Athena Home Loans has won a Canstar Innovation Excellence Award for its "automatic rate-match" feature, which re-sets rates for existing customers if a lower rate is offered to new borrowers.
The service checks all home loan rates being offered to new customers and if it finds a rate on a like-for-like loan that is lower than the rate an existing customer is on, it will offer the lower rate to the existing customer.
The feature overcomes the so-called "loyalty tax" that irritates established customers of many financial institutions.
Banks deny the existence of loyalty taxes but last November the Reserve Bank reported that the average discount to the standard variable rate that owner occupiers were paying on their mortgages was 120 basis points, while new borrowers were receiving a further discount of around 30 bps.
"On average, for owner occupiers with variable rate loans, interest rates on new loans are currently around 30 bps below those of existing loans," the RBA said.
It said similar discounts for new loans were evident for other loan types, such as investor and interest-only loans.
Athena was launched in 2017 as a specialist mortgage lender. To date, it only offers loans for refinance.
Last October, it received $70 million of funding from a group of investors that included Airtree, Hostplus, AustralianSuper, NAB Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.