ANZ’s approach to building its new ANZ Plus digital home loan, which was launched yesterday, was to look for external providers with market leading components and engineer parts of the platform itself. The bank worked with Salesforce, whose contribution included the customer relationship management system, and Twilio, which is providing the contact centre. But it built many parts of the platform itself, including Lex, the lending platform. ANZ managing director, customer experience and digital channels, Peter Dalton said: “Where we can find something that really, like Salesforce, leading edge CRM, we’ve gone with that. “But there are key components of the platform, we couldn’t find anything that did what we needed to do well enough, so we have built them ourselves.” ANZ group executive Australia retail, Maile Carnegie, said: “Where we built is where we are looking to have a point of competitive advantage.” The ANZ Plus digital home loan is available at this stage to existing customers for refinancing of owner-occupier loans. They must be a single borrower on PAYG income and the offer is restricted to borrowers in New South Wales and Victoria. It has been designed for the application to be completed on the ANZ Plus mobile app. The bank is promising approval in minutes for most loans. The package includes access to coaches. Borrowers can track settlement from start to finish on the app. ANZ Plus includes a default block on screen sharing inside the app to provide additional protection from scams. ANZ has 500,000 customers, 37 per cent of whom are new to the bank. ANZ has been building market share in home lending this year, with growth almost twice system. It is the highest growth rate of any of the big banks over the past year. But that growth has come at the cost of a lower margin, which fell from 1.75 per cent in the March half to 1.65 per cent in the September half. One of the main goals of a digital lending platform, apart from improving customer experience, is to reduce origination costs.