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Financial education start-up Humbli has appointed senior industry executive Brett Halliwell as a non-executive director, as it seeks to help lenders and brokers better improve customer financial literacy.
Halliwell (pictured above) is a respected veteran of the mortgage and finance broking industry, having held senior roles at NAB and Advantedge as well as non-bank lender Challenger Limited for over 17 years.
After advising Humbli informally for a year, Halliwell said his decision to join as a non-executive director aligned with his desire to lift consumer knowledge and awareness in financial services.
“Entering a home loan is the biggest financial commitment most people make in their lifetime,” Halliwell said. “Humbli’s innovative tools and learning design approach will assist lenders and brokers to better educate customers, leading to more confident and better-informed decisions and outcomes.”
Humbli aims to improve financial literacy by enabling lenders, aggregators and brokers to deliver customers personalised, bite-sized learning in the flow of transactions when they need them.
For a mortgage or finance client, that could mean brokers sending personalised financial education to clients ahead of a meeting, or following up to ensure they understood what was discussed.
With Humbli having already developed relationships with REA Group and a major bank, Halliwell is expected to support its continued growth into the finance and broking industry.
“Brett’s understanding of the market will also allow us to shape products which generate mutual benefits for lenders, aggregators and brokers,” Humbli CEO Damien Farrell said.
Farrell said the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey of 17,000 Australians shows that financial literacy in Australia has been going backwards since 2016.
He said he would agree with calling it a national crisis, particularly when 45% of Australians surveyed now met the definition of being “financially illiterate”, and the score for younger Australians in particular had dropped sharply from 3.4 out of a possible 5 to just 2.9 when surveyed in 2020.
“Solving that issue of base level financial literacy would be like boiling the ocean for us at Humbli – we are not the right people to solve that problem. But when looking at what we could do, we realised we could deliver targeted in-the-moment insights when it matters,” Farrell said.
Farrell said broking groups using a learning platform to send targeted, stage-matched learning to a client would be able to position themselves as a trusted adviser and nurture customer leads.
Aggregators and brokers would also be able to utilise learning to better curate leads, with the ability to use data to find out which customers are more engaged in learning and moving forward.
“What our team knows from the experience of building and scaling learning companies over the years is that a motivated learner is a good learner – and someone who wants to purchase their first home with a home loan or use a financial product are usually very motivated,” Farrell said.
“We need to ask how do we get to them in moments that matter and deliver insights that enable them to make more informed choices, that help them understand risks a bit better and create a bit more confidence that they do understand what they are entering into?”
