AMP chooses start-up’s digital mortgage platform

John Kavanagh

AMP Bank is working with home loan start-up Nano to develop a digital mortgage.

AMP announced yesterday that it aims to release the product in the September quarter, offering a “fully digital mortgage experience capable of providing unconditional approval for a residential loan within minutes.”

The decision to use Nano platform is quite an endorsement for the fintech, which was launched in July last year.

The company was founded by Andrew Walker and Chris Lumby, a couple of ex-Westpac executives.

Walker told Banking Day last year that everything involved in Nano’s origination process – customer identification, income and expense verification, credit records, property valuation and onboarding - is digital. There is no paper at any stage and no manual involvement in areas like underwriting.

A set of algorithms do all the assessment and decision-making.

Walker said the digital home loan offerings of most lenders are digitised versions of their manual systems, forced on them by their inability to move away from legacy systems, and still involve some manual processing.

The backbone of Nano platform is the Salesforce customer relationship management system. Its core ledger, Cloud Lending, sits on the CRM.

“New technology allows you to start with the customer, making the customer and not the product primary in your system,” he said.

Last October, Nano signed a deal with Oracle Financial Services to offer its loan application and credit decisioning technology through the Oracle Partner Network as an element in the Oracle banking platform.

AMP Bank has been on a path to digitise its business for some time. Last year it stopped issuing cheques and stopped offering paper applications for certain products.

More than 70 per cent of deposit accounts were opened by digital origination last year.

According to the latest APRA data, AMP Bank has a A$20.6 billion mortgage book, which grew 11.8 per cent over the past 12 months.