diversify into other product categories besides home loans. Brokers can choose which loans they may wish to write themselves and which they wish to refer out to LoanOptions.ai under a revenue-share model.
Under the referral model, LoanOptions.ai onboards the customer and uses its proprietary AI-assisted loan matching technology to pre-approve clients with loans from its panel of 60 lenders.
Speaking to The Adviser, Mr Fayad said: “When we speak to mortgage brokers, what we often see is that a lot of them aren’t really converting their website leads. They haven’t invested the money required to build a really slick, smooth process for the client.
“So, our product is designed specifically to integrate even with really old websites that need some TLC and turn them into a lead-gen machine.
“Essentially, the product is a really seamless, mobile-friendly application journey that allows the clients to apply entirely online, end to end. We send a one-page partner agreement that is digitally signed, and we can onboard in less than a day that the web integration takes less than an hour.”
Outside of diversifying into other products, there is also new tech helping brokers diversify the types of lender they work with, too.
Mortgage manager and fintech LoanStreet recently changed its name and logo to FinStreet, as part of a move to better reflect its offering to mortgage and finance brokers.
Established in 2016 by broker Darren Liu, FinStreet is a mortgage manager that supports borrowers with diverse needs and provides lending solutions “beyond the scope of traditional lending”.
It provides brokers with access to Australian non-bank lenders via its AI-driven CRM platform.
It also offers mortgage and finance brokers support on a range of back-office systems and resources, including leads, marketing, mentoring, and processing support.
The company also has its own investment fund of about $450 million, so it can write large commercial deals, too.
FinStreet chief executive Boban Jurisic told broker delegates at the Better Business Summit 2023 that the company was a “gateway for access to non-banks in Australia”.
“Whether you’re looking to spread the risk in your portfolio or find a niche solution, you need access to non-banks,” he said.
As the mortgage manager aggregates under Finsure, brokers will either need to be aggregating under Finsure or their own ACL to use the fintech in full, or they can opt to introduce clients under a referral model.
Settlement tech
For the settlement process, an on-demand cloud-based platform that is becoming increasingly popular with brokers is LEXTECH.
Rather than relying on paper-based systems, mail, or email, LEXTECH is a cross-platform settlement system that can be used by anyone in the settlement process at any time.
Innovated in 2004 by Simon Purcell, LEXTECH has allowed legal firms to assist lenders, borrowers, solicitors, and brokers to seamlessly manage and settle over 100,000 mortgage transactions Australia-wide.
The design was led by lenders and brokers, in conjunction with their solicitors, to ensure that “no one gets left behind” in the settlement process.
Jade Peace, risk and compliance officer at LEXTECH, explained: “The platform gives brokers and the other players in the settlement ecosystem visibility about the whole property transaction; everything from when mortgage documents were sent out (and whether they’re going to the broker or the client), the settlement date, what documents have been received by the lender (and what might be missing that the broker may be able to upload themselves — for example, certificate of currency), and notifies all users when something has been added/a milestone has been reached.”
She noted that with all the data and security breaches at the moment (see page 14 for more), the platform was also attractive to brokers as it improves the data security of the settlement process, as LEXTECH is ISO-certified and makes document retrieval much safer and more efficient.
Post-settlement tech
One of the most underserved areas for digital innovation is the post-settlement area. While brokers have traditionally done an annual check-in with their clients or touched base with existing clients when a loan term or rate is set to expire, the changing rate environment means that this is no longer enough.
But, rather than having to spend hours calling the whole back book to determine whether a client may need any financing help, tech is at hand to help here, too.
Regchain™, for example, has built a platform that can be used for both brokers and lenders to manage their loan book retention.
Its Stryd platform is a configurable rules engine that helps aggregators, brokers, and lenders provide more reliable home loan product offers to their customers.
By utilising Consumer Data Right information and broker-submitted lender panel information, the tech has the ability to ingest an infinite number of existing loan book records and automatically give brokers an output that shows them the customers that are a risk in that loan book due to an uncompetitive rate, and what current products they would be eligible for now that are more competitive than the product that they’re already on.
Ruth Hatherley, CEO and founder of Regchain, explained: “We use your record set against your product repository and then we will provide you back with the list of customers who are at risk for you to contact.”
She noted a recent case where a broker in Western Australia had identified that 35 per cent of their customers in their back book were at risk because they were eligible for better products than they were currently on.
“What we were also able to identify from that record list was that we could get a better result on a further 28 per cent of clients if we just had some up-to-date information about that customer,” she said.
“So, that broker then had that number of leads that they could call for a specific reason; to get them a better deal.”
Stryd is currently API-enabled, so can embed directly into an aggregator’s CRM but noted that it is also able to provide CSV files for aggregators that may not yet be API-enabled.
What other tech are you using at the moment to make mortgage broking more efficient? Let us know on social media or by emailing
